Accidental fish in cycle. [My journey]

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Soooo I was a bad girl. Lol. I was on Facebook marketplace yesterday and saw a 50 gallon tank, fish and everything included.....and I bought it. Part of me couldn't help it. It really wasn't being well taken care of, Andi appear to have developed multi tank syndrome. So now I have it, it's clean, but it's also fully cycled. (Tested it hours after it had been set back up and cleaned. We transferred all decor, gravel and the filter in tank water so we didn't destroy the cycle.) It has an internal filter with bioballs. I was curious if I could clean them in some tank water and add that water to seed my 36 gallon. (The 65 gallon is keeping nitrites down to .25 or less on it own. Looks like it will be cycled soon.) I'm still fighting the nitrites in the 36, so I was just curious. I figured maybe I could clean half of them and leave half alone, to be safe?

On the funny side, there was far too much gravel so half of the gravel went into an empty 20 gallon that I put some of the fish from this new tank and put them in. (They were quite small and not suited for the larger tank mates.) and because I didn't use tap water to clean the gravel, I have ended up with a cycled 20 gallon as well. Lol. Strange. I'll test it more throughout the day. But so far no nitrites, no ammonia, between 5 & 10 ppm nitrates. And it's been set up for 12 hours now.
 
Hee hee. I know. I've ended up with two giant danios, a bristle nose pleco, a brochis catfish, a very large cardinal tetra, a crown tail dumbo ear betta, three glofish and a guppy with a deformed spine, from this venture. What a strange groupie of creatures. Some of which weren't fish I'd planned to have. I'd never even heard of the catfish. It just looked like a large emerald green Cory. And by large I mean three inches large. Maybe three and a half. Lol.
 
Not alot of stocking thought on original owners part. Im sure there were more that died
 
For sure. There were a few she thought were still in there that weren't. Right now the danios, the cardinal tetra, the pleco and the catfish are still in the 50g, the glofish, betta and guppy are in the 20g. I'm trying to figure out who needs to go where. Any advice on that please share. Most of these aren't fish I'd done research on.


Also, what about using tank water to clean some of the bioballs and seeding my 36 with that water? Just curious but don't want to mess anything up.
 
Established tank water is little to no value in cycling a tank. If it was established water from your tank it would have similar tds and id say yes. But someone elses tank water....no thanks. Algae and pathogens come to mind.

Real bio balls like in a sw tank? You could possibly seed with bioballs if there are enough and you feel they are safe.
 
They appear to be. I haven't opened the filter yet, it's an internal filter. Looks like they did away with the cartridges and replaced them with bioballs. (I've got a sponge filter otw to add in addition to the internal for better mechanical filtration.

And lol, I didn't mean adding tank water by itself, I meant tank water that I'd used to clean the bioballs. The water in this tank is new anyway. We only saved water in buckets to transport the fish, filter and decor. Once we filled the tank with new conditioned water all of the old water was dumped. We didn't add in any if the old water....it was orange....
 
Gotcha..sorry. An internal in a tank that size was probably part of the issue. Im not a fan of those but thats me. Bio balls at one time were hot item. They do work obviously. There better choices now that hold more BB. But yes id use them if you can. That the size tank I usually think multiple hob or canister.

So if you even have something with a sponge and add bio balls it will help till it gets going then you could remove them if you wanted.
 
Oh yes, I've ordered a sponge filter thats rated higher than the tank, once that's good and established I'll be getting an hob or a canister and putting ceramic media and the bioballs inside it, eventually replacing the bioballs with more ceramic media.

The sponge filter will be here tomorrow, so that should help, at least for now.

It looked like this tank was one of those with the filtration built into the hood, but when it gave out they plopped in an aqueon internal. We've bought a new glass hinged lid (the other lid was unwieldy and unnecessary since the filtration was no longer there) we also grabbed a nice light with day and night modes and I have a correctly sized heater coming tomorrow as well. The one that's in there is only a 50w eheim. (And it wasn't in the tank when we got it, it was in a box of supplies she gave us. The tank wasn't heated at all.)
 
Sponge filter and better heater came in for the 50g today.

Also, for two days in a row now, the 65g appears to be cycled. 0ppm of both ammonia and nitrites, 10ppm nitrates.

Still struggling with nitrites in the 36g though. Haven't tested the levels yet today, I'm about to gravel vac in the 65g and the 20g QT tank.
 
JessiBeau said:
Sponge filter and better heater came in for the 50g today.

Also, for two days in a row now, the 65g appears to be cycled. 0ppm of both ammonia and nitrites, 10ppm nitrates.

Still struggling with nitrites in the 36g though. Haven't tested the levels yet today, I'm about to gravel vac in the 65g and the 20g QT tank.
Click to expand...
Yay! I'm glad.
 
Everything is cycled now! Just thought I'd pop in and update everyone! ;)
Thanks so much to everyone who helped out with this! And I especially appreciate that no one made me feel bad about it all!

You guys are amazing, I'm so glad I discovered this community!!! I'll definitely be posting here more in the future!
 
JessiBeau said:
Everything is cycled now! Just thought I'd pop in and update everyone! ;)
Thanks so much to everyone who helped out with this! And I especially appreciate that no one made me feel bad about it all!

You guys are amazing, I'm so glad I discovered this community!!! I'll definitely be posting here more in the future!
Click to expand...
Yay! Catching this a month later. I'm so glad your tanks are cycled. Did you have any more losses?
 
I didn't! Managed to keep the levels low enough with water changes.
 
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