On another fish forum. I'm not going to name it because the forum in question gives warning points, then bans members who give links to other general fishkeeping forums. I don't know if the owner of Thinkfish does the same but I'm not going to risk it
The chap on the other forum is American (let's call him TwoTankAmin, or TTA for short). He is a follower of everything Tim Hovanec says. That is the man who discovered the species of bacteria that grow in our filters, and proved they were not the same ones that was originally thought; that is, not the ones that grow in industrial situations.
TTA did a lot of research into cycling and in particular all the writing by Tim Hovanec. He discovered that the main reason that fishless cycles took as long as they did was because high nitrite levels stalled the cycle. Most nitrite testers do not go high enough. The API one, for instance, only goes up to 5ppm. Once the level in the tank goes higher than this, we have no idea how high it actually is. The test shows 5ppm regardless of how high it really is, but that 5ppm colour was interpreted as meaning exactly 5ppm, so people thought their levels were low enough. Diluting the tank water needs distilled water and very accurate measurements. The cycle stalls when the nitrite level gets over 15ppm. The old method of cycling created nitrite levels much higher than this.
TTA also discovered that Tim Hovanec had found that the filter bacteria do not starve and die within hours as was previously thought. The ammonia eaters can go several days without food before coming to harm.
So he devised a new fishless cycling schedule, which I have shamelessly paraphrased on here, which limits the addition of ammonia to amounts which prevent the nitrite level exceeding 15ppm.
I used a variant of the old method when I cycled a 25 litre tank this spring. I knew about high nitrite stalling a cycle; I knew that the nitrite tester would read 5ppm regardless of how high it actually was; but I did not know about the ammonia eaters being able to go for several days without food. I used the old add and wait method, but dosing to only 1ppm ammonia. And I did a water change just before adding the ammonia dose evey time the nitrite reading showed 5ppm (easy with just 25 litres). Then once the nitrite level had dropped to zero 24 hours after adding ammonia, I increased the amount of ammonia I added.
This took 48 days to complete the cycle.
I was interested to know if TTA's newer method would cycle any faster which is why I posted it on here. If he had written it in time, I would have used his method to see what happened.