Ammonia: What To Trust

[Adalius]

I currently have my existing ~5 year old tank in a house I'm selling, so I set up a new tank at the new house. We just got an accepted offer so I have ~29 days left to get all the livestock out and remove the tank from the old house to sell it. So I thought I'd get a jump on things. I bought a Cade S/2 1500 thru Algaebarn and they sent me a bunch of stuff for free, including the dry rock, live sand, media, salt, etc.

I did my aquascape, put the live sand in, filled the tank, got it heated, salinity checks out at 35 ppt. It came with some nitrocycle and I added some Dr Tims. I also tossed a bag of the ceramic media in my old tank for a week and when I put in the Dr Tims, I also transferred this media back to the new tank thinking it should be fairly seeded after being in the established tank... So this is where it gets weird. It's been about a week since I added in the Dr Tims and put in the seeded media (and this is on top of the live sand from day 1...).

I have two means of testing ammonia: a Seachem ammonia dot, and Seachem ammonia test kit (which does both free and total ammonia). The dot is showing 'toxic' (0.5ppm or higher). The manual test is showing dark purple for total ammonia (i.e. off the chart), but the free test is showing 0. I tried using the reference sample the kit comes with and it reads as it should so the sensors appear to be fine...

I'm utterly confused as to which I should trust, the dot or the manual test... I tried swapping 25 gallons (~14% of the tank water) with fresh mix and that didn't budge the reading on anything. I would have expected the manual test to at least budge a little with that...

What do you guys think?

 

[Uncle99]

That testing kits are not good in measuring phosphate.
Mine was stuck on .25ppm for 6 months until an ICP gave me 0.1ppm.
The Hanna’s work great on phosphate.

 

[Adalius]

That testing kits are not good in measuring phosphate.
Mine was stuck on .25ppm for 6 months until an ICP gave me 0.1ppm.
The Hanna’s work great on phosphate.

I'm not sure what phosphate has to do with anything? I'm talking about ammonia, free ammonia specifically, and I'm using two of the most commonly recommended methods for detecting it. My issue is the absolute polar variance in results I'm getting.

 

[jda]

Put a good amount of rock from your existing tank into the new one and don't worry about ammonia too much. Even if you have ammonia, it should be gone in a day, or so.

I don't trust many SeaChem products and do not use them, so I am sorry that I am not of any help there.

 

[Adalius]

Put a good amount of rock from your existing tank into the new one and don't worry about ammonia too much. Even if you have ammonia, it should be gone in a day, or so.

I don't trust many SeaChem products and do not use them, so I am sorry that I am not of any help there.

The current tank is in a state of absolute chaos so I'm trying to bring as little rock as I can (its out of control with aiptasia, algae, sludge, etc as I'm not able to keep up on my maintenance since we moved quite a distance away). Which is why I brought over a big bag of media that soaked in there for a week. Just don't want to bring stuff over and *poof* so trying to at least get a reasonable reading first.

 

[Uncle99]

That testing kits are not good in measuring phosphate.
Mine was stuck on .25ppm for 6 months until an ICP gave me 0.1ppm.
The Hanna’s work great on phosphate.

Sorry, typo but same with both ammonia and phosphate, because there’s so little in the waters, the test kits your using can’t measure it accurately.

I only get good reads from the Hanna for those two.

 

[brandon429]

updated cycling science assists you because it involves counting a number of days to ammonia control, vs you having to estimate using non digital kits

this is how the 'count' affects your cycle planning:

-there are no published cycling charts that show taking longer than 12 days to control ammonia, it drops by day twelve, on any chart from a book for a reason

the reason is, that's how long fed and inoculated bacteria take to set up shop for that parameter

and that param is the only one we care about in marine cycling... so that's convenient

additional 10-12 day supporting info:

-no calibrated seneye cycle ever posted breaks the rule when ran in a common reef tank setting using common reef tank bottle bac. they are all ready day one, much less day ten.

-nobody can post any series of reef tank threads, from any forum, showing instances where fish added die of ammonia poisoning after day ten. there is no pattern of loss, in any format searchable, for failed cycles at day 10 or longer.

so that means once this setup you have reaches day 10-12, nothing you can test will matter. mounds of searchable proofs will make your cycle done.


how you handle disease preps, isolation and prevention is by far the most important part. cycle=as good as done already. by day 12 after stewing, done by all searchable instances in reefing.
B

 

[brandon429]

the only way you'd short change the method is by using less than the typical degree of surface area in the display that a common reef tank would use. per the setup description, it's the same ratio we all use.

and given 10-12 days, that much surface area vastly exceeds any reef tank's collective bioload needs, and this is why all searching on the matter of stalled reef tank cycles are actually working-fine tanks + a non digital test kit subjectivity call causing the stress.

counting days is better cycling overall, those can be days reading up on disease controls which is the real frontier in all reefing, stopping disease losses.