Cycle Woes

[mjszos]

This thread is more a vent to my own lack of research, and hopefully can be useful to someone else just starting a Dr Tim’s cycle.

I spun up a new Reefer 250 this past weekend and decided to give fishless cycling a try as I’d like my first additions to be designer clowns and don’t want to subject them to any added stress.

For my cycle I decided to use Dr Tim’s One and Only fishless routine. I added the bottle on Saturday + the prescribed amount of ammonia minus 20% to account for rock/sand displacement.

Tested my water yesterday and saw ammonia and nitrite. Woohoo! Cycle has started! Went along my day happy as a clam. Added a little Microbacter7 as well for diversity.

Today I did some more testing, ammonia is through the roof according to my API kit. I think it’s at or over 8ppm, my partner says between 4-8ppm. Again added some Microbacter7.

To try and understand how ammonia managed to spike so high I hit the googles and landed back on BRS product page for the fishless cycle - which states to check ammonia before adding anything if using live sand. Something I hadn’t even considered given previous cycle success and it wasn’t mentioned on the recipe card.

fingers crossed I haven’t stalled the cycle. I’ll be keeping a close eye on things and hopefully we’ll be back on track. If I don’t see levels noticeably drop by Wednesday I’ll likely end up doing a 20% water change.

 

[KrisReef]

Monday Night Hypothesis; Since you are using API to test for Ammonia the cycle will remain stalled until you throw the test kit away.

Alternate hypothesis: i don't have an alternative hypothesis.

 

[mjszos]

Monday Night Hypothesis; Since you are using API to test for Ammonia the cycle will remain stalled until you throw the test kit away.

Alternate hypothesis: i don't have an alternative hypothesis.

Hah, this is almost certainly the case. There's not enough salt in my 175gal container to take with the results. I have a new Hanna nitrate tester on the way, I couldn't be bothered to buy the Ammonia or Nitrite ones as I'm a firm believer that after a few months those parameters you can get close enough with either the API or Red Sea kits.

My approach to the API tests... It's a good baseline, but far from the full picture. My big takeaway from this, and what I hope anyone else who reads this will get is to be aware of the live sand + ammonia regiment. It's my own mistake for not being aware, but being my first fishless cycle something was bound to go wrong... Nothing quick happens in reef keeping anyway ;-)