Problem Cycling 5 Gallon Fluval

[anne stuart]

Cycling a 5 gallon Fluval Spec and I need some advise. The thing is that it's so small evaporation and the tiny amount I take to test the water daily keeps causing me to need to top off the tank. I have to do it for the 3rd time today in the 9 days I've been at this. Can I trust the readings?

Days 1-6 Ammonia stayed at 4.0 even with one top off on day 5 of about 5% of the tank.

Day 7 Ammonia dropped to 2.0 and Nitrite .25, nitrate 0

Day 8 Ammonia 2.0 Nitrite .25, nitrate 0

Today Ammonia 0, Nitrite .25, Nitrate 0

I just added ammonia to see how long it will take to return to 0. My concern is that I've never seen a spike in Nitrate and Nitrite has only gone to .25 (if that, it's really between 0 and .25 in color)

 

[Mattyfelts]

Cycling a 5 gallon Fluval Spec and I need some advise. The thing is that it's so small evaporation and the tiny amount I take to test the water daily keeps causing me to need to top off the tank. I have to do it for the 3rd time today in the 9 days I've been at this. Can I trust the readings?

Days 1-6 Ammonia stayed at 4.0 even with one top off on day 5 of about 5% of the tank.

Day 7 Ammonia dropped to 2.0 and Nitrite .25, nitrate 0

Day 8 Ammonia 2.0 Nitrite .25, nitrate 0

Today Ammonia 0, Nitrite .25, Nitrate 0

I just added ammonia to see how long it will take to return to 0. My concern is that I've never seen a spike in Nitrate and Nitrite has only gone to .25 (if that, it's really between 0 and .25 in color)

what are you testing with, the 4.0 ammonia had to go somewhere, do you have a tonne of plants?

 

[anne stuart]

I'm Using The API master test kit. That's what has me puzzled. I have one tiny little plant. I added a decent amount of seeding material from my existing tank and at one point added about half a gallon of water from the existing tank to get things going. I did go away for Mother's day weekend so no testing was done on Day 6 of the cycle but I've never done a PWC, just these little 5-10% top offs a couple of times. Maybe I'm not doing the Nitrate test correctly? On my other tank I did get a nitrate reading of 10ppm just before a PWC one day so I thought I was doing it correctly.

 

[Mattyfelts]

I'm Using The API master test kit. That's what has me puzzled. I have one tiny little plant. I added a decent amount of seeding material from my existing tank and at one point added about half a gallon of water from the existing tank to get things going. I did go away for Mother's day weekend so no testing was done on Day 6 of the cycle but I've never done a PWC, just these little 5-10% top offs a couple of times. Maybe I'm not doing the Nitrate test correctly? On my other tank I did get a nitrate reading of 10ppm just before a PWC one day so I thought I was doing it correctly.

you have to add drops from both bottles, shake, and let sit for a couple minutes.

 

[anne stuart]

That's what I did. I'll test again later today and see what happened with the ammonia I added last night. When I checked ammonia yesterday afternoon it was reading Ammonia of only 1 or 2 so I'm thinking I didn't put enough in. I'm using the dr. Tim's aquarium ammonia and followed the directions for my size tank but it doesn't look like that's enough to bring it to 4ppm although I didn't test it till several hours after I put it in because of mommy duties. Still nitrite was only up to .25 again and no nitrate so the ammonia didn't have anyplace to go, must not have put enough in.