eco23
Aquarium Advice Addict
The carbon that you have in your tank might contain little black and white rocks. The white rocks are zeolite which in fact DOES absorb ammonia. This may be where you are getting that ammonia absorption that you are referring to.
I also saw in another thread that you mentioned that you seeded your tank with media from an already established tank. Could this possibly be where your carbon came from? If in fact the carbon that you put in the cycling tank came from an already established tank, it will have bacterial colonies built up on it. This would explain why it took you so many drops to reach the desired ppm reading. Basically the bacteria was doing its job. Then once you removed it, you removed this bacteria source which allowed the ammonia to reach the desired ppm faster. This is just speculation.
No. The seeding material was a filter sponge with no carbon that I jammed down into the slots with the bio-filter pads. The carbon that was in there was the stock carbon pads that came with my filter. I didn't remove the filters... I cut a slit in the side, emptied the carbon out and put them back in. I'm not sure why this is an issue. As you yourself said carbon doesn't need to be in the tank. We've also established that the carbon itself doesn't harbor the bacteria. So what is the harm in getting out some scissors, shaking out the carbon and putting the pads back in? This is obviously an advice forum, not a tell you what to do forum, so you can make your own decision, but with all that we've stated so far I don't see how removing the carbon and reinserting the filter pads it was in is a bad idea.