fishless cycle?

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demon_surfer

MooOOoOOOoO
Jan 28, 2003
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ok ive read the posts and you have all talked about the fishless cycle and this seems like a great idea to me. It really bummed me out when i killed off most of the fish in my first tank by over stocking to fast, and not cycling it properly. But i cant find anything on how to do a fishless cycle!. I was thinking about it and do you just leave the water and ornemants with the filter going or what? but then how would the bacteria get anything to eat??? as you can see im a little confused on the subject but very intrested.

If anyone could see their way to telling me how to do this i would greatly appreciate it:)
 
There are a few ways to do this.

One method involves pure liquid ammonia from your grocery store. The people that use this method slowly add ammonia to the tank till they have a good reading of ammonia. Then they wait for the ammonia and nitrite to be gone.

Nother method of this is to use a bit of raw fish flesh. Place this fish meat (uncooked and unseasoned) into your tank to decompose. The fish flesh will decompose over a week or so and then the ammonia and ntirite should be gone a while after that.
 
I am new as well and am at the tail end of cycling my tank after doing some unfortunate damage to my Dwarf Gouramis trying to cycle with them.

The link that OrionGirl gave is where I found most of my information. If you also do a search on Google for "fishless cycle" you will come up with some information as well. Also, search this forum and you will find a lot of info from people who have first hand experience.

Basically what I did was print off as many articles I could find, sat down and read them and came up with a gameplan. You will find some of the articles differ slightly in their approach but overall the process is the same: seed the tank with pure ammonia to 5ppm, bring the ammonia level back to 5ppm as it drops, test for nitites, when you can burn through 5ppm of ammonia in one night and have no sign of nitrItes, do a large water change, and then stock with fish.

Please keep in mind that I am new to this as well and learing as I go so my method may be flawed. There are many others on this board that can help you better than I can.

Your first step however is research, research, research.

Hope this helps,

Eager
 
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That's a great summary of the process! If no one objects, I'd like to make this thread a sticky.
 
No problem here...

I noticed OrionGirl that I called you OnionGirl in my first draft of the message. I have edited it to show your real name. Sorry:)

Eager
 
It's a sticky because is has a great synopsis of how to fishlessly cycle, as well as relevant links. There is a lot of data here on the same topic, but this one covers it pretty well.
 
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