Cycle stalled?

hurricanejedi

hurricanejedi

AC Members
Apr 4, 2005
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Raleigh, NC
www.flowerspride.com
Hi. I recently posted panicked that after I did a water change and messed with my filter my ammonia no longer goes back to 0 in 24 hours. Well its been just under 2 weeks since I've done this. The bad thing is my ammonia eating bacteria appears to not be growing anymore. I dose up to 2ppm and the next day its down to .75. This is constant (it used to be I could dose 5ppm and it was to 0 in 24 hours). Its not moving and I don't know why! My nitrite eaters are also stuck. Again I dose the ammonia to 2ppm everyday and my nitrites test around .5 everyday. Is there a cause for cycles to stall? My pH took went from 7.6 to 6.4 in 3 weeks. A few days ago I added baking soda as the coral I added is taking a long time. Now I have a kH of 4 and a pH of 7.0. Any ideas? I'm 4 weeks in so again maybe I'm just being impatient but its been constant for just under a couple weeks now with absolutley no change. At least the ammonia eaters should be growing faster than this....
 
hurricanejedi said:
Hi. I recently posted panicked that after I did a water change and messed with my filter my ammonia no longer goes back to 0 in 24 hours. Well its been just under 2 weeks since I've done this. The bad thing is my ammonia eating bacteria appears to not be growing anymore. I dose up to 2ppm and the next day its down to .75. This is constant (it used to be I could dose 5ppm and it was to 0 in 24 hours). Its not moving and I don't know why! My nitrite eaters are also stuck. Again I dose the ammonia to 2ppm everyday and my nitrites test around .5 everyday. Is there a cause for cycles to stall? My pH took went from 7.6 to 6.4 in 3 weeks. A few days ago I added baking soda as the coral I added is taking a long time. Now I have a kH of 4 and a pH of 7.0. Any ideas? I'm 4 weeks in so again maybe I'm just being impatient but its been constant for just under a couple weeks now with absolutley no change. At least the ammonia eaters should be growing faster than this....
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Try a water change.
 
I agree with the water change. The KH is being used up and causing a PH crash. That also can be detrimental to bacteria.
 
I've done several water changes. I actually did one on Tuesday and had done one the previous Sunday. How often should I do them? Fish food has phosphates? I actually tested my phosphates for the first time tonight and its 0.5. Also my kH out of the tap is 2 so I started using baking soda after the last water change to raise it to 4. Do you think now that the kH is higher the bacteria will start growing again?

I did the one Sunday because the nitrates rates as high as the test would go. Did the high nitrates hurt my bacteria? Then I did the one on Tuesday because my water clouded up from my messing with the substrate and thought I would remove more nitrates would be good.
 
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90% and 30% . Previous Sunday was 50% . I think usually I will do 50% but that last Sunday the nitrates were so high I wanted to get as much out as possible. As it was it only brought it down to 40ppm.

So much for people thinking water changes are bad during a cycle...
 
Looking back to my first fishless cycle, there was a stretch of time where I stalled out. The readings for nitrite looked odd (kind of a non-colour), the nitrate seemed to be stuck just below 10, and ammonia would not go lower than 0.25. It went on for a looooong stretch of time (and the whole fishless cycle took many weeks, in fact a couple of months!) I finally tried testing nitrites and nitrates again with 1 mL tank water to 4 mL tap water and found that my numbers were way off the chart, giving me a false test reading (the tests couldn't handle it).

I did a few water changes and added baking soda to raise my KH back up. It took a 95% water change to bring the nitrite and nitrate numbers back into line (0.5 NO2 and 20 NO3) and then my ammonia finally went to zero.

I believe that there were a couple of issues with my cycling:

1) I started with a tank that had gone part way through a fishy cycle (all the fish died and I decided to continue fishlessly, as I should have from the beginning!)

2) Because I had started cycling, I was seeing nitrites and nitrates immediatey in my fishless cycle, and so I wasn't sure how much ammonia I should really be dosing, and thus was probably adding too much at the point where I was supposed to "add 1/2 the original dosage when I see nitrites"...so my numbers went way out of whack, contributing to the stall in my cycle.

In the end, I gave up and added some BioSpira that my family brought back from a trip to the US...it finished my loooong cycle off. Fortunately, the next time I cycled a tank (seeded with filter media from my first tank) was a much easier and quicker process. :)
 
kay-bee said:
You could boost your water temp to the mid to high 80s; that will increase the bacteria reproduction rate.
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It'll also flush all the oxygen out of your water and stall the nitrogen-oxidizing bacteria. Temps in the mid to high 70s make for perfectly happy bacteria.

There was a pH crash into the low 6s. That kind of thing will stall a cycle. Steps have been taken to correct the problem, but I'd start counting from when you got the pH back up to neutral.
 
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