Do I still need to cycle?

The tank will need to go through a cycling period, just depends on how you want to cycle. Either cycle with a few hardy fish, and continue to add fish slowly, or do a fishless cycle with ammonia... There will be no beneficial bacteria already there, so you'll have to have them grow, and that takes food for them, which is fish waste (aka ammonia). Read the sticky on cycling and you should learn all about it, but unless the biowheel was used on a fully cycled tank for a while and transferred over (thus already being colonized and mostly cycled) the cycle will happen.

Emily

id10t said:

Thanks muchly - I guessed as much, but the manual said nothing about it. Goes to show that you *can* believe things you read on the intarweb

Click to expand...

You're welcome. Actually, most booklets that come with set-ups dont really mention much about cycling. They just tell you how to get the hardware stuff up and running so that all the mechanical stuff is working and it's o.k. to add fish. THey don't really bother to say, don't add all the fish at once, and use hardier fish first, and .... I don't really know of anything that talks about fishless cycling, and even the experienced people I work with dont' know much about it. However, at a good lfs, they will ask questions about tank size and set-up, and make sure you start off slow and don't overstock, so the cycling process can happen. It's really not anything you do perse (unless it's a fishless cycle) It's just something that happens to the tank, and if you don't have hardy fish, or overstock to begin, then you'll lose a bunch of fish while it happens.


Emily