Recent content by marshrunner

Update Just tested. Ammonia 0.5, Nitrite 0.2 and Nitrate 5.0

Thanks for all the help. This is the kind of information I was looking for. Hopefully, it will help others who are attempting this also.

Thanks for all the info. I will keep you posted on the progress. I do have one other question. How high should I try to push my ammonia? I've had the shrimp in for 3 days now and my reading is only about 0.5. I thought it would go higher than that.

So I should keep a source there. Would a daily feeding of fish food work? I think that exact thing happened to me. I put a shrimp in, saw ammonia starting, then nitrite. I removed the shrimp and ammonia, nitrite dropped but never zeroed and I had just a little nitrate.

So if I just remove the shrimp, my bacteria will die and I'm back to square one? What should I do? Should I continue adding shrimp or could I use fish food once I have the ammonia built up? Seems I've seen something about feeding the tank. Any advise is greatly appreciated.

Do a search for aragocrete. I made about 80# of it and is now in my 55gal reef tank. It takes about 6 weeks to cure, but is easy to make. My mixture was 1 part portland cement, 2 parts crushed oyster shell and 2 parts solar salt.

Thanks for all the feedback. This is a really nerve racking time. I guess being new to this I don't really know what to expect.

So basically once the ammonia starts, you don't need anything producing ammonia?

when you use a table shrimp to cycle, how long do you leave it in? I put one in for a few days, ammonia started rising so I thought I could remove it. Had lots of brown stuff buid up in the tank, nitrites came up. Now, very little ammonia/ nitrite and nitrate. Was I supposed to leave it in...