I’m so confused!

[IgsPoke3]

Hey everyone,

Can someone please explain this picture bc it doesn’t make sense to me. I’m in the process of fish in cycle with one betta and it’s around day 25. PH around 6.8, Ammonia around 0.25, nitrite around 0 and nitrate is for the first time today around 10 ppm. How is that possible when nitrite never rose up. I shook all bottles plenty so it’s not that and I did this test twice just to double check. What does this mean about my cycle? Thank you!

[Aiken Drum]

It means you have nothing to worry about. You have a little bit of ammonia, but its not enough to be at toxic level especially at your acidic pH. Ammonia must be converting to nitrite, and then to nitrate because you arent seeing nitrite and you are detecting nitrate.

Yes, you would normally go through a stage of having nitrite in your test but you didnt. Your nitrite to nitrate stage must have established quickly enough you never saw any nitrite. Thats great.

Monitor the ammonia to ensure it stays at that low level. Maybe do an ammonia test on some bottled water which should be zero ammonia and compare it with the test from your tank. Zero ammonia can often look like a trace ammonia result. If the bottled water and your tank water look the same, its safe to say your ammonia is zero in the tank.

[Andy Sager]

Aiken pretty much nailed it but just one more test to make sure: test your source water for nitrate. If it shows nitrates, that would explain why you have it in your tank and did not see any nitrite rise. This would mean that you are still in the cycling process.
Just a note, fish in cycles do not happen quickly. 25 days is rather quick for a fish in cycle.
Did you use any filter material from another fully cycled , healthy tank?
Did you use any bacteria product since adding the fish?

These things could also explain a nitrate reading without seeing a nitrite rise.

[IgsPoke3]

Originally Posted by Andy Sager

Aiken pretty much nailed it but just one more test to make sure: test your source water for nitrate. If it shows nitrates, that would explain why you have it in your tank and did not see any nitrite rise. This would mean that you are still in the cycling process.
Just a note, fish in cycles do not happen quickly. 25 days is rather quick for a fish in cycle.
Did you use any filter material from another fully cycled , healthy tank?
Did you use any bacteria product since adding the fish?

These things could also explain a nitrate reading without seeing a nitrite rise.

Hello, I did think to test my water source and it’s all 0 across the board. One thing that I did was also test a bottled water for ammonia and it appears the exact same color as the one I my tank. To me that color always looked like 0.25 ppm because of the slight green and not yellow so now I’m assuming that ammonia is also 0.
As for the cycling, I used API bottled bacteria since day 1 as well as a couple of “enzyme” beneficial bacteria from aqueon.

[Andy Sager]

Originally Posted by IgsPoke3

Hello, I did think to test my water source and it’s all 0 across the board. One thing that I did was also test a bottled water for ammonia and it appears the exact same color as the one I my tank. To me that color always looked like 0.25 ppm because of the slight green and not yellow so now I’m assuming that ammonia is also 0.
As for the cycling, I used API bottled bacteria since day 1 as well as a couple of “enzyme” beneficial bacteria from aqueon.

The it sounds like you have completed cycling your tank. Congrats. The key now is to not overload the system with new fish. Keep in mind that the biological filter is a living organism that grows and shrinks to the amount of ammonia present at that time. Adding new fish will mean your colonies need to grow to catch up to the new ammonia levels. The good news is that these microbes multiply quickly once they are established. So quick that you may not even see the rises and fallings unless you have a monitor on the tank that is recording the water quality 24/7. If you overload the system, these levels can once again become toxic to the fish so you want to add things slowly.
On another note, take your readings in natural sunlight and against white paper and if it still is not coming out clearly 0, you may want to get new reagents for the ammonia test.