Fishless Cycle/Nitrate too low?

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shockwave191

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Aug 24, 2006
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I'm at the close of a fishless cycle. It has been going for about 6 weeks. The tank is empty except for gravel substrate (No plants or decor). The ammonia at the start of the cycle was 5ppm and nitrite spiked at 1 ppm. Currently at the end of the cycling the ammonia is 0ppm, nitrite is 0ppm, and nitrate is only 5ppm. I used treta water conditioner (No false readings as such with amquel or prime) and using an api liquid test kit (Master kit). I assume that the nitrate will not come up over time? The question is should I continue to feed ammonia so as to bring up the nitrate to about 20ppm or so? If so what level of ammonia do I what to acheive in order to bring up the nitrate? Can I add live plants at this time or is there not enough nitrate yet? Should I add a fish or two at this time or again try to bring up the nitrate before doing anything (bio load will overload for the amount of nitrate and cycling starts all over)? If I need to bring up the nitrate how should I proceed?

Please advise.
Thanks
 
The level of your nitrAtes are irrelevent in a fishless cycle as you typically do a 90-100 Water Change (WC) prior to adding fish.

However, Ammonia spiking is critical! Try to keep your ammonia up to 5ppm and maintain this level until you are ready to add fish. This will feed your bacterial colonies and prevent a crash. You want to maintain this level of concentration until after your nitrItes spike and read 0.0ppm for a few days. At this point your ammonia is probably reaching near 0.0ppm every 12 hours or so after spiking it up.

GREAT Article here on the topic: http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81388
 
You could've added plants from the very started, they help seed and cycle tanks.
 
If you have not added ammonia lately, its time to do so. What you really want to know is whether the bacteria can keep up with some fish. To do that, they need to process ammonia so its time to find out if they can. Take the tank to at least 3 or 4 ppm and watch what happens. If the next day the ammonia is gone and there is no nitrites, you are ready to use fish instead of ammonia. If the ammonia doesn't process quickly, you may want to give it time to build the bacteria while dosing ammonia.
 
Yep, if it eats 3-4 ppm ammonia in 24 hrs, big water change and add fish.
 
not clear on this part - were you testing and adding ammonia daily, or did you just add it the first day and let it process through into nitrate? if you only added it once, the ammonia-eating bacteria were already dead (starved) by the time the nitrite-eating bacteria started working.
 
Everyone, thanks for the replies.

I will try to reply to everyone as best I can.

Plants- I was misinformed in the beginning. I was told that the plants would eat up or use up the Nitrate and therefore could not cycle the tank properly. However, from the replies and reading other threads on this forum I learned that I could have planted and cycled as well. So I understand I can add plants anytime now.

Cycling- Yes, I only feed in enough ammonia to reach a level of around 5ppm. Once I obtained that level I did not keep adding ammonia. From the article I was following I believe that was the approach described.

So what I need to do now is continue adding ammonia at around a level of 3 to 4ppm and see what happens. I will let it run over night at that level and check the results in the morning. I assume from this the nitrate will eventually increase.

Fish- I know better then to fully stock the tank. That is why in my orginial thread I mentioned only stocking one or two fish. If I'm correct the bio load would be too much for my amount of nitrate. My intention for adding one or two fish was to up the nitrate level but, I rather do it fishless.

So again I will bring up ammonia level and watch what happens.

Again thank you so very much.
Chris
 
Sorry to hear that you went the wrong way and only added once. The idea is not to add ammonia daily but to add enough to keep the levels up around 3 or 4 until the rest of the cycle is working. Meanwhile you may have enough bacteria still surviving to come out of this quickly because you have had both types of bacteria present in some concentration and may have enough left to recover quickly. If I had to guess, this will be complete in a week or two because you have the advantage of having some number of the bacteria present even though less than you would want.
 
Thanks OldMan47,
I really appreciate your responses. Basically what you are telling me is I need to do or continue the cycling. This time keeping the ammonia level up to 3 or 4ppm. Again watch the nitrite spike and then check for nitrate after nitrite drops to zero. Last night I spiked the ammonia level up to ~3ppm and will test again in 24 hours. Tonight at 10:30 pm my time will be 24 hours. If the ammonia and nitrite are not at zero then I need to follow your suggestion and basically cycle again.

Again thank you so much for your responses. I keep learning as I'm going.
Chris
 
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