Seeded my tank - how am I doing in the cycle?

[stevedave]

I cycled a 29 gallon tank in this manner but I added ammonia weekly and then added all my fish at once and had no problem.

 

[FiveSix]

I would like to thank everyone who helped me in this thread. My fishless cycle is now complete. After dosing to 3 ppm for the past 3 days I am showing < .25 ammonia the next day with 0 Nitrites. My nitrAtes jumped to somewhere between 40 and 100 ppm. I am not positive, but I think the reason why I wasn't showing NitrAtes at first was because I ran carbon for a few days in case there were impurities from all the new hardware and sand I added. I did a 50% water change and now my NitrAte are between 10-20 PPM.


Thanks everyone.

 

[neilanh]

There's some sort of reaction between the nitrItes in your water and the nitrAte test kit - or something - that causes the nitrAte test to read invalid when you're nitrItes are high. Very common, and that's why it seemed that they jumped up to 100 at the end - truelly that were constantly climbing, you just couldn't see it.

Congrats on a successful cycle. Continue to dose daily until you're ready for fish, then do another big PWC the night before you stock, and you're all set.

 

[TomK2]

neilanh-

as far as I can tell, the nitrate test first adds a reducing agent to convert any nitrate present into nitrite, and then the chemicals are added to measure the amount of nitrite present. Thus, any nitrite in the water willl add to the nitrate measured level?

test kit chemistry

I made some test kit/water treatment notes a while back, at the link above.

 

[marchmaxima]

After I was showing some wild test result near the very end of the cycle, I was shown where it says on the nitrate test kits instructions that high amounts of nitrite can make your nitrite test result unreliable.

In short, things went completely haywire, then a few days later, it all returned to normal.