Fishless cycle.. time for skimmer?

[nim6us]

So I've never done a fishless cycle and I'm looking for some advice.

It's been about 15 days now, I used Dr Tims One and Only, and I've been dosing ammonium chloride, no ghost feeding or raw shrimp, just the ammonium chloride. I've got it now when I dose ammonia to 2ppm in two days ammonia is down to .25, can't seem to get it completely to zero so I'm going to let it cycle another couple weeks. Nitrite reads .5-.25 depending on the day but my Nitrate is starting to climb. It's gone from 5ppm to 50ppm in 4 days.

My question is, can/should I add my protein skimmer to bring down the Nitrates? They're just going to keep climbing without some sort of export and I don't want to do massive water changes on a 120g system in the middle of cycling. Am I on the right track with protein skimmer or perhaps dose some NoPoX?

 

[tdileo]

You can turn the skimmer on at this point. NoPOx won’t work without a skimmer running anyways, and it’s better to have the skimmer broken in now rather than when you have fish and corals and need it running

 

[lion king]

After the cycle(ammonia and nitrite both zero) depending on the amount of ammonia you processed, your nitrates can be quite high. At this point doing large water changes is the best way, personally I would not use any other method besides water changes to bring the nitrates down, I would get them down to around 10 then let my filtration take over from there. A protein skimmer removes unprocessed organics and has absolutely zero effects on nitrates, there is no point in a skimmer until you have fish being fed and creating waste. I use nopox and would only recommend this product for a more mature tank and someone with a bit more experience, you can create a tremendous mess if not used properly.