fishless cycling and water hardness.

OK, I am sick of not having fish swimming in my 350g. I have lost patience and really don't know how long it's going to take to bring the hardness down from my concrete backgrounds. So I'm soliciting advise as to whether anybody thinks this will work.

I want to start my fishless cycle. I know that bacterias and algae will help seal the concrete but I'm not sure if the bacterias will survive in the very high hardness in the tank right now.

I will be doing the cycle in the usual way but my question is if I do massive water changes during the process would it be possible to do it without breaking the cycle? I plan to test the amount of ammonia before draining the tank and bringing it back up to the same levels after I fill it again..... The drain and fill takes about 2 1/2 hours.

Anybody have suggestions or musings that you think might help?

I don't know for sure about the bacteria surviving in the current parameters.

Changing the water during the cycle would also be removing nitrites, while you can keep the ammonia level spiked by adding ammonia after the water change, I don't know how you would add the nitrites back and they are definitely needed to complete the cycle.

I think your best bet is to soak the tank until the parameters level out which might take several large water changes and a couple weeks.

I could be wrong tho... it's happened once before

Norm, what´s your KH and GH? Do you measure them in ppm or in germen degrees dh?

I am using Aquarium Pharmaceuticals Freshwater Master Liquid Test Kit. It was bought about 7 years ago. The PH and KH regents in the kit seem to be OK. I'm not so sure about the GH though.

PH is 8.8 or better.
KH is 125.3 DKH is 7
GH is not measurable with my kit. If I had to estimate it would be somewhere around 700-800 ppm.

All in all it is very high.

Rift_Lakes_Rule wrote:I don't know for sure about the bacteria surviving in the current parameters.

Changing the water during the cycle would also be removing nitrites, while you can keep the ammonia level spiked by adding ammonia after the water change, I don't know how you would add the nitrites back and they are definitely needed to complete the cycle.

This was my thought also. I go back and forth between the nitrosomonas already being established in the media producing nitrites and once the nitrospira establish themselves in the media being able to produce nitrates. Will the water change effect the curve between the 2 of them working in unison? If not,then the cycle should go as planned. If there is a start up curve between the two will it prolong the cycle or cut the nitrospira out completely?

Norm, that test kit might be too old. Mine was 7 years old too and when I was cycling my tropheus tank this summer I bought a new one and compared the readings -- they were way off on some of the tests.

Your right Betty. I just did a baseline on my tapwater and found the GH test was worthless. The KH also read the same as the hard water in my tank. The Ph was about right but now I don't trust any of the regents in the kit. I'm going to stop by an LFS today and pick up a new one. I certainly want accurate readings when I cycle the tank.

That's the problem with buying these kits. You need them in the beginning when starting in the hobby but after your confident in your tanks water parameters the whole kit and caboodle ends up sitting on the back of the shelf unused.

Hakan: If you read this ignore my test postings. I'll try to get more accurate readings tomorrow. The water I added yesterday should be well saturated by then.

id jsut got buy some giant danios for a while

Drake-tripod wrote:id jsut got buy some giant danios for a while

The last time I cycled a tank I used old fish food to start the cycle and after a month I put in a dozen or so feeder goldfish. It took over 9 weeks to cycle. This time around I'm going to try the fishless cycle to see if I can cut that wait down by at least half.

I found this article did a pretty good job of explaining the fishless cycling in simple and easy to follow instructions. http://www.aquariumadvice.com/articles/articles/23/1/Tips-and-tricks-for-your-fastest-fishless-cycle/Page1.html. Do you have a source for some good used filter media that you trust to not have any diseases in it?

I hope you get this all sorted out without too many delays. I can't wait!

Thanks for the article B. It had some nice info on trace elements that are helpful to the bacteria. First time I've seen mention of them from all the other fishless cycle articles I've read.

ohh ok well i know if you put house hold anmoina in there it jumps it but idk the doesing

I cycled my 75 tropheus tank in under a week. I squeezed enough sponges to completely fill a brand new eheim canister and robbed a emp 400 from another tank ( it was just waiting for me to set up a new tank, wasn't needed on the tank I robbed it from ). Years ago I cycled a small tank with a ugf with no seeded media as an experiment, it took 6 weeks...

Once my 75 cycled (4 days if I remember correctly) I continued adding 4 ppm ammonia and at first it took 2 days to get back to zero but after that it would process 4 ppm overnight. Approx 2 weeks after starting the cycle the trophs arrived (25 wc adults), I never read even a trace of anything except nitrates.

If you can get your hands on some media it's well worth it. Without media it takes a good bit longer.

I always ghost feed my tanks when cycling and it seems to work pretty good for me. Usually cycles in about 2 weeks.

iceblue wrote:

Rift_Lakes_Rule wrote:I don't know for sure about the bacteria surviving in the current parameters.

Changing the water during the cycle would also be removing nitrites, while you can keep the ammonia level spiked by adding ammonia after the water change, I don't know how you would add the nitrites back and they are definitely needed to complete the cycle.

This was my thought also. I go back and forth between the nitrosomonas already being established in the media producing nitrites and once the nitrospira establish themselves in the media being able to produce nitrates. Will the water change effect the curve between the 2 of them working in unison? If not,then the cycle should go as planned. If there is a start up curve between the two will it prolong the cycle or cut the nitrospira out completely?

Here's what I'm thinking, and I could be wrong...

As the cycle gets going the nitrites start to spike, more nitrites than the bacteria can process so they start multiplying (just like the bacteria multiplys to process the high ammonia levels). If you do a water change and remove the higher level of nitrites without replacing them it seems to me that it would stunt the growth of the nitrite processing bacteria colony as in my understanding they only multiply if there is a higher level than the current colony can process. My fear would be that after the cycle you might experience a nitrite spike.

That's just what I'm thinkin but keep in mind I'm just a simple minded redneck and I could be wrong :lol1:

dmetal wrote:I always ghost feed my tanks when cycling and it seems to work pretty good for me. Usually cycles in about 2 weeks.

With ghost feeding, how high does the ammonia rise and how fast does it rise?

With adding pure ammonia you know within an hour or less the exact level of ammonia your starting with. When cycling a tank for one fish it's not as critical but if your planning to add many fish at one time you have to be certain the tank can handle a large bioload immediately without having to grow into it. My troph tank for example was ready to handle a bioload of 4ppm ammonia in 24 hrs, overkill even for 25 adult trophs but i'd rather lose some bacteria to starvation than lose the fish to an ammonia spike.

Norm, I used a Seachem ammonia alert indicator when I did the fishless cycle for being able to keep a constant check on the tank at a glance along with the other type of test. It was amazing how quickly it changed readings when I added the pure ammonia and also to be able to watch the speed at which the ammonia disappeared as the cycle progressed.
http://www.seachem.com/Products/product_pages/AmmoniaAlert.html I picked mine up at Petsmart or Petco -- not sure which one.

Mike, what you're saying about the nitrites makes sense. I would think the water changes would slow the process down, depending on how much water you remove at each time.

Betty, I just bought a AP test kit and was shocked to see how much they went up in price compared to the last time I bought one. My wife would shoot me if I ran out and picked up another kit because it was faster.





Rift-Lake_Rules wrote:

As the cycle gets going the nitrites start to spike, more nitrites than the bacteria can process so they start multiplying (just like the bacteria multiplys to process the high ammonia levels). If you do a water change and remove the higher level of nitrites without replacing them it seems to me that it would stunt the growth of the nitrite processing bacteria colony as in my understanding they only multiply if there is a higher level than the current colony can process. My fear would be that after the cycle you might experience a nitrite spike.

That's just what I'm thinkin but keep in mind I'm just a simple minded redneck and I could be wrong :lol1:

That makes a lot of sense in fact, perfect sense. One thing about rednecks, both their moonshine and common sense are crystal clear. In all likelihood the spool up time of the ammonia producing nitrites between water changes to high enough levels to get a good crop of nitrospira would prolong the cycle.

Interesting thought I just had. Is their a source of nitrites I could add after a water change?

iceblue wrote:Betty, I just bought a AP test kit and was shocked to see how much they went up in price compared to the last time I bought one. My wife would shoot me if I ran out and picked up another kit because it was faster.

It was about $5. It just stays in the tank with a suction cup. I have it in my growout tank now because it lasts about a year. But yeah, it's amazing how much those test kits cost now.

Well I returned the test kit to Petsmart. Why oh why when they get it right the first time won't they just leave it alone. I thought it was just like the old kit I bought 7-8 years ago and didn't bother reading the package. Gone are the KH and GH regents replaced with a nitrate and some other bogus test I don't need. Not only that, but the new API packaging is cheesy bad. It comes with a very thin plastic cover that doesn't stay put even after you spend 2 or 3 minutes lining up all the caps to fit it on right. There's no place to put your directions or color charts and overall it just plain sucks when compared to their old packaging which was in a nice box that the whole kit slid in and out of easily.

Petsmart didn't even have a separate KH or GH kit to go along with API's new cheesy pakage. They did have a saltwater master kit that had them but I don't know how well it would make the jump to freshwater.

I might have to go online to find what I need or tomorrow go check out one of the LFS's to see if they have a proper kit I can use.

dam man no good