Tank cycling

[wasabi bean]

I recently started a cycle in my new tank that will serve as an upgrade for my old tank that is getting too small, I always do a fishless cycle so that there is no risk to fish, i use ammonia and get it to around 1ppm and use bottled bacteria. How do you guys stop nitrate just building up before adding fish cause last time it got to around 50ppm nitrate and i had to do lots of WC’s to get that down!! Would i be able to start a refugium mid cycle to remove nitrates or what do you guys do when doing a cycle? Any help would be great as i want a low nutrient system to try my hand at dome sps as currently i only have lps and softies.

 

[brandon429]

use testless cycling which doesn't use any ammonia. easy.

buy a brand of cycling specific bacteria: Dr. Tims, or fritz, or biospira

not mb7, one of the other ones above. add it into the tank per directions.

take 1 small pinch of fish food if the tank is a nano, 2 pinches if it's a large tank, and grind the food into powder in your hand, add it into the tank

wait 14 days, you can't not be cycled anywhere on earth. the fish food protein breaks down to provide ammonia and all trace nutrients needed by the cycling bac added from a bottle.

the ammonia control wait time on any standard cycling chart is ten days, going back to 1960 in books. it's a really well researched wait time for basic ammonia control in water systems, we went 4+ days for the that extra mile effect.

no other params (nitrite, nitrate) matter in updated reef tank cycling, and ammonia is 100% predictive said the 50 year old charts, that's how we got testless reef tank cycling. if we weren't using bottle bac, and only getting natural bac we'd need to wait longer. but in the setup you've described, it's bottle bac from a tested source, fish food, two weeks, you're cycled.

 

[Garf]

I recently started a cycle in my new tank that will serve as an upgrade for my old tank that is getting too small, I always do a fishless cycle so that there is no risk to fish, i use ammonia and get it to around 1ppm and use bottled bacteria. How do you guys stop nitrate just building up before adding fish cause last time it got to around 50ppm nitrate and i had to do lots of WC’s to get that down!! Would i be able to start a refugium mid cycle to remove nitrates or what do you guys do when doing a cycle? Any help would be great as i want a low nutrient system to try my hand at dome sps as currently i only have lps and softies.

Nitrate tends not to just accumulate without an input. However, nitrite interferes with the nitrate test, and is what you appear to be experiencing.

 

[brandon429]

the advice to input a bunch of ammonia and thereby drive up nitrates is merely something that a group of 1000000 people do on the internet, and tell each other it's required. that's absolutely not the case.


here is a forty page work thread of testless tank cycling

How to unstick any seemingly stuck cycle

Updated Cycling Science in Action This is a testless reef tank cycling thread, the only one from any board. If you ever had trouble with reef tank cycling in the past, you won't any longer after working some jobs with us. chances are you are using/about to use a method of reef tank cycling...

www.reef2reef.com

(they still give me test pics even though I don't want them lol, it's how we're trained)

every job in that thread used the ten day count to choose the start date, none of their testing mattered we can see.


again in summary: every single tank asking for help in that cycling thread I simply discerned what their day 10 was after adding some bac and food


and that was their assigned start date: not complex science. counting to ten


nobody in that whole thread had to do a big water change at the end.

using a pinch or two of fish food feeds all required bacteria just fine, we show. there wasn't a need to grossly overprove the cycle readiness by driving to 2 ppm ammonia, as the crowd does. It does not help anything at all to dose liquid ammonia repeated, or even once, to 2ppm. we don't even require ammonia use whatsoever to cycle, per above.


for the techies reading highly concerned that fish food is feeding the wrong clade of initial bacteria, ones who will eventually be replaced by the right clades: agreed. nobody cares which clades rotate in and out, they care about initial and ongoing ammonia control, which you can see by looking at anyone's seneye chart went just fine the whole time of transition. we got that part covered ok. it was better to build a system that surpasses the terrible ammonia test kits people use/get sidetracked by/and let the bacteria alternate as they will for a seamless reef cycle, every. single. time.

B