Are These Results Normal for a Five-Month Cycle?

[nickkohrn]

I have had a rock and a MarinePure plate cycling for five months while I have been buying equipment and setting up my system for success. The rock was purchased from a live-rock bin. The owner said that he believes it to have been in there for a few months since it was at the bottom of the bin and that rock isn’t sold often. There were starfish and other animals in the system, so it has a sufficient population of bacteria.

The rock and MarinePure plate were housed in a dark bin for five months at my apartment, and I moved them over to a spare ten-gallon tank last night so that they can start to get some light in the hope of going through the diatom phase before my system is ready for them.

In the meantime, I have been adding one drop of ammonium chloride (Dr. Tim’s) per gallon once each week to keep the bacteria population healthy. I haven’t tested my water parameters for a couple of months because I haven’t done anything to change the chemistry, other than dosing ammonia, since I set the system up.

I decided to test my water today because I dosed ammonia last night, and my Seachem badge wasn’t displaying a detectable level of ammonia when I arrived home this afternoon. My API test kit gave me an ammonia measurement of ~0ppm. However, nitrites and nitrates are high.

I expect nitrates to be high because I haven’t performed water-changes on the system. I don’t think that the level of nitrites should be as high as they are, though.

Attached is a photo that shows the results of my tests.

Are these results to be expected, or should I perform a water-change to bring the levels down?

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

Yea. Normal.
A 100% should pretty much get rid of the no3

 

[RobZilla04]

Stop dosing ammonia. The bacteria population can process, but likely the test results are high in Nitrite and Nitrate because you dosed ammonia the night before and it's simply taking time for the nitrogen cycle to complete. As mentioned above, change the water. You can lightly ghost feed flakes or pellets (very lightly) once a week until the equipment is ready and you get the whole tank up and running. The bacteria will feed off eachother as the population grows and diversifies though.

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

Dosing ammoina is actually fine to do. Food actually becomes ammonia as it rots.
The only benifit to food over ammoina is the food will contain Po4 as a source for the bacteria rather than having to let it pull the small amounts from the rock.
As we see from the dino threads , Po4 limitation can be bad for a tank.