Cycling A Tank With Plants In

Plants do indeed use ammonia and provided there are enough fast growing plants you can do a silent cycle. This means planting the tank, waiting until you are sure the plants are actively growing, then getting fish a few at a time, checking for ammonia and nitrite every day afterwards. if they do show up, do a water change. if they stay at zero, after at least a week, get the next batch of fish. Floating plants are particularly good for this.


Tetra Safe Start is better than Stability. But you can't add it straight after adding Prime. To be honest, I won't use Prime because it is a chemical soup and the less chemicals that go in my tank the better for me.

A couple of things:
* am I correct in that you lost all the ruby barbs from one tank and all the guppies from the other tank, and these are the two tanks that you're cycling?
* as I understand it, the planted aquarium needs to be incredibly densely planted almost like a jungle for this method to work.
Hope that's helpful.

Hi FCMF

Yes they are the tanks. Decided a complete reset was way to go. Possibly getting another filter for the larger tank as well as not sure the Fluval U4 is up to job.

So with only a few plants, they shouldn't affect the normal way to cycle?

Well decided to go all in and get external filters for all my tanks. Should be fun

If you can get hold of seeded filter media from someone that will likely reduce your time to cycle the tank significantly...

I have some in my other tank which I might use in one of the tanks, the other, the 200l I will just do normally.