New Idea For Fishless Cycling

The water change - at least 75%. It depends just how high your nitrates are. You want to get the reading close to your tap watre level.


We'll see what the lower dose of ammonia does.

Hey,

Tonight nitrite was reading 1ppm  so I'll see what it says tomorrow and probably add some more then.

Tasha 

Hey guys,

Guess what..... its FINISHED!!! 

I know I'm ridiculously over excited but it is exciting to me because it's my first tank.

So I have a list of plants and such that I need to get now to plant the tank ready for the fish. Shall I do my water change before or after planting the tank?

Sue you said a 75% water change didn't you? 75% of 150l water in the tank is 112.5l, that's a lot of water to change one bucket at a time 

Tasha

Yes I did mean 75% or even more. It is the only time you'll ever have to do it. Hopefully. I do know how time consuming and tiring a big water change is when using buckets. Several years ago, I used a combination of Melafix and Pimafix for a sick gourami as I didn't know what the problem was. An hour later, I found all my pencilfish dead. So I did a 95% water change on a 125 litre tank to remove the meds as fast as possible.

How high is your nitrate reading? The purpose of the water change is to get that down to just above the tapwater level. In theory, this new version of fishless cycling shouldn't make too much nitrate - the old way, especially the version that said to add 5ppm ammomia doses, would end up with a nitrate level too high for the test kit to read. If your nitrate is not too bad you could get away with a smaller water change.

There is a section called Gallery Showcase near the bottom of the forum.

What did you get?

I have just used this method for my 38 litre tank and its worked an absolute treat, thanks! 

Hi Sue

Its taken about 32 days. I cranked the heat up to about 30 degrees and had the water line below the filter outlet so it 'rainfalled' down creating lots of bubbles. I dosed to get it around 3ppm. Its been fantastic. Now I am just being a bit careful and will ensure that it is 0ppm amm/nitrite 24 hours after a few more times before adding any fish just to be totally sure (also because it will be next Sunday at the very earliest I can get fish anyway).

I would recommend this method to anyone. 

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.

I have already cycled my 38 litre tank using this method and have now started a cycle on my new 64 litre this way too! Its so easy and I highly recommend it!