Thank you very much for reading this.
I am 25 days into a fishless cycle of a 450 litre Juwel Vision 450 bow fronted converted to marine with a 90 litre sump tank, 2 x 12" air walls, 1 x 4" air disc, 2 x 3000 l/p/h powerheads, 1 x 1500 l/p/h sump return pump, sump contains 3 chambers (1,Entrance drop from Tank. 2,Refugium comprising bio balls, crushed coral and old gravel and a small filter for polishing water. 3, Return to Display Tank) .
Water was de-chlorinated after 1hour (to check for leaks and sterilize the tank as this had marine in it and is now wanted for freshwater fancies) with API Stress Coat+ (Test results showed this was successful), I have an old tank thats always been (0,0,20-40) and I have taken filter media from it along with new ceramic filter media from a very good LFS(Thanks Maindenhead Aquatics), Correct dose of API Stress Zyme+ added on first day along with 4-5ppm of household ammonia (yes, i have shaken the bottle and no fizzing or bubbles, its pure ammonia, well as pure as your going to get with no added cleaners or chemicals), I have been taking tank reading via API Master Test Kit for the past 20 days and nothing has changed... 4-5ppm Ammonia, 5 (possibly off the chart) NitrIte and nearly nothing 10-20 for NitrAte. I have added a few drops of PH down and a few very small crushed pieces of fish flakes to help with phosphates, but still nothing, it just sits there with the same readings day after day after day...
I am going to do a large 50/60% water change over the weekend to see if I can get a proper reading of NitrIte as my gut feeling is NitrItes are too high stopping the conversion to NitrAtes, just really surprised not to see the Ammonia dropping due to the quailty of the old media/ceramic that was added.
Any further input to this would be great, as i feel the cycle of my last tank was a little hard on my fish and I really wanted to do this fishless this time...
Many thanks
Tim
I am 25 days into a fishless cycle of a 450 litre Juwel Vision 450 bow fronted converted to marine with a 90 litre sump tank, 2 x 12" air walls, 1 x 4" air disc, 2 x 3000 l/p/h powerheads, 1 x 1500 l/p/h sump return pump, sump contains 3 chambers (1,Entrance drop from Tank. 2,Refugium comprising bio balls, crushed coral and old gravel and a small filter for polishing water. 3, Return to Display Tank) .
Water was de-chlorinated after 1hour (to check for leaks and sterilize the tank as this had marine in it and is now wanted for freshwater fancies) with API Stress Coat+ (Test results showed this was successful), I have an old tank thats always been (0,0,20-40) and I have taken filter media from it along with new ceramic filter media from a very good LFS(Thanks Maindenhead Aquatics), Correct dose of API Stress Zyme+ added on first day along with 4-5ppm of household ammonia (yes, i have shaken the bottle and no fizzing or bubbles, its pure ammonia, well as pure as your going to get with no added cleaners or chemicals), I have been taking tank reading via API Master Test Kit for the past 20 days and nothing has changed... 4-5ppm Ammonia, 5 (possibly off the chart) NitrIte and nearly nothing 10-20 for NitrAte. I have added a few drops of PH down and a few very small crushed pieces of fish flakes to help with phosphates, but still nothing, it just sits there with the same readings day after day after day...
I am going to do a large 50/60% water change over the weekend to see if I can get a proper reading of NitrIte as my gut feeling is NitrItes are too high stopping the conversion to NitrAtes, just really surprised not to see the Ammonia dropping due to the quailty of the old media/ceramic that was added.
Any further input to this would be great, as i feel the cycle of my last tank was a little hard on my fish and I really wanted to do this fishless this time...
Many thanks
Tim
