nice heads up I like to see all the possible combos for cycling nowadays. its hard to make sense of all the different directions one can take, not all the info lines up for sure.
in my opinion combining forms of bottle bac especially in tank dilution will not be harmful. neither is an antibiotic product, selected for and sustained against a matched target.
happenstance favors bacteria, not eliminates it. where water goes...
*if some strains say on the directions not to combine, dont lol maybe they have a trade secret to down other strains.
redundancy isn't required though. Those cycling bacteria are not necessarily the dominant strains that will pass assay in five years anyway, I think most of the deep surveys have shown forms other than bottle bac strains to be present in samples-pelagic and benthic swabs. that means buy one brand tested by Dr Reef and its guaranteed to work buy the dates shown, if you have any sort of confirmation like ammonia moving down by the date on the bottle directions.
The extra strain isn't needed, what the tank develops into over time isn't a result of your retail dosing its the natural selection and import pathways in the home.
at the start we only care about nh3 control, any bottle bac will handle it pretty much. feed some ammonia, a pinch of fish food for carbon and extras, bottle bac, stew on date to directions then change out water and reef. =shortcut option.
if you'd like to wait and stew until ammonia is zero and nitrite is zero and nitrate reads some, the classic start date, that's no harm. nowadays people like to speed up a bit, its fun working with that too. our data is fast, our reefing is fast, np.
cycles using mb7 alone have tracked out to be slow as well, i'd use the Dr Tims alone in my opinion but mb7 will not harm Dr Tims.
