Cycling FOWLR

[Analisse119]

Hi everyone!
I have just started cycling a new 100 gallon FOWLR tank. I initially added my dry rock and sand then added my water. I decided to make a custom sump system which set my tank back a few days running as I was trying to set everything up correctly. With that being said everything in my tank was sitting stagnant for about 3 days until I got my sump set up. After I started running everything normally, I waited for the water to clear up and added dr. Tim’s one and only bacteria and then added a damsel for ammonia. This is the second day my fish has been in there and it seems to be doing great. I tested my levels today and my ammonia is at 0.25 ppm, nitrites at 0.00ppm, and my nitrates are at 20ppm. Is this normal for a new tank? Based on what I’ve read, I shouldn’t be seeing any nitrates yet and there should be a spike in ammonia and nitrites before hand. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

[brandon429]

This won’t and should not be a spike/ peak / trough cycle. Those are when we dose ammonia into the tank to drive well beyond typical levels and wait for it to come down as a form of bacteria feeding

you’ll burn the fish by combining methods. This way currently is a # of days wait cycle approach we do not expect a spike nor cause one using this method.

Simply feed your fish and reef as normal, the bottle bac is handling the easy waste load and two weeks with fish food and fish waste in two will give you the same cycle quality / covering of surfaces as the big blast of liquid ammonia option. You specifically don’t want elevated ammonia here.

in two weeks the tank is done, test nothing, do nothing just wait two weeks. Re fallow your system after, you’ll bring in disease bigtime with chromis which affects future fish very very likely. The cycle is 100% done in two weeks no testing needed, in fact your tests are more likely than not to misread and mis advise status. Trust the timing option. Disease intro is now the single biggest risk to anything you’ll add here, re fallow when done, only add quarantined fish next round. Source for statistics: any sticky thread in the disease forum