Cycling issue??

[Brian mcguirt]

I wouldnt add to your display or change water in it if you're interested in doing the symptoms test. just let it ride until tuesday and put one fish in it, chart for a few hours, if he's normal then that tank carries fish like all the patterns we see. and if he is in poison water, his behavior will indicate that in obvious ways, not just swimming directly in a corner or something. he'll flop and die if burned.

the fact your device reads .1 in fresh mixed water, where the lethal range is .05 in most circles of analysis-that is a stat oulier because its coming from no test load water and still stating alarm/concern ammonia.

(hey have you verified all settings and procedures on the device itself are correct? are there any calibration steps to take, or can you select between nh4 and nh3??)

that still leads towards test issues, there are no known reef salts that mix up lethal amounts of nh3, not any. not ever.

there's some ammonia in reef salts going off the totality of Randy's posts and writeups, but not .1 nh3 / nope/ none of them mix to that level is my firm bet.

Just went over the booklet for it again the range is 0 to 2.50ppm NH3 so im litterally at the limit of it. Not sure why the checker even says NH4 on it bc I can't test either or

 

[brandon429]

hey this is all very very helpful feed back to know when posts start building up using that unit. all good to know

I did see upon cursory exam it's subject to .05 swing in accuracy .1 nh3 on new water still seems high even with best case scenario .05 overread. They also have that unit calibrated for 77 degree water, I know of no reefs in my city at 77 degrees today that's for sure. we're all 80~ / summer fun.

surely the temps too high are affecting it too. Im amazed they set the calibration at a level temp that no reef will ever present at

I hope the meter is still reading very high on your setup by tuesday so the test will be valid for the conditions we want to see in action/ dead fish vs completely normal happy fish

 

[Derrick0580]

Stop doing water changes during the cycle. Wait until ammonia and nitrite drop to zero and you see nitrate only! Every time you do a water change you are restarting the cycle

 

[Garf]

Just went over the booklet for it again the range is 0 to 2.50ppm NH3 so im litterally at the limit of it. Not sure why the checker even says NH4 on it bc I can't test either or

I’m assuming the reference to NH3 and not NH4 is a typo, hopefully.

 

[Garf]

For what it’s worth, there are plenty of reports of 0.1 and 0.2 (even a few up to 0.8) total ammonia on new mixes of salt. Some folks confuse this with toxic NH3 levels however.

 

[brandon429]

the rock being prior used is a variable to inspect as well, smell test is our only hope. that w have to be some hardcore reef jerky that I can't see in any pics to be degrading into ammonia over and over for weeks on end. sniff a test rock lifted up/ smack one in half sniff the inside. if you had lined palythoas in there we'd skip this portion

 

[Garf]

@Hanna Instruments ;
Any chance of clarifying;

 

[gbroadbridge]

Here are my readings taken just now.
30gal water change was yesterday.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but I consider the Hanna Ammonia checker to be a worthless piece of junk.

I have mixed up a known amount of ammonium nitrate, added to salt water, run the test, and the results were nonsense.

Maybe I had a faulty instrument or bad reagent but nothing made sense.

edit. Sorry meant to say ammonium chloride not ammonium nitrate. I can see FBI mobilising over that typo. Lol.

 

[taricha]

Ok, Hanna seems to be working. What’s the maximum reading on those things? You may have had some driveway die off.

Never mind, lol. It’s maxed out @ 2.5
I would not put a fish in it, as is;

All three of those checkers are maxing out.
maxed ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate.

 

[131696]

Water changes stop stop ,Read about cycle leave it alone ,read about saltwater fish and corals , stop slow down them tanks you see are years of work not overnight. Leave tank alone and grab a book about saltwater hobby, seems you going way to fast.

 

[Brian mcguirt]

Water changes stop stop ,Read about cycle leave it alone ,read about saltwater fish and corals , stop slow down them tanks you see are years of work not overnight. Leave tank alone and grab a book about saltwater hobby, seems you going way to fast.

Sorry not my first tank, I've had several, never had issues during cycle. And water changes do nothing to the bacteria as they attach to surfaces not float in the water column. My tank has been running almost 2 weeks and parameters have remained maxed with no further addition of ammonia other than on day 1. Our guess, is leaning to the rock leaching the ammonia. I removed the the and replaced with brand new life rock and added more bacteria to see if that changes anything. I am going to cure the rock and see what happens. I placed my "dry live rock" into a bin with fresh saltwater, tested water prior all levels were almost zero, 1hr later everything was all over the place and ammonia was back to almost 2.50. So almost certain it was the rocks leaching.

 

[brandon429]

i bet those rocks smelled normal inside and out, did you do a smell test

it has to be filthy obvious rotten egg smell to be at 2.0 ppm nh3 / not possible after two weeks


I’m not thinking your rocks are leaching at all, and never were, that’s something forums make up to justify misreading tests. We see this for twenty straight years online as the explanation for common .25 api

what I’m leaning towards: nothing is wrong and when you add a fish he lives as if the tank was cycled nearly two weeks ago.

 

[gbroadbridge]

Sorry not my first tank, I've had several, never had issues during cycle. And water changes do nothing to the bacteria as they attach to surfaces not float in the water column. My tank has been running almost 2 weeks and parameters have remained maxed with no further addition of ammonia other than on day 1. Our guess, is leaning to the rock leaching the ammonia. I removed the the and replaced with brand new life rock and added more bacteria to see if that changes anything. I am going to cure the rock and see what happens. I placed my "dry live rock" into a bin with fresh saltwater, tested water prior all levels were almost zero, 1hr later everything was all over the place and ammonia was back to almost 2.50. So almost certain it was the rocks leaching.

Rocks dont leach ammonia

There can be biological die off resulting in an ammonia spike due to decaying material, but that's it.

Use chlorine to bleach the rock and let it air dry for a week or two. Problem solved.

Or as Brandon said, probably everything is cycled and your tests are wrong.

Chuck a fish in the tank and my bet is everything will be fine.

 

[taricha]

Test results are consistent with a cycle in progress from a high amount of ammonia. NO2 is being produced, but ammonia is still too high for the meter to track the decrease. Nothing mysterious or "stuck"

 

[brandon429]

Taricha I think one of the final frontiers in cycling will be revealed when we as a hobby can see and measure across multiple tanks how fast that activation happens. If these tests are right he's only mid cycle, the upside of the bell curve of readiness (and that rock should stink, lemme know Brian)



I claim that since this much surface area is present, suspended dead mid-water in the most ideal position, it's not possible to be out of ammonia spec as of today's date. The older set of rules paints the ammonia control phase as a drop that is slow over time, a month is claimed for most (bc that's how long api tends to take to comply, a pronounced lag time vs seneye-tracked cycles) but interestingly even the old cycling charts, all of them, put that drop rather fast. a few days after day ten in fact. the fact we're at 13+ days claiming zero ammonia control was my first suspect clue of not stalled. that's what all my false stall examples that carry fish excellently post at the beginning.


and now with seneye cycles, we can't even see when the activation happens bc all but the deadest bottle bac handles initial ammonia instantly, there isn't any form of creep up. The only way to measure that activation period was the 100% water change in the test vessels that Dr. Reef did putting fritz at 24-48 hrs implantation, and all other strains tested within a few more days.

If there was that much dried jerky on the outside of the rocks to be melting, and overcoming the 4 ppm per day easy that a cycled tank can process / then those rocks will smell like nine rotten eggs per square inch. they're about to smell lakey, musty, but it won't be 8 ppm per hour ammonia leaking smell that's the bet. Brian ima need to sniiff them rocks mkay lemme know if doomsmell

 

[brandon429]

I'm of the opinion that on any reef board right now, nobody can locate a cycling aquarium that wouldn't carry six fish just fine if we put them in. Everyone's testing is this bad is what I'm saying (reading us nh4 levels vs nh3 you guys have discovered to be a large player in the API is bad mode, the test isn't actually all that bad once we see their actual pics)

the tanks are ready bc bottle bac makers have the patents earned and we simply can't see that ammonia control is 0% of a concern in a cycle, to the degree we don't even need to test for it given a few variables + 10 days wait, and that fish disease is 100% the new concern in reef cycling. I feel the sum total of all seneye logs posted reveals this hidden quick compliance fact, combined with the sheer ability to carry fish on day 1 from all these dry rock cycling posts. The failed cycles are always a test kit, rarely if ever a seneye, and the fish are always alive= everyone's ammonia is fine.


establishing a biofilter takes only water, and time, but not thought or coaxing. an entire sales industry is aligned with the opposite mode: one wrong move and you've killed all your water bacteria/buy more

establishing a fish population that lives past 8 mos/ requires Jay-level thought IMO. The greatest error being committed in 2022 cycle analyses is thinking that ammonia isn't controlled, when in fact it's the first crucial param to be controlled and the last param to go out of control in any reef. It's all in the disease prep, and no degree of extra wait time in a cycle lead up can help us with lower disease expression. The vast majority of help posts on the disease board is from tanks that did the month wait, and got the hard zero on api/ still posting patterned disease loss by mo 8

right when setting up a reef tank, cycling dry rocks should be this:

get any bottle bac that's used for cycling it doesnt matter, dump it in along with a couple ground up pinches of flake food. be reading Jay's disease forum for a week straight.

at the end of that week of reading, your tank is cycled, we didn't mention any testing because it can't not be cycled, and any fish you add will live fine. Put all the thought, effort and planning into applying what was read in Jay's forum during leadup time. We didn't mention a large water change, because we didn't mention putting in liquid ammonia, all the focus goes into fish disease vector control.

if we do that as a hobby, we begin to suppress the #1 cause of fish loss in the hobby and we turn away from concern where there is 0% documented fish loss in the hobby.

 

[gbroadbridge]

Taricha I think one of the final frontiers in cycling will be revealed when we as a hobby can see and measure across multiple tanks how fast that activation happens. If these tests are right he's only mid cycle, the upside of the bell curve of readiness (and that rock should stink, lemme know Brian)



I claim that since this much surface area is present, suspended dead mid-water in the most ideal position, it's not possible to be out of ammonia spec as of today's date. The older set of rules paints the ammonia control phase as a drop that is slow over time, a month is claimed for most (bc that's how long api tends to take to comply, a pronounced lag time vs seneye-tracked cycles) but interestingly even the old cycling charts, all of them, put that drop rather fast. a few days after day ten in fact. the fact we're at 13+ days claiming zero ammonia control was my first suspect clue of not stalled. that's what all my false stall examples that carry fish excellently post at the beginning.


and now with seneye cycles, we can't even see when the activation happens bc all but the deadest bottle bac handles initial ammonia instantly, there isn't any form of creep up. The only way to measure that activation period was the 100% water change in the test vessels that Dr. Reef did putting fritz at 24-48 hrs implantation, and all other strains tested within a few more days.

If there was that much dried jerky on the outside of the rocks to be melting, and overcoming the 4 ppm per day easy that a cycled tank can process / then those rocks will smell like nine rotten eggs per square inch. they're about to smell lakey, musty, but it won't be 8 ppm per hour ammonia leaking smell that's the bet. Brian ima need to sniiff them rocks mkay lemme know if doomsmell

Sorry @taricha, I'm with @brandon429 on this.

That tank cannot be stuck mid cycle. Just doesn't happen.

The tests are wrong. Dont know why or how, they just are.

 

[Garf]

Sorry @taricha, I'm with brandon on this.

That tank cannot be stuck mid cycle. Just doesn't happen.

The Hanna’s are maxed out. Stuff is happening but above the range of the test, and slowly, if these digital tests are to be believed. Who mentioned stalling?

 

[gbroadbridge]

The Hanna’s are maxed out. Stuff is happening but above the range of the test, and slowly, if these digital tests are to be believed. Who mentioned stalling?

I'm having a bad day. Seem's every comment I make upsets someone or maybe I'm just having a brain out of gear day..

Almost 1am here, time to reboot before I drop the soldering iron on my leg.

Into hospital for a month tomorrow for some surgery.

Happy reefing

 

[taricha]

Taricha I think one of the final frontiers in cycling will be revealed when we as a hobby can see and measure across multiple tanks how fast that activation happens.

Only problem is some product bottles are ~3x (or 10x) faster initially than others. And the same bottle kept for month or 2 or 3 might be slower by another factor of 3.
get one frozen and... you might be waiting a looong time.
And some companies seem to sell heterotrophic nitrifiers that need carbon but don't explicitly say so (yikes).

I'll grant you a firm timeline for one product at a time. Fresh Biospira 1ppm to 4 ppm ammonia. You are done for sure by day 9. By day 10 or 11 you'll even have NO2 cleared.

Sorry @taricha, I'm with @brandon429 on this.

That tank cannot be stuck mid cycle. Just doesn't happen.

The tests are wrong. Dont know why or how, they just are.

Fair enough.
lets get OP to post a pic of the reacted hanna cuvette after the ammonia test.

@Brian mcguirt do us a favor, read through the hanna ammonia directions one more time, and post a pic of the reacted cuvette after the 15 minutes.
If it's cloudy, it's test kit (or user ) error.
If it's blue/green and clear then there isn't a reasonable case I could make for interference or other misleading result except significant total ammonia.

I'm having a bad day. Seem's every comment I make upsets someone or maybe I'm just having a brain out of gear day..

you're good. Brandon and I come down on opposite sides of how much to trust kits all the time.