Question on Cycling.

so me adding the substrate and all the other sh*t didnt do anything? i feel weird throwing ammonia in there with fish in there.
 
Wait, is it reading 0 on the tank with fish or the tank without fish?

If it's the tank with fish, you are good to go. If it's the tank without fish, nothing has started the cycle yet.

Don't add ammonia to the tank with fish in it, lol, you're right about that.
 
the fish where i just now put in fish is reading 0. my tank with fish is at 1. i did a 10% water change. figured i wait till tomorrow to test it again.
 
Ok, so you're adding the feeder fish. Well, it will take as long as a normal cycle tanks, anywhere from 4-6 weeks. Sometimes shorter but usually not. Hopefully the gravel will help you. Don't add ammonia, the fish will do it for you.

I would recommend at least a 45% with that amount of ammonia in the water.
 
ok so tomorrow i will do a 45% water change on my 1.0ppm ammonia tank....after that then what needs to be done with that tank?

how much of a water change on the 29 gallon with the feeder fish?
 
Alright lets start from scratch and see if we can generate a synopsis.

You bought one 15 gallon tank two weeks ago and one 29 gallon tank on Saturday. Then on the advice of the salesman you tossed in a bunch of fish and snails in to the 15 gallon tank and 4 feeder goldfish into the 29 gallon.

1. Transferring established media from one tank to another only works if the first tank has completely cycled.

2. All of the stuff sold at stores for speeding up the cycle process is really a short term fix (like 15 minutes only) and is not worth much.

3. Your ammonia in the 15 gallon tank has skyrocketed up to 1.0ppm. Now your fish are in critical danger from ammonia poisoning.

So here is what you need to do. You have two options.

1. Take all of the fish back to the store and go through a fishless cycling process. (you can read the sticky on how to do this).

2. Keep the fish and buckle down and get in the groove of water changes. With an ammonia reading of 1.0 you will need to do a 80% water change with a gravel vacuum as soon as possible. Then monitor the ammonia and nitrite reading very closely in the coming weeks (daily testing) and change at least 50% of the water whenever you see more than .25ppm of ammonia or nitrite. There are only two things that you can do to speed the process up -- add lots of plants or get filter squeezings/gravel from an established tank.

Also keep a very close eye on the fish for disease. Feeder fish are notorious for having all sorts of diseases.

BTW welcome to the hobby. Almost all of use have similar stories of when we first started out. You are very lucky that you started when the internet is around and you can ask questions. Those of use who started earlier just killed a lot of fish (so many toilet flushes... sigh).
 
ok goin by the api test strips my nitrate is 20 and my nitrite is 1. but the **** colors arent perfect nor does it match perfectly
 
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