Andy Sager
Aquarium Advice Addict
Better safe than sorry.Well I do not want to contaminate my 40 gallon, so I will not do it. Thanks for letting me know. My 40 gallon is doing very good right now. I do not want to mess things up.
Better safe than sorry.Well I do not want to contaminate my 40 gallon, so I will not do it. Thanks for letting me know. My 40 gallon is doing very good right now. I do not want to mess things up.
A lot. You won't even have to get more Guppies than what you already have. They will fill it for you. If you want them to fill it faster, just get one male and put it in with the females.Looks like I am going to have to buy another 40 gallon, not sure where to put it but would a 40 gallon long be big enough for all the guppies, with just the guppies and no other fish. How many guppy fish can fit in a 40 gallon long? I know of a place that sells fish tanks.
What fish can I cycle a 40 gallon tank? Which I can keep with guppies? I do not think a Gold fish would help, but the Gold Fish is very hardy. I cycled tank like that before. I did take the Gold Fish back to the store, but it did help cycle the tank.Using water from a cycled tank will do nothing to help cycle a new tank. The microbes responsible for your cycle dont live in the water. They live on surface area, so thats on your substrate, on your aquascape, on the glass your aquarium is made of, but mostly it lives in your filter media. All you will transfer from one tank to another by transfering water is any pathogens that are present in the water.
Transferring some substrate, some piece of aquascape from an established aquarium will help cycle a new tank. Better still take a small amount of filter media from an established filter and use it in your new filtration, or squeeze out a sponge from an established filter into the water of the new aquarium.
There is no guarantee this will quickly cycle a tank, but it should speed up how long it takes. The Fritz product might help too.
You then need to decide if you want to cycle the new tank before getting fish (fishless cycle) or cycle the tank using fish (fish in cycle). You previously did a fish in cycle when that god awful fish store you go to lent you fish to cycle the tank. If you want to do a fishless cycle you will need an ammonia source like Dr Tims Ammonium Chloride and patience. Even doing everything mentioned above it could still take a couple of months, but more likely 2 or 3 weeks.
The thing with fish in cycling is you are only cycled sufficiently for the number of fish you use to cycle. If you use 2 fish, you are only going to grow enough microbes to support those 2 fish. If you then add more fish your cycle needs to catch up and grow more microbes. If you only add a small amount each time you add fish, then your cycle doesnt need to catch up very much. If you go from 2 fish during your fish in cycle to then fully stock a tank then your cycle needs to catch up a lot. There is a massive difference between cycled enough for 2 fish in a 55 gallon tank and being cycled enough to fully stock it. 3 weeks to cycle a tank enough for 2 fish sounds about right, but thats a long way from being cycled.It must’ve worked for me bc I dumped all the water including the ickys down in the substrate into my 55. I had this 55 cycled in about 3 weeks by doing that and I had a couple fish in there that I didn’t care about for good measure.
Btw I know I’m cycled but a post on here really wigged me out. Someone saying they’ve had a tank going for a year and they didn’t think it cycled still so I’m super paranoid. I’ve been using the bottled bacteria every water change. But I know mines for sure cycled. Still a terrifying thought. I don’t want all this effort to be for nothing
I also put a filter in there from my old tank I forgot about that. I didn’t leave it in there long bc it wasn’t doing anything! It was a 10 gallon filter I had that and a 45 but I knew that small one wasn’t touching anything so I went and bought a 2nd 45 which I now have in there.
Please don't use fish to cycle a tank you dont intend to keep long term. We should be promoting ethical fish keeping, and using fish you are planning to just return once you are done with them just isnt right. We are going back to the practices of that awful fish store again.What fish can I cycle a 40 gallon tank? Which I can keep with guppies? I do not think a Gold fish would help, but the Gold Fish is very hardy. I cycled tank like that before. I did take the Gold Fish back to the store, but it did help cycle the tank.
Should I add guppies right away, or wait a few days. For my fish in cycle. I am going to put tank in my bed room. I do have a stand but I do not trust my tank on. I have a very long dresser top, that is rock solid and long enough for my fish tank.Please don't use fish to cycle a tank you dont intend to keep long term. We should be promoting ethical fish keeping, and using fish you are planning to just return once you are done with them just isnt right. We are going back to the practices of that awful fish store again.
Start your cycle with 3 or 4 of your guppies in a 40g tank.
There is much debate on which microbe or microbes are actually doing the nitrification but one thing holds true about them all: They are aerobic in nature so they will be found where there is an oxygen level high enough to support them. The higher the oxygen level, the more microbes will be found there. This is why you find more of them in the filter/ filter material because that usually has the highest oxygen level in a tank. (In deep bed tanks, anaerobic bacteria form under the substrate where there is less oxygen to convert nitrate into nitrate gas which gets eliminated through bubbles so it's possible to have both aerobic and anaerobic microbes in a tank at the same time but they will not be in the same place(s) in the aquarium. ) They are surface dwellers as well. They do not produce free swimming spores so your adding the water would at best only have added a minute amount of microbes that were scraped off another surface. In your case, the filter you added is where the microbes came from in enough volume to cycle your aquarium faster. The fact that it was only a 10 gallon filter really plays little in this event. That filter was cycled for the amount of fish that were in that 10 gallon tank and it wouldn't have mattered if the filter was moved to a larger tank, a much larger tank or even a much smaller tank, there will be enough microbes present to handle the bioload of however many fish were in that 10 gallon tank at the time the filter was moved. As Aiken and I have said repeatedly, it's not about the water, it's about the materials in the tank.The fastest I’ve been able to cycle a tank was by adding water from an existing tank as well as using cycle fish. I would not put any fish you care about in the uncycled tank.