The universal rule in testless cycling is that a pinch of ground up fish food, ground well, added to the system along with any brand of common cycling bacteria will cycle submerged surfaces within ten days enough to carry a common decent bioload in reefing.
you don’t have to add ammonia to 2 ppm and attempt to detail measure it, simple fish food works fine. It degrades into what we need
anyone with a calibrated seneye machine can report back the spot checks.
cycling charts have a ten day ammonia drop line, maybe twelve days on some. but that’s a tight range…it’s not twenty days on any chart published for example. so we pick a calendar date ten days out for all common cycle approaches and that’s their start date in these testless cycle threads. If they haven’t added fish food, add some then start the count.
uncured ocean rock is the variable set, if it’s full of sponges and tunicates destined to die in the shipping plus tank transfer that can exceed ten days but those aren’t the majority cycle types
bottle bac cycles on dry rocks are the majority cycling type, and that’s ten days under the stew mentioned above plus a water change at the end so there’s no need to test it-that’s how we make testless cycles out of any reef tank. it will be done by day ten and the charts show it so why bother testing for ammonia control it isn’t going to fail in an inoculated, warmed and circulating body of water.
we could be replacing that ammonia testing time with reading in the disease forum to avoid quick disease outbreaks in new tanks.
ammonia is the only parameter we track nowadays in cycling we don’t care about nitrate and nitrite
ammonia control can be predicted off wait times without any testing, testing is now optional.
Official cycling charts are all the same because that’s how many days each parameter takes to stabilize in an aquatic system where inoculated, and of sufficient surface area and presentation in the water table. Testless cycles are merely setup, stewed for ten days, water changed, then you can relocate those rocks into any tank as a skip cycle setup or use them where they sit.
Bacterial adhesion happens within ten days given bottle bac and added fish feed or bioloading, thats the secret of updated cycling science. You don’t have to test it is the benefit.
the entire point of this 100 page thread below is Dr. Reef testing how long the various strains took to adhere to surfaces, look how rigorous his method is:
what’s the recurring completion date among all strains tested there? The dates go even faster when fish food powder is added because that also boosts strains of bacteria that use ammonia as an energy substrate
over time and as additions bring selected species into the system, those initially dosed bac strains die out and are outcompeted for vital space (the filter surfaces)
that similarity across brands is updated cycling science, that reef cycles are so predictable in timing completion you can make sixty year old charts with them and run todays reef tanks off them just the same. The reef-specific part is that we only care about ammonia. If this was freshwater cycling, nitrite would be the top contender and ammonia would be low totem pole.
but since u asked to see one here's forty pages of cycling meeting these criteria:
www.reef2reef.com
