Cycle problem

[latazyo]

alright, here is the deal

I just bought a brand new 75g, put the sand in there, and fired up the filter

put a dish of gravel from my 20g in to help the cycle along, as well as a silver molly

got the water tested....high ammonia, and nitrites were just starting to come along, so I figured a week or so more

after a few weeks, ammonia is still high, so I threw the biowheel off of one of my other tanks in teh water to help it along some more

it has been a month...I'm in a dif town right now, but I had my buddy check on the tank

he said this "it smells like someone peed in your tank the ammonia is so high"


wtf is going on here?

75s shoudln't take a freakin' month to cycle with one fish, a cultured biowheel and cultured gravel

what the hell???

[ewok]

any chance of specific measurements? ph, ammonia and nitrite....

theoretically the tank should be cycled, but it sounds like it isn't somehow..... maybe the molly isn't enough. as a wild guess without specific readings i would think *maybe* by not having a large enough ammonia producer you might have killed off the original culture you added.... without something there to feed the culture it would starve pretty quickly i would imagine and a 75g with new water and one small fish sounds like it would be awhile for the waste to accumulate enough for the culture to have something to eat. now with the original culture dead from lack of nutrients and the water building up toxins, you are basically back to square 1. hopefully the biowheel and other things you have added will help get things under control.

may i suggest a changing some water until we can get specific readings?

[morleyz]

Did you dechlorinate the water? I know this might sound obvious, but when I was fishless cycling my 150G I had to move the tank after a few day and when I refilled the tank, I forgot to dechlorinate. I had seeded with filter media and gravel from an established tank and 2 weeks later, there was no drop in the ammonia. I reviewed what I did and couldn't come up with anything other than the chlorine had sterilized my bacteria. I changed the water out, and remembered to dechlorinate this time, reseeded the tank and was done in 2 weeks.

[latazyo]

hmmm...interesting point

I figured that if I let the water sit for a while, it would dechlorinate itself, BUT I didn't think that the chlorine would sterilyze the bacteria (which makes perfect sense now)

sh|t, I guess I should have thought about that and waiteed before adding the gravel, etc...hmmmmm

when I get back there in a week or so, I'll get the water checked and tell you some real numbers...but for now it seems as if we've solved the problem