Ammonia level needed?

[y2klovebug]

Hi, so we have an already established fish tank but have bought a bigger tank and it's all set up ready yo go for fishless cycling, I have read your excellent guides and understand what I need yo do, have purchased the ammonia etc but my question is how on earth do I work out how much ammonia I add to my tank to make it up to 4ppm?

It's a 64l tank

Thanks

 

[librarygirl]

Hi and welcome! You can either add a few drops, wait, test, etc until you get to the desired amount. There's also an online ammonia calculator (scroll down a bit to see it). So for a 64/17 gal tank, assuming the percentage of ammonia is approx 9.5% (it should say on the bottle), you would need about 2.7ml (getting an eye dropper from the pharmacy is a good idea to make dosing easier) or approximately half a teaspoon.

Is this a new separate tank or are you upgrading a current tank? If you're just upgrading, you can just move the filter from the current tank to the new tank and add the fish right away. If it's a separate tank and your current tank is cycled and established, you can also pull a small bit of media from the filter and add it to the new tank's filter while you're fishless cycling to introduce some bacteria faster. Hope this helps. Let us know if you have more questions!

 

[y2klovebug]

Hi, that's fab thank you. It is basically upgrading yo a bigger tank - we moved everything over as this is what someone else told us aswell but something went wrong and all the fish got very unhealthy very quickly so we popped them back in the old tank and they are fine so is obv something to do with the new tank so rather than risk our Fish we thought we would do it the long winded way and fishless cycle it just to be sure. Thanks for the tip about the filter media to speed it up that's great will Defo do that.