Just finished putting my first fish in the tank. Thanks to everyone for following along. The total length of the cycle was about 6 weeks. Here are a few things I learned along the way for anyone who stumbled upon this that might be looking to fishless cycle a tank.
The biggest take away for me is the importance of seeding material. My tank basically sat without change for 3.5 weeks, then I put a piece of filter from my LFS in the tank and things started immediately.
I personally saw no change after using two bacteria in a bottle brands (Dr. Tim's, and Nutrifin Cycle). This is not to say the products aren't effective, they just didn't work in my case.
I used Old Country brand ammonia available at Home Hardware for those Canadians out there who can’t get ahold of the standard Ace Brand Janitorial Strength Ammonia. Old Country Ammonia costed ~$3 for a huge bottle, I called the company and they confirmed it to be a 5% solution with no detergents or surfactants.
Although a lot of guides trail off and make it sound like things are over when nitrates start to appear, I found things to be the opposite. As with dosing the proper amount of ammonia, I found it also important to “dose” the amount of nitrites. Other guides make it sound like you can just maintain off the chart nitrites while building your nitrIte-to-nitrAte colony, but this just stalled the cycle for me. Once you can turn a significant amount of ammonia into nitrite overnight, you have to do a big water change to keep them in readable ranges in order to slowly build the nitrite-to-nitrAte colony.
Thanks for following along!
