problomatic cycling

S

secretmuscles

AC Members
Sep 25, 2005
62
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0
Houston
recently i decided to set up a 20 gallon brackish aquarium for my girlfriend. I plan on putting a couple of figure eights puffers in after it completes cycling. The only problem is the cylcing itself. Iam not new to cycling in any way and have cycled plenty of tanks but have never run into this problem before. I used the non fish method and started out the cycle with pure amonia. After about two days my nitrites rose and quickly peeked. A day after that my nitrates rose and quickly peeked also. Its been almost 3 weeks since then and neither have fallen. I have been feeding them regulalry with amonia daily. Some days adding up to 2 and half table spoons of amonia.... Being somewhat frustriated i decided to do a water change about 5 days ago. I took out about 20 percent of the water. I then let thing settle and took another reading. The reading turned out the same, this time with less amonia. I then added more amonia and waited... Still nothing 2 days later so I decided to add some used filter floss from a HUGE wet dry filter that i have accesses to from working at an LFS in houston. Almost 3 days later still nothing has happened. Can someone PLEASE help me out on this one! My water specs are as listed:

PH- 7.5
KH- 120
GH- 200
Nitrities - peeked
Nitrates- peeked
amonia- fluctuates (but i keep it high and let it fall)
SG- 1.010

PS- does anyone have any suggestions on tank mates other than your average bracksih aquarium fish IE (monos, scats, archers etc), one of my co workers suggested africans. has anyone kept any africans in a brackish tank before?
 
Are your nitrites and nitrates extremely high or off the charts? Do a large water change (80% or more) to bring the nitrite and nitrate numbers way down, and then dose with some ammonia again to see what happens.
 
secretmuscles said:
Some days adding up to 2 and half table spoons of amonia....
Click to expand...
That seems like a lot of ammonia!!!

When I was fishless cycling a 55G, I never dosed that much.

Could it be you are dosing too much Ammonia and you environment just cant keep up to level off?? Also, what % is your ammonia???

Maybe someone with more skill at this could help?

Good Luck

Aries

Yy u r. Yy u b. I c u r yy 4 me.
 
it's possible that adding that massive amount of ammonia is killing off some bacteria. . . or something. also, BW bacteria may be different than FW bacteria, and that is why there was no change after adding the floss.

for a fishless cycle, you add 5ppm ammonia and test every day/every 24 hours. if it goes below 5ppm, then you top it off. you don't add another 5ppm, you just bring it back up to that amount. when you see nitrites, then you drop it down to 3ppm, and continue with daily testing and adding. nitrates should not "peak", or reach a high level and just stay there, unless they've gotten so high that you can't measure past your test kit. if they stopped rising and are somewhere in the middle of your color card, then your cycle has been interrupted, as your nitrite-eating bacteria have died and aren't making any more nitrates. also, do not wait for nitrate to fall on its own, that has to be removed with regular water changes.

i'm guessing that you have one of those 5-in-1 test kits (which btw are much less precise than liquid kits). do you also have a separate kit for ammonia or do you guess at the levels you add? letting it drop all the way down to 0 is probably not too good, the most important factor is giving the bacteria a constant (daily) supply of a regulated level. they won't all die if there's no food, but reproduction probably slows and when there's no ammonia they don't produce nitrites so the nitrite-using bacteria are affected too, etc, etc.
 
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