My tank is finally cycled (phew)

Anne L.

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Dec 3, 2003
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After a small hiccup, I believe my 10 gallon is finally cycled. It's processing 3-5 ppm of ammonia in 24 hrs or less, and I'm at 0 nitrites as of yesterday.

This is what I want to put in the tank -
3 glowlight tetras
4 harlequin rasboras (if I can find them again)
3 cory catfish.

I was thinking of putting in the tetras and rasboras all at once, then adding the corys a week later. Is this too much of a lag time between adding fish?

I don't believe I am overstocked at this amount of fish, am I right?
 
looks good

I think that looks fine. All mid zone fish together, bottom fish a bit later.

Be sure to do a very large water change before adding fish to remove built up nitrates. You might even ask the pet store to test the nitrates for you so you will know how large is enough. Id change enough water to get nitrates to below 5ppm.

Be sure temperature is good, be sure to dechlorinate or treat for chloaramines whichever you have.
 
how many days?

How long did it take, start to finish?
 
Anonapersona, I'm going to do a very large water change, and probably only leave a gallon or 2 of water in there, so about 80% change. I'm also going to get a nitrate kit, but I think that large of a water change should be enough. We'll do it the night before we go to the fish store and use AquaPlus as a conditioner. This way the water can come up to temperature slowly.

I started fishless cycling on Dec 12th, and I thought I was done last week. Turned out I wasn't adding enough ammonia, only 1 ml, and when I went to do the test by adding 5 ppm overnight, I started getting nitrite spikes again. That was on January 14-15th.

What I did, on the advice of the good folks here, was bump up
the ammonia to 3-4 ppm and start testing.

So all told, it's taken about 5 weeks, using only an ornament from
my friend's tank to start with.

Not so bad for a complete newbie, I think.

;)
 
38 days?

I read somewhere that it takes 38 days....

Dec 12 - Jan 20 = 39 days -- pretty good

Just checking, before I start quoting that number too often.
 
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