How to successfully cycle tank in less than 2 weeks

[HildebrandRarity]

Good morning all, wanted to share with you my experience setting up my new upgraded 75 gallon tank and a fast way to cycle tank that worked for me. I used brand new sand and Old live rock from my other tank and transferred it to the new tank, also my old filter cartridges I placed in the new filter with the new cartridges to build beneficial bacteria. For the first 7 days I used Seachem Stability and Introduced a small hardy domino damsel fish on the 3rd day. For filtration I am using Seachem Matrix, Seachem Purigen and High density floss with carbon on 2 HOB filters. Now I am dosing 15ml of phytoplankton daily and the tank is thriving

 

[brandon429]

Good job, if this was 2006 you’d be excoriated for not waiting thirty days


ironic= even in 2006 when forums were sure cycles couldn’t be skipped, marine tank conventions housing 500 skip cycle full reefs with fish and twenty grand in corals had already been happening decades and they all started on the same date, no lates. It’s very hard to get forums to validate any form of rushing based on forum-defined cycle timelines, but I’m on board. nice speed cycle here.

 

[HildebrandRarity]

Photo

 

[HB AL]

I haven't had to cycle a tank in decades, just you the sand and some of the rocks from the current tank and its plenty to not have a cycle. Kinda easy and nice to be add corals and fish from day one.

 

[Sisterlimonpot]

Transfering live rock from an established tank would've been an instant cycle to begin with.

Out side of possibly adding a bit more bacteria, you more than likely experienced an instant cycle.

 

[jd371]

My 75g cycled quickly also because I used pure ammonia instead of waiting for the shrimp to decay. To be honest I started with a shrimp but the smell was so bad I pulled it and just dosed some pure ammonia. It was cycled in just under 3 weeks.

 

[HildebrandRarity]

Transfering live rock from an established tank would've been an instant cycle to begin with.

Out side of possibly adding a bit more bacteria, you more than likely experienced an instant cycle.

Thanks for your feedback, think is great to share with live rock you don't really even need to cycle an aquarium, just a few items from an old aquarium will set you up for success

 

[brandon429]

I made use of that truth by converting into tank cleaning practice. the intent was to use that biology well past the cycling phase and test it in other people's tanks along with mine to see if skip cycling works and is consistent, or just lucky and stuff will eventually die.


Just as we skip cycle from pet store to home with true cured live rock, if a tank was particularly misbehaving (invaded) and the aquarist was so fed up, we could just take it all apart and clean it to the bone, sand included (it didnt come out of the bag dirty, so making it clean again doesnt hurt) and clean the rocks and reassemble an invader-less tank, using that same rationale from above.

turns out it works, I bet my buddies have done half a million rip cleans by now. what bacteria do with free ammonia is the most predictable action in reefing, no reef cycle ever stalls or fails to complete relative to the type of substrate we're employing. all cycles behave in such a way that we dont even have to test for them anymore. I maintain a 23 page cycling thread where we refuse all testing lol and just cycle them without any. we still use certain measures, but its not an ammonia nitrite or nitrate test kit we dont use the data.

a tank certainly goes at one point from not cycled to cycled. the conversion point is very fast its not slow...when we dose bottle bac or use wet sand other surfaces pick up this bacteria by association within mere days, Dr Reef's bottle bac study thread showed.

these cleaning threads evolved into total sandbed removal threads, with no ramp down time. Meaning live rocks will also tolerate having their bioloading instantly increased when sand is removed, and will run the same amount of fish they used to run with-sand. And, without a mini cycle (we have someone do this using mindstream, a highly accurate ammonia measuring device)

when cycled, if kept wet, rocks will never ever uncycle. That provides a key detail in how we spot what bacteria do without ever measuring for them. moving detritus tank to tank causes moving problems, not ever a lack of bacteria.

we aren't guessing in testless cycling threads, we extract details that confirm or deny the presence of bacteria and then apply that third tenet above that they can't be killed by being moved tank to tank or cleaned etc.

 

[AZMSGT]

You never cycled the tank. You seeded it with already cycled rock. All it did was stabilize the new tank.

A true cycle is starting out with zero bacteria in water, sand and rock.

Basically, you did a tank transfer.

 

[brandon429]

AZM

do you find it amazing like I do that this info can't be found in any reef book, or cycling article

no form of written teaching discusses that fine detail

if we're reading about a cycling article, we're assuming bacteria must be added, in all cases, and in all cases, only adding ammonia will cycle us.

its neat we trade this very new to the hobby info as common as day to us, but in the written world nobody identified it. I think cycling authors are way way behind on the times, we dont have any updated info that even references what seneye shows to be true...

not one cycle author in history have I ever seen allow for skip cycling, or live rock transfer noncycling

Ive never seen anyone formally differentiate how to handle total live rocks vs dry base rocks.

we're taught to handle everything like dry base rock. Those rascals at the reef conventions have been secretly defining this approach since the 80s or earlier lol but now we broke up their secret cycling society of hand gestures and subtle posturing and use all their methods/ on reef wikileaks