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View Full Version : 1st fishless cycle, 2 day to now brown colour water??



karlo
04-21-2009, 4:59 PM
Hi all,
new to fish keeping and in my 5th day of fishless cycling but coming up with a visual problem.
I have started the tank with nothing in except internal filter, heater and sand as base.
When I poured the water into the tank it was crysta clear.
1st day I did the ph test and got a figure of 6.4 and I also put in some fish food.
the next day, the water was still crystal clear and most of the fishfood was gone.
i did the test ph 6-8 and more fish food
the next day (day 3) the water of the tank looked 'dirty' misty but assumed that it was the filter clearing the fishfood.
ph 7
no ammonia
20/04/2009 (day 4)
I have now started to use household ammonia so brought the ammonia level to 4, nitrite 0 but stll the water has not cleared??!

21/04/2009
no ammonia added as the level has not dropped and water is still the same colour.

I am going to do another test tonight to see if the ammonia has dropped (which I think it should) and see if there are any nitrite as people are telling me that the cloudy is the cycle working but I thought it would have been like mist cloudy, not dirty, like mucky pond water also is it not too early for the cloudiness to show??
please help me as I am debating whether to start the whole cycle again and not waste my time if this is wrong.
Regards
Karlo

colinsk
04-21-2009, 7:16 PM
It takes a long time to get nitrites unless you have some media to seed from. It may take 3 weeks. If you don't have another aquarium to borrow media from then be patient.

jessie1
04-21-2009, 7:18 PM
Same thing happened to me when I started up, I grabbed some old media/filters from an established tank and it went away over night. I am assuming the color is a part of the cycle.. be patient!

ChrisK
04-21-2009, 7:46 PM
It's probably some kind of bacterial bloom. Is this and eclipse system or something of the sort?