Can you use prodibio start up if you’ve added ammonia?

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HankstankXXL750

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Go ahead and add the bacteria. 2ppm ammonia won't kill bacteria, otherwise we wouldn't use it as the standard test. You don't want it too much higher than that, but 2ppm is entirely fine.

A tank is considered cycled if it can reduce 2ppm ammonia to 0 ammonia in 24 hours or less. Once that happens, you're good to add critters.
Ok, so I started cycling this tank on either the 5th or 6th. Added the Prodibio start up on the 6th after running this thread. Looked like my ammonia was dropping pretty fast so I dosed back to somewhere between 1.2 and 2 ppm at 8-8:30 this morning. At 8 PM I was at .2 so figure I’ll be at 0 by morning. However I just tested for nitrites using Red Sea for all, and as soon as I added the part C powder it turned bright red. Over 1 PPM. After the 9 minutes it was way darker than the 1 ppm on the color card. My salinity is at 1.014 and temp at 79.1 as I read the bacteria multiply faster at the lower salinity. My nitrates are over 75 PPM.

Is my cycle complete? I think I remember Randy Holmes saying nitrite doesn’t test right if nitrate present. Or is there that much nitrite present also and I need to continue dosing ammonia?

thanks.
 

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If your tank can convert 2ppm of ammonia into not-ammonia in 24 hours, your tank is cycled. IIRC nitrites aren't really toxic in saltwater, so they aren't a concern.

You do need to get some water changes done to fix your salinity and remove nitrates, though.
 

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These tanks will carry life on day one, legit, without burning animals. Bottle bac makers have removed all required thought and coaxing from a common cycle. The benefit we get in waiting a bit before adding fish is prep time for reading about disease, there's nothing to actually concern regarding the cycle itself. Bac first before ammonia, ammonia too high or too low, bac added without ammonia, all the imperfections we assemble simply don't matter after this many days dosing any decent mix of marine cycling bac.


0% of your concern is whether the tank can carry fish with a working biofilter

100% of concern is how all new aquarists feel the details found in the fish disease forum does not apply to them :)

By that I mean it doesn't matter what you tell them, fish disease preps don't apply. They start to apply after the first or second complete wipeout, though. Watch today's new posts coming up in the forum... how many are for tanks younger than eight months?

Cycling in 2022 only cares about your fish disease preps we know all common arrangements for a cycle turn out just fine, and no cycles fail. It's hard to kill water bac in water; it's easy to keep water bacteria adapted to living in water, and we house them in water etc
 

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I personally don't understand why bac makers insert weakness into their own products with statements about competition, using live sand alongside, or selecting for carbon- fixing strains over true nitrifier filter bac strains

Everyone's got a feigned built in death fallacy even in their own gear, it's so strange. We get told water bacteria have trouble setting up shop, lol in water. Any seneye owner knows cycles seat fast, regardless of common variation, and they never starve or become undone as long as hydration and not being sealed off from the surrounding environment remains.

The initial strains we start with are simply selected against over time and replaced by more adapted species we see in aquabiomics posts. It didn't matter we started with unideal or competing strains; only that they converted ammonia was what matters. Any seneye owner knows ammonia control is never a problem in display tank cycling and we don't care if generations are slowly being changed out for better- fitting ones.
 
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These tanks will carry life on day one, legit, without burning animals. Bottle bac makers have removed all required thought and coaxing from a common cycle. The benefit we get in waiting a bit before adding fish is prep time for reading about disease, there's nothing to actually concern regarding the cycle itself. Bac first before ammonia, ammonia too high or too low, bac added without ammonia, all the imperfections we assemble simply don't matter after this many days dosing any decent mix of marine cycling bac.


0% of your concern is whether the tank can carry fish with a working biofilter

100% of concern is how all new aquarists feel the details found in the fish disease forum does not apply to them :)

By that I mean it doesn't matter what you tell them, fish disease preps don't apply. They start to apply after the first or second complete wipeout, though. Watch today's new posts coming up in the forum... how many are for tanks younger than eight months?

Cycling in 2022 only cares about your fish disease preps we know all common arrangements for a cycle turn out just fine, and no cycles fail. It's hard to kill water bac in water; it's easy to keep water bacteria adapted to living in water, and we house them in water etc
Yes I have always fish in cycled my tanks. Larger tanks are much easier to cycle without burning fish if you stock slowly. However I have found that you can kill fish if you try to QT fish in a 20-40g tank without enough prepared bio material from an established tank even with the use of bacteria such as seed or stability.
 
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If your tank can convert 2ppm of ammonia into not-ammonia in 24 hours, your tank is cycled. IIRC nitrites aren't really toxic in saltwater, so they aren't a concern.

You do need to get some water changes done to fix your salinity and remove nitrates, though.
I know from Randy Holmes and his article that the nitrites are not harmful to the fish unless extremely high. And I know I will eliminate them and nitrates with a water change. Planning close to 100% change before adding fish. So I guess the only question I have, is if there isn’t enough of the proper bacteria to consume the nitrites, will I end up with a gradual reduction in nitrites that leads to a huge spike in nitrates if I don’t wait for nitrites to come to 0 before I do this water change and stick the tank?
 
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I personally don't understand why bac makers insert weakness into their own products with statements about competition, using live sand alongside, or selecting for carbon- fixing strains over true nitrifier filter bac strains

Everyone's got a feigned built in death fallacy even in their own gear, it's so strange. We get told water bacteria have trouble setting up shop, lol in water. Any seneye owner knows cycles seat fast, regardless of common variation, and they never starve or become undone as long as hydration and not being sealed off from the surrounding environment remains.

The initial strains we start with are simply selected against over time and replaced by more adapted species we see in aquabiomics posts. It didn't matter we started with unideal or competing strains; only that they converted ammonia was what matters. Any seneye owner knows ammonia control is never a problem in display tank cycling and we don't care if generations are slowly being changed out for better- fitting ones.
I agree that once the cycle is established it will remain, at least up to a year. It can be “weakened” or slowed if not enough food is available ie ammonia. Having never ammonia cycled a tank before, and having it fully cycled for ammonia in 8 days, I just don’t want to jump the gun, if waiting for the nitrites to drop gives me any advantage over nitrate control long term I will give it more time to develop the bacteria for nitrite. If not I will do a water change near 100% and start adding fish.
Thanks.
 

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If you do a large water change, you won't really have any nitrites waiting to be converted to nitrates anyway.
 

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I don't agree that anyone has ever measured digitally a weakened cycle

There are zero digital studies involving cycle starving of set in cycles, and we do have monthslong fallow tank studies using seneye where the bacteria never got weaker having less overall sustenance for months on end.


Fear of that starved/ weaker condition is part of the sales training that accompanies all cycling nowadays, we're being taught that replenishment of bacteria is needed

Or taught that one wrong step in cycling results in a stall/ redo needed

Agreed above on qt tank risk; that's a lack of surface area condition a display reef won't ever see.
 
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I don't agree that anyone has ever measured digitally a weakened cycle

There are zero digital studies involving cycle starving of set in cycles, and we do have monthslong fallow tank studies using seneye where the bacteria never got weaker having less overall sustenance for months on end.


Fear of that starved/ weaker condition is part of the sales training that accompanies all cycling nowadays, we're being taught that replenishment of bacteria is needed

Or taught that one wrong step in cycling results in a stall/ redo needed

Agreed above on qt tank risk; that's a lack of surface area condition a display reef won't ever see.
I could be wrong on my information, reading I believe the thread on here about cycling a tank mentioned that an established tank set up for 4 months would possibly not accept the same level of new livestock that the same size tank with the same number of current fish could accept. I would think that just like everything else in nature that if there isn’t enough food that organisms will die off. From some trusted source like humblefish or here I read that the bacteria can “go dormant” and although they are still present may take some activation to return to full capacity. That wouldn’t mean adding bottled bacteria, rather introducing fish slowly or giving a ammonia dose. May not be true, but I did have a 90g that I went fallow and when I restocked I had an ammonia spike. However I really cleaned it and vacuumed the sand really well, and I have since read that this can cause an ammonia spike also. So not sure which caused the spike.
And don’t get me wrong as sometimes I word things in a way that other take wrong. I am definitely not arguing your point just sharing where my information came from.
 
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If you do a large water change, you won't really have any nitrites waiting to be converted to nitrates anyway.
That is my thought. I think that the same amount of nitrites will be produced regardless of wether they are being consumed so in a month, the same amount of nitrates will end up being produced either way. Putting way too much thought into this tank. First time I have “artificially” created the cycle. And trying to be extra attentive as I’m planning angels in the tank, and I think they might be more sensitive to water quality than say a grouper or puffer.
 

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the for-sure going mode of thought is that cycles can be starved / retrograded by withholding food. only the advent of digital ammonia testing will shine light on the real nature of cycle self sustenance, non digital test kits are too imprecise for the masses to get clean data from so this absence of clear measure really allows for lots of debate on how filters work.

MNFish1 has a study along these lines in the research forum which was first time anyone bothered to look into it, well done M.


I’m always going against the grain of cycling rules simply because we find so many threads demonstrating how opposite approaches to the rules also work just fine…cycling was always said to be so crucial that no animal could ever live if the cycle wasn’t complete, hence the stage is set for high stakes cycle completion. The part that strikes me is I can’t find a single digitally-measured example of ammonia noncontrol in any cycling display reef ever posted to the Internet, it’s literally a bunch of api fear posts.

anytime during a set of samples we find no examples available, that become an interesting trend to inspect. I’ve never seen one example of a failed display cycle on the Internet- it’s fascinating. I’ve seen only panicky nh4 posts from non digital kits and pics of tanks looking and running just fine. If cycles were as finicky as the rules said they are, we’d have lots of consequences on file. We see questionable acclimation, delayed fish disease onset loss, but we don’t see ammonia alert badges going off in displays and then all the fish dying, not ever. This is a telling trend on how well water bacteria set up shop in water but until we have 2400 seneye owners posting cycle starvation proof data, we all get to make our predictions on file. That’s the current state of reef tank cycling in my opinion
 
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the for-sure going mode of thought is that cycles can be starved / retrograded by withholding food. only the advent of digital ammonia testing will shine light on the real nature of cycle self sustenance, non digital test kits are too imprecise for the masses to get clean data from so this absence of clear measure really allows for lots of debate on how filters work.

MNFish1 has a study along these lines in the research forum which was first time anyone bothered to look into it, well done M.


I’m always going against the grain of cycling rules simply because we find so many threads demonstrating how opposite approaches to the rules also work just fine…cycling was always said to be so crucial that no animal could ever live if the cycle wasn’t complete, hence the stage is set for high stakes cycle completion. The part that strikes me is I can’t find a single digitally-measured example of ammonia noncontrol in any cycling display reef ever posted to the Internet, it’s literally a bunch of api fear posts.

anytime during a set of samples we find no examples available, that become an interesting trend to inspect. I’ve never seen one example of a failed display cycle on the Internet- it’s fascinating. I’ve seen only panicky nh4 posts from non digital kits and pics of tanks looking and running just fine. If cycles were as finicky as the rules said they are, we’d have lots of consequences on file. We see questionable acclimation, delayed fish disease onset loss, but we don’t see ammonia alert badges going off in displays and then all the fish dying, not ever. This is a telling trend on how well water bacteria set up shop in water but until we have 2400 seneye owners posting cycle starvation proof data, we all get to make our predictions on file. That’s the current state of reef tank cycling in my opinion
I would have to say that you need a little clarification and common sense in the approach that no ammonia badge / ammonia related fish deaths in DT. I think it depends on the size of the display. And the level of stocking.
I may be wrong, but I think that if I put the fish I have QT’d for this tank in from scratch I would be in trouble.
6-7” red volitan lion, 4-5” porcupine puffer, 3” miniatus grouper, 2” juvenile blue Koran, 3” changling emperor, 3” harlequin tusk fish, 3-5” marine beta and a 3” scorpion fish.

Not even sure I should put them all in at once or wether to spread them out some.
 

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Challenge: link us two examples, just two will do. Show a starved cycle or one that failed to keep fish, be able to rule out acclimation error and disease

If you post one I'll be amazed, we'll see how common the claimed consequences are :)



Link two recent times you've seen a cycle fail

Even random searches trying to find anything from the past have to go back far far even to find rough examples of fish loss due to cycle issues.

When fish die due to disease, and that overpowers a filter, that's not a cycle issue that's a disease prep issue. Ammonia rising never precedes a fish loss, a fish kill precedes ammonia rising. In all searchable examples of a fish kill in a display reef, none were caused by initial failure of a cycle.
 
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@brandon429 @Tired got it up and running, changed out around 180g of new water and added my fish. Next question. I’m running homemade No-Pox in my three other displays as I overstock and over feed. To keep my nitrates down. Should I start a preventative dosing schedule to help get the denitrifying bacteria established through carbon dosing, or wait to see how quickly they rise.
Wondering if I start with very low dose and increase very slowly, if it will help me lessen or avoid the ugly stage.
Thanks for any input.
 

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Hank, wow man 180 gallons of water attained is no small feat, that many brutes filled with water would take up my whole apartment lol nice mechanical preps there. Regarding new tank uglies, I don't have any experience with nitrate control for uglies prevention but I do have a thread for uglies I think you'll find fitting here, we can track how the reefer Tuffloud handled new white rock uglies in a 200~ gallon system when he moved one giant, established reef system into another huge reef system with 100% new white rock. He got uglies so bad I would have never been able to fix the system since it was too big to rip clean.

But he perseveres and wins and shows his way of control. *you'll see endless yapping here about cycling as this thread is the first I've seen where we prove that tank water alone, no dosing feed no adding bacteria, can cycle up another system within 20 days

This thread is among the top 5 for important cycling proof threads as nearly anyone sampled would tell us cycling bac only adhere to rocks and aren't ever found in the water for exchange, which isn't the case. He up cycled an entire 200 gallons worth of new rock by merely plumbing the new reef into the old one's water loop for the duration a cycling chart shows it takes, and bam, his new tank indeed cycled off contact alone and time. Very neat rule inspection there... but your benefit was his follow up control of uglies I would have had no idea how to control in a tank this size:

 
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