Do I need to cycle?

[Drayven]

So here's the situation, at work there is a 20 gallon fish tank that is overcrowded and not very well cared for. I'm going to be taking it home to rescue the fish. At some point in the near future I will be setting up probably a 50 gallon tank or so to move them all into. Now the question is, if I'm doing a complete move from one tank to the other do I need to let the new tank cycle first? My plan is to move the fish, gravel and current filter to the new tank when I do the move. The filter will run in conjunction with an appropriately sized filter for a while or maybe I'll just run 2 30 gallon filters or whatever. Considering the filter media is where the bacteria live mostly and I'll have all the gravel and what not I shouldn't need to cycle first right?

 

[joy13]

You will probably have an ammonia spike but it shouldn't bet that bad. If the gravel is really nasty you will probably need to rinse it, if you do make sure you use treated water. An easy way I found is to fill a bucket with water treat it then dump some gravel in and as it floats down the gunky stuff with stay in the water momentarily take out the gravel and dump some more in. I keep doing this until all the gravel has been rinsed once then repeat once or twice more depending how bad the gravel is. If you have it use prime to treat your water it helps with the ammonia.

 

[jsoong]

Chances are you will not see much of a spike if you move everything over. I have done several tank moves like that without incident. i would just monitor the tank for a week or 2. Chances you will only see a mini-cycle with minor spike that an extra pwc or 2 will fix.

 

[Blueiz]

Out of curiosity, what kind of fish are they?

 

[Drayven]

Convicts, right now there's 8 of the buggers in a 20 gallon. I know that 50 or 60gallons still isn't big enough for that many but it's way better than their current conditions that they've lived in for a few years