I've never seen or heard of nitrates so high (I gasped when I saw the red color in the pic haha). Where are they at now? Have you removed the shrimps or done any water changes yet? Definitely do so if you haven't yet.
Cycling questions
- Thread starter elisa h
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IslandLifeReef
Valuable Member
I would disagree that your nitrites are zero because you have a high nitrate reading. Nitrites in the tank can cause nitrate tests to read incorrectly. For there to be 160 ppm of nitrate in the tank, you would have had to have added 30+ ppm of ammonia over the period of the cycle. I would get a nitrite test.
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elisa h
Active Member
@IslandLifeReef I've never heard of a nitrate false reading due to nitrite, but I was cautious anyways and I just left everything be in case of nitrites. &samnaz im not too worried about the nitrates. I left one shrimp in there just to feed and hopefully populate more bacteria. I'm waiting on a nitrite test kit to do anything. My lfs should be getting them in this weekend hopefully. Once I test and if they are at 0 I'm gonna remove the shrimp and change out enough water to get nitrates down below 20 before I put anything alive in there of course. I read that doing water changes can disrupt the cycle so that's why I haven't done any yet. I just don't want to risk assuming the cycle is over and doing water changes only to kill my clean up crew after adding them due to nitrites.
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elisa h
Active Member
The tank has been cycling for two weeks now and ammonia has stayed zero the past week. Would it be normal for nitrite to still be cycling a week after ammonia is 0? I'm not sure about this just trying to stay in the safe side. Definitely don't want to kill anything. As I've been told a couple times, nothing good comes fast in this hobby 
IslandLifeReef
Valuable Member
Yes, some test convert nitrate to nitrite and then read the total nitrite. If there is already nitrite present, you have already spiked the reading. I'm not sure all of the tests that do it, but I know that my nitrate reading with Red Sea was in the 70+ range while my tank was cycling, but as soon as nitrite went to 0, my nitrate went to just below 15. The problem with using a decaying shrimp or two is that you never know exactly how much ammonia you added to the system to cycle.
To answer your other question, I would think that if ammonia was at 0 for two weeks, then nitrite would probably be at 0 as well. What was the highest ammonia reading you had and for how long? Two weeks for a cycle seems a little quick.
To answer your other question, I would think that if ammonia was at 0 for two weeks, then nitrite would probably be at 0 as well. What was the highest ammonia reading you had and for how long? Two weeks for a cycle seems a little quick.
