chykityta
Aquarium Advice Freak
Hello all, I am new to the hobby and been doing lots of research.
I started fishless cycling a freshwater tank on 1/29. It was a new tank so I just wiped it, cleaned and boiled the gravel, added decorations, and added water with API tap water (thought that Prime was counter productive to what I wanted to accomplish). The tank is a GloFish 10 gallon (kit). I am testing with the Ammonia and 6-in-1 test strips.
I use 10-12 drops of 10% ammonia solution when adding ammonia and I also crush like 5 flakes of food and add them to the tank.
Once I started seeing ammonia going down on week 2, I bumped it back up. By 2/10, the water got yellowish from the tannings on cholla wood I added -even though I soaked them on a separate bowl with tank water- so I did a 50% PWC and added more ammonia. My LFS recommended that I let it drop to zero before adding any more.
On a desperate attempt, I added TetraSafe last Sunday 2/15 and like 10 pieces of gravel from my LFS on a bag directly in front of the filter intake. I have a Java Fern and an Anubias Congensis I got last week as well attached to the cholla wood. The problem is that I thought the ammonia was going down, but it isn't. I thought I read 0.5 last night and it is at 3 today. PH is between 7.8 and 8.4 so don't think that the PH is the cause. Note that in none of the reading have I seen traces of Nitrites or Nitrates; always zero.
I started fishless cycling a freshwater tank on 1/29. It was a new tank so I just wiped it, cleaned and boiled the gravel, added decorations, and added water with API tap water (thought that Prime was counter productive to what I wanted to accomplish). The tank is a GloFish 10 gallon (kit). I am testing with the Ammonia and 6-in-1 test strips.
I use 10-12 drops of 10% ammonia solution when adding ammonia and I also crush like 5 flakes of food and add them to the tank.
Once I started seeing ammonia going down on week 2, I bumped it back up. By 2/10, the water got yellowish from the tannings on cholla wood I added -even though I soaked them on a separate bowl with tank water- so I did a 50% PWC and added more ammonia. My LFS recommended that I let it drop to zero before adding any more.
On a desperate attempt, I added TetraSafe last Sunday 2/15 and like 10 pieces of gravel from my LFS on a bag directly in front of the filter intake. I have a Java Fern and an Anubias Congensis I got last week as well attached to the cholla wood. The problem is that I thought the ammonia was going down, but it isn't. I thought I read 0.5 last night and it is at 3 today. PH is between 7.8 and 8.4 so don't think that the PH is the cause. Note that in none of the reading have I seen traces of Nitrites or Nitrates; always zero.