Benjamin100
Aquarium Advice Newbie
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2013
- Messages
- 4
When I was younger I had several tanks, and was completely oblivious to the nitrogen cycle which was obviously pretty cruel for my fish.
I recently decided to get back into the hobby, and bought a little 54 litre/14 gallon tank and thought i'd go with the whole fishless cycle thing.
I got the ammonia up to 4ppm etc, and have been monitering ph to ensure there was no dramatic drop. I attempted to seed the tank with some gravel from a friend's tank to speed up the cycling process.
The issue is that it has been 3 weeks now and my test kit (API) is displaying no drop in ammonia, and there are no signs of nitrites.
Here are my two areas of concern:
1) I'll admit to using cloudy ammonia, only as pure ammonia is incredibly difficult if not impossible to come across here in New Zealand. Actually, the only reason I ended up using it was reading about several other fish keepers here that had cycling success with cloudy ammonia. However despite this I am philosophical to the fact that there could be a chemical in the cloudy ammonia that is killing any bacteria.
2) The filter is a pretty rubbish Juwel internal filter that came with the tank- with a sponge inside it, and no ceramic media or anything good like that. So I am wondering if my lack of bacterial growth could be to do with the filter not being an ideal place to harbour bacteria.
___
All in all the whole process has become incredibly frustrating and all I can think to do is to buy and aquaclear HOB filter, somehow source some ceramic media to seed it with- and see if anything changes. However I don't know whether I'm going to have any luck with that either.
Sorry for this massive post, and it would be amazing if someone could give me a little advice
I recently decided to get back into the hobby, and bought a little 54 litre/14 gallon tank and thought i'd go with the whole fishless cycle thing.
I got the ammonia up to 4ppm etc, and have been monitering ph to ensure there was no dramatic drop. I attempted to seed the tank with some gravel from a friend's tank to speed up the cycling process.
The issue is that it has been 3 weeks now and my test kit (API) is displaying no drop in ammonia, and there are no signs of nitrites.
Here are my two areas of concern:
1) I'll admit to using cloudy ammonia, only as pure ammonia is incredibly difficult if not impossible to come across here in New Zealand. Actually, the only reason I ended up using it was reading about several other fish keepers here that had cycling success with cloudy ammonia. However despite this I am philosophical to the fact that there could be a chemical in the cloudy ammonia that is killing any bacteria.
2) The filter is a pretty rubbish Juwel internal filter that came with the tank- with a sponge inside it, and no ceramic media or anything good like that. So I am wondering if my lack of bacterial growth could be to do with the filter not being an ideal place to harbour bacteria.
___
All in all the whole process has become incredibly frustrating and all I can think to do is to buy and aquaclear HOB filter, somehow source some ceramic media to seed it with- and see if anything changes. However I don't know whether I'm going to have any luck with that either.
Sorry for this massive post, and it would be amazing if someone could give me a little advice
