- Joined
- Nov 12, 2019
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You da man!!!!Agreed, regarding the usual cycling compounds free ammonia has instant measurable effects on observable tank life and is never neutral in observable impacts.
ammonia can be known safe or unsafe levels in a reef tank solely by seeing a full tank shot, I don’t recall ever reading that in cycle advising materials.
that either means the statement is wrong, or cycle authors don’t really understand surface area mechanics.
red sea, api, salifert, all have proven accurate reads and inaccurate reads, each brand. Their owners agree the world is a mix of accuracy and inaccuracy with these mainstay brands ++ but people are also passionate when they own an accurate version of these testers and can wield them accurately** if I discount all titration as false, those testers will not buy into anything I’m saying. I acknowledge several people wield api just fine, and Red Sea too.
in that case, they’ll suffice to show if ammonia can hover, post away proof I say. Cycles can’t stall for ammonia, nitrite doesn’t even factor in a cycle to begin with (another retail selling falsehood is that nitrite stalls ammonia ability) and not one seneye user is ever going to report .25 or .5
I can live with the fact only the misreading/misinterpreted kits are producing the fake stalls and sustaining the over sales. The good working kits gave their aquarist a reliable ammonia control date to begin reefing without consequence.
one of these days, a reefer will report on one of my callout threads that something died, the timing of an organisms loss will coincide with me yapping there is no free ammonia/bet. Animals have died in reef tanks before from non ammonia causes, but by and large we are going to see these themes when inspecting stuck cycle threads:
-no smell or cloudy water, free ammonia emanates from rot, there will be cloud and smell when not dealing with a single dead snail or crab, true lack of active surface area manifests as a completely unstable system, and a full tank shot will show it.
-the fish are normally positioned in the tank pics, down low, off to the side etc. in a tank lacking cycle completion, they develop reddened gills, cannot breathe, and hover at the top for air, then die overnite
-fish have been in the tank longer than overnite= you have no free ammonia, even if a snail did die along the way. Snails can die of infection, age, genetic issues like any other motile organism we keep. But when a snail or set of them thrives, ammonia can be ruled out as having occurred or they’d be dead.
-no source for the ammonia. Notice in the threads there’s not a fish they can’t find, or some recent disturbance to the tank. The claimed ammonia always results from a perceived lack of bacteria... this is the search trending everyone is capitalizing on from retailers to the bottle bac makers. True ammonia growing over time (since ammonia cannot hold at a given level) has to have an input source we can easily discern with no testing from any type of readout.
