Hi,
I've decided to do a fish-in cycle (I haven't got the fish yet) on this little 10L tank I have and have been reading all about fishless/fish in cycling etc, and essentially my reason for not doing fishless cycling is that I'm impatient.
I've had it filtering for a week (which I now know hasn't really done anything - but I acted on the advice of an aquarium shop assistant) and bought the API Master test kit and did some tests last night. The pH is sitting at about 7.4 from memory, and there was no ammonia but seemed to be a tiny bit of nitrite. I can't remember the reading off the top of my head, but it was the first coloured square after 0. Maybe 0.25ppm or something?
After those tests, I also put some gravel and filter media from a fish tank I have at work, in the tank. It just occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't have put the filter media in my new filter.. should I have just put it somewhere else in the tank? God I hope I haven't screwed it up by doing that! But either way, there's filter media and gravel in there, which is hopefully going to help.
My question really, is this. When doing fish-in cycling, is what I'm doing basically manually removing or reducing the ammonia and nitrite in the tank, by doing much more frequent and large water changes? So I'm effectively simulating the effect of the amm - > nitrite and nitrite -> nitrate bacteria, while these bacteria grow?
I'm just trying to determine exactly how it fits together. I vaguely remember how all these things work from first year uni chemistry, but that was 10 years ago now
I'm happy to do lots of water changes and deal with what's going to be an intensive regime for a little while, I just want to make sure that I actually understand exactly what is happening, rather than just responding to numbers etc.
I've decided to do a fish-in cycle (I haven't got the fish yet) on this little 10L tank I have and have been reading all about fishless/fish in cycling etc, and essentially my reason for not doing fishless cycling is that I'm impatient.
I've had it filtering for a week (which I now know hasn't really done anything - but I acted on the advice of an aquarium shop assistant) and bought the API Master test kit and did some tests last night. The pH is sitting at about 7.4 from memory, and there was no ammonia but seemed to be a tiny bit of nitrite. I can't remember the reading off the top of my head, but it was the first coloured square after 0. Maybe 0.25ppm or something?
After those tests, I also put some gravel and filter media from a fish tank I have at work, in the tank. It just occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't have put the filter media in my new filter.. should I have just put it somewhere else in the tank? God I hope I haven't screwed it up by doing that! But either way, there's filter media and gravel in there, which is hopefully going to help.
My question really, is this. When doing fish-in cycling, is what I'm doing basically manually removing or reducing the ammonia and nitrite in the tank, by doing much more frequent and large water changes? So I'm effectively simulating the effect of the amm - > nitrite and nitrite -> nitrate bacteria, while these bacteria grow?
I'm just trying to determine exactly how it fits together. I vaguely remember how all these things work from first year uni chemistry, but that was 10 years ago now
I'm happy to do lots of water changes and deal with what's going to be an intensive regime for a little while, I just want to make sure that I actually understand exactly what is happening, rather than just responding to numbers etc.
