Tasmainia300
Aquarium Advice Regular
Hello, so I'm having some issues with my fishless cycle in my planted 10 gallon tank. I use an API freshwater master kit.
I'm on the 22nd day of my cycle, which started with treated tap water and a bottle of Dr. Tims live bacteria. I use pure ammonia to feed the bacteria, dosing up to 2ppm as per the instructions.
After a little over a week, the ammonia dropped to .5ppm, so I added a 1/4 dose of ammonia to bring the number back up to about 1ppm. 3 days later I was reading .5ppm ammonia again, and thats when my nitrites started dropping from around 2ppm down to .5ppm.
I let it run a couple more days until the ammonia hit .25ppm and then on April 17 I added a half dose, bringing ammonia back up to a little over 1ppm.
Since then my nitrites have not gone up at all. They went from .5ppm on the 14th to .25ppm on the 19th and they just now tested at 0ppm.
My ammonia on the other hand has not seemed to change since the dose on the 17th. It has measured 1ppm since the 18th and still measured 1ppm today.
I think the nitrites going down was of course normal for cycling but it feels weird to me that my ammonia isn't going down at all...
I'm not sure what's going on with my cycle and this is the first time I've properly cycled a tank so I'm really nervous that something has gone wrong. To me it seems like my tank has stopped processing ammonia for some reason and that would explain why I'm not seeing any nitrites..
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, and I'm happy to provide more info. This process has just been really stressful and sketchy for me especially since I feel like I can never guess my API kit's colors right, I'm not colorblind but I ALWAYS second and third guess whether it's one color or another..
I'm on the 22nd day of my cycle, which started with treated tap water and a bottle of Dr. Tims live bacteria. I use pure ammonia to feed the bacteria, dosing up to 2ppm as per the instructions.
After a little over a week, the ammonia dropped to .5ppm, so I added a 1/4 dose of ammonia to bring the number back up to about 1ppm. 3 days later I was reading .5ppm ammonia again, and thats when my nitrites started dropping from around 2ppm down to .5ppm.
I let it run a couple more days until the ammonia hit .25ppm and then on April 17 I added a half dose, bringing ammonia back up to a little over 1ppm.
Since then my nitrites have not gone up at all. They went from .5ppm on the 14th to .25ppm on the 19th and they just now tested at 0ppm.
My ammonia on the other hand has not seemed to change since the dose on the 17th. It has measured 1ppm since the 18th and still measured 1ppm today.
I think the nitrites going down was of course normal for cycling but it feels weird to me that my ammonia isn't going down at all...
I'm not sure what's going on with my cycle and this is the first time I've properly cycled a tank so I'm really nervous that something has gone wrong. To me it seems like my tank has stopped processing ammonia for some reason and that would explain why I'm not seeing any nitrites..
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, and I'm happy to provide more info. This process has just been really stressful and sketchy for me especially since I feel like I can never guess my API kit's colors right, I'm not colorblind but I ALWAYS second and third guess whether it's one color or another..
