Fishless cycle not going well - help!

[kindk]

Hi everyone

I have a 30L Biorb which is working beautifully after being fishless cycled about 2 years ago and has one happy Betta fish and a couple of snails pottering in it with some wood and some live plants.

We have just recently moved to a bigger house and have decided to start up a mini aquarium for one betta fish in another room, so have a 20L nano aquarium. I started it 2 weeks ago on a fishless cycle and am not sure things are going well. Firstly, the ammonia is sky high (>8ppm) despite me only having added a tiny bit of fish food at the beginning. I would normally just wait it out as I'm aware you need ammonia to get your bacteria going, but two things are worrying me - firstly, my plants aren't looking healthy. The leaves are starting to brown and they look a bit wilty. Secondly, algae is starting to grow on the rocks and tank walls.

Am I doing something wrong or do I just keep waiting and testing?

Cheers

 

[claudio1]

i think you should do a 50% water change to get the ammonia to 4ppm,and if you can get some filter media from the biorb to get the bacteria colony growing in the nano tank...hope this helps.


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[kindk]

That's what I thought too - I have done a couple of 20% water changes and put some gravel from the established aquarium in but that was a couple of days ago and the ammonia never came down below 8ppm.

Argh!

 

[Fel]

Doing small water changes won't do as much as one larger one.

3 20% water changes would drop an ammonia of 10 ppm first to 8, then to 6.4 then to 5.12. Instead of just doing one 50% water change and getting to 5pmm

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[ScotJudd]

Hi KindK
The optimum ammonia level for fish less cycling is around 4ppm, hard to regulate using flake as a source, easier with pure ammonia, such as Ammo. If it's too high just calculate the percentage of water needed to dilute it and do it in one go, even if it's 80%. Try to get a small piece of seeded material from your cycled tank and put it into your new filter. Adding some gravel from the old tank will help but not as much as directly seeding the filter. Keep the temp up around 80f and Ph at or above 7. As for the plants, they can help to cycle as they carry bacteria on them and they can help stabilise a cycled tank once stocked but it's quite hard to get them established when all the parameters are altering, as they do whilst cycling.


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[LayzorBeams]

The reason it is so high is because it is a small tank. PPM is "parts per million" as you may know. So while adding a small pinch of food to a 55 gallon tank may only give you around 1 ppm or ammonia, adding the same amount to such a small tank gives a much higher ppm of ammonia. You have to account for tank size while you add sources of ammonia. Not to mention that fish food isn't a stable source of ammonia.

I would start doing water changes of ~30% for the next 3-4 days to get rid of some ammonia; don't add more until it starts to cycle.


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