I will never own either test kit, that’s how unnecessary ammonia and nitrite is to know starting day one. Nitrite is neutral in saltwater keeping start to finish, so we skip measuring it always. Ammonia can harm if left untended in a cycle, but quickly comes under control in aquatic systems and then doesn’t ever get uncontrolled unless fish dieoff happens and ammonia doesn’t cause that…hardware issues or disease always causes fish death in multiples.
that doesn’t mean I’m ignoring raw ammonia burns in the reefs we cycle either... it means we have alternate markers and measurement points for reefs that make api unnecessary at all stages start to finish
and these markers, when verified on digital testers that don’t mislead us wildly, always pass safety nh3 tolerances.
valid markers for testless reefing (cycle testless, some reefs still need calcium and alk monitoring):
-time frame: anything with feed or any type of bottle bac + 10 days wait (the ammonia drop line from a cycle chart) will carry a common starting fish bioload. Change water on day ten for a clean start, begin.
-bottle bac: any use of Dr Tims cycling bacteria, biospira or Fritz, carries fish on day one when the bacteria are added. Lots of times it says so on the label, because they’ve studied bac in bottles and have already measured ability to oxidize ammonia out of the bottle in their qa testing and logging at the factory. Some bottles are dead, but so few I’ve never seen one instance of it in any of my cycling threads. Disease is always the sole stressor, occasionally it’s bad acclimation and floating shipment bags too long killing by ammonia within the bag, not from the tank.
-visual benthic cues: any tank pic showing diatoms in the sand or rocks, or new algae growth, or new cyano, means cycled for base ammonia control. Those secondary growths come after ability to control ammonia, not before, always. Any use of live rock from another reef skip cycles the whole reef it’s transferred to, without dieoff. We can see attachments latched onto real live rock…not all cycles have to be fed bottle bac as some cycles using live rock are instant ready tanks with zero wait.
-shipped ocean rocks don’t need ammonia testing. Hand cure off all the tunicates, large algae tufts and unidentified growths likely to die off in a tank. Cure the rocks for ten days in the cleaned condition, they’ll stop leaking ammonia by then, always.
every form of cycling already has a known completion date and no cycle is ever a challenge to solve. None are mysteries, all are compliant depending on the tester we choose to believe.
see how ammonia performance is already charted for every way we can cycle? It’s why I’ll never own the tests. day ten wait is a big deal in cycle start date assessment, all cycling charts agree. Six weeks with water is beyond all known charted timing maximums by a few times over.
