Has Seachem Stability done its job?

[dranjithk]

Hello all,

First post in here. Started cycling my new tank 14 days ago and just wanted to know what's going on inside my tank.

The setup is as follows:
45 gallon tank
Aquaforest rocks (Dry)
Crushed coral substrate (Dry)
Nano Taro rolls x 15

After setting up, I filled in the water and added Seachem Stability for a week as recommended. Been monitoring the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels from day 3.

As it stands now, the test kits are returning 0 ammonia, 0.5 to 1 Nitrite and about 50 Nitrate. The problem is, the nitrite level is not going down for a while.

Has the cycle completed?

 

[SlugSnorter]

no, as long as something is giving the bacteria ammonia to eat they'll make nitrite and bacteria will grow to eat that nitrite. If nothing else is wrong (really low or high PH, large salinity swings, etc) the bacteria are just taking a little bit of time to grow, this is normal, and the bacteria will grow over time. even with bottled bacteria the cycling can take a while, 2 weeks isn't abnormal for a cycle give it more time.

 

[brandon429]

if you want to factor nitrite in your cycle, no.


if you want to not factor it and begin, your cycle is done and here's 24 pages of it

How to unstick any seemingly stuck cycle

non digital ammonia test kit readings (api, Red Sea, nyos, seachem badges) make you think you aren’t cycled when indeed you are if you owned a $200 expensive seneye meter, you’d never be doubting your cycle status. since .01% of the reefing population owns these, we need a way to help the...

www.reef2reef.com

the reason your specific start date being now/ready fits that bill above is because 14 days is 4 days longer than a cycling chart takes to show ammonia control, and because you used bottle bac for cycling that Dr Reef has charted out to implant faster than 14 days. you are using the common surface area arrangement we all use, its covered in bac, choosing a disease protocol before adding any fish is the next route of concern.


load it up on corals and cuc though if you want. If that reef was in my house it'd have $500 in frags by tomorrow and they'd do fine being fed, water changed, hand gardened in the usual manner but no fish just yet for me, I'd be sourcing out pre quarantined options. but if you wanted to carry fish, there's 24 pages of that being done based on actionable ten day waits.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

The nitrate value is not that high, assuming the nitrite is real. Nitrite causes false high nitrate values.

have you done anything to boost ammonia and see what happens?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

if you want to factor nitrite in your cycle, no.


if you want to not factor it and begin, your cycle is done and here's 24 pages of it

I haven't seen him dose ammonia?

 

[SlugSnorter]

good test for your if you want to be super sure: take a shrimp from a grocery store and boil it for 30-40 seconds (kill any risk of contamination) and leave it inside of a mesh or media bag in the aquarium for a few days, if your ammonia and nitrite stay good or they spike, and it eventually zeros out again, your tank is cycled

 

[brandon429]

even if feed is withheld those bacteria are still able and still did attach. we have examples of bottle bac, no feed systems being tracked out to bioload carry and if I'm not mistaken one or two is in that thread above. duration in wait allowed for natural feed vectors and the actual prep brings in food. in a home the build can't be sterile enough to restrict action

that too is among the types of bottle bac used in fish-in cycling, so adding fish now is simply delaying out to day 14 the thing that thousands do on day 1 and when we seneye track them, they pass. I would never think any boosted arrangement by day 14 in that much surface area would stall, we specifically want the outcome here for study above for sure if it wasn't fed. excellent thread/post tank pics we always need that first pic to compare to the outcomes

I expect 0/0/0 from all params measured if we are to believe all test kits for nitrite, which we are advised to do in many pro nitrite threads heh.

something kicked in per the testing above.


don't think I'm for nitrite testing either lol its just to provide a nutrient out from the stated arrangement

In all the varied ways people approach cycling, without stating all variables, half a month wait always covers us. not being cavalier its really a standout pattern we rely on for making predictions

 

[dranjithk]

The nitrate value is not that high, assuming the nitrite is real. Nitrite causes false high nitrate values.

have you done anything to boost ammonia and see what happens?

No, I have not dosed ammonia. Neither did I add dead shrimp or fish food. Just the prescribed dose of Stability and waited for nature to take its course. I wasn't in a hurry back then for the cycle to finish soon.

Maybe I should've added one of the above and tracked the test results?

 

[brandon429]

you can either re wait another round after feeding, possible a week or two longer to reverify

or, per the thread/ day 14, put animals in and keep us updated with pics.

try to imagine after all that work, all those tanks logged above, yours not making it

as long as the fish about to be added have equal or more focus on disease prep than the cycle completion, you'll be fine either way. even if you'd like to feed and wait for rise and drop confirmation

if you planned on adding pet store fish to the cycle, after verifying its ready with classic feeding, expect that to turn out very bad by March.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

No, I have not dosed ammonia. Neither did I add dead shrimp or fish food. Just the prescribed dose of Stability and waited for nature to take its course. I wasn't in a hurry back then for the cycle to finish soon.

Maybe I should've added one of the above and tracked the test results?

Yes. That's the only way to know if cycling is complete.

 

[brandon429]

there's no issue if someone wants to test/its a chemistry forum/expected for sure/the non tester is the weirdo in a chemistry forum heh


but we must allow room for testless, time-based cycling, when it comes with large threads using only that metric and getting spot checked the classic way occasionally too.

we rely on this when test kits don't agree, and in post #2 in the link between seneye and API we showed some test kits certainly not agreeing, they have led astray a time or two.

(aware not everyone believes seneye. we do, in the work thread of outcomes)

I specifically would bet that on seneye when the desired bioload is added here the nh3 does not rise uncontrollably but stays in range.

if this turned out to be a seneye cycle that'd be hilarious timing / caught in prediction/no wiggle room

I find zero risk from dead bottle bac. aware they exist/any production line has QA fails, but other variables are at work given two solid weeks. its not to be endlessly debating cycling its merely to say I haven't found an outlier yet that can't participate above.

 

[dranjithk]

but for 24 pages, we didn't use that way. Outcomes matter 100%, in pattern.

there's no issue if someone wants to test/its a chemistry forum/expected for sure/the non tester is the weirdo in a chemistry forum heh


but we must allow room for testless, time-based cycling, when it comes with large threads using only that metric and getting spot checked the classic way occasionally too.

we rely on this when test kits don't agree, and in post #2 in the link between seneye and API we showed some test kits certainly not agreeing, they have led astray a time or two.

(aware not everyone believes seneye. we do, in the work thread of outcomes)

That's insightful, Brandon. I agree with your take on test kits.

I'm using Salifert kits for Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrite, and pH. I have also stuck a Seachem Ammonia monitor in the tank.

While the Salifert Ammonia test result returns zero, the Seachem ammonia badge still points at the presence of ammonia. This just made me think I'm running in circles. Perhaps I shouldn't have bought this badge and should've trusted the good old cycling process.

 

[brandon429]

So you are getting that reading, having dosed no ammonia is that right

have you used Prime or anything similar as water prep

that one input right there makes for very handy test comparison, amazing you haven't dosed 2 ppm eight times over, what a rare comparative measure set to be working with here

**now I'm really curious to know what comes in that bottle of water bacteria ha nice

two of the most common kits we use won't agree on a non loaded test sample/my blood pressure rises lol

 

[dranjithk]

So you are getting that reading, having dosed no ammonia is that right

have you used Prime or anything similar as water prep

that one input right there makes for very handy test comparison, amazing you haven't dosed 2 ppm eight times over, what a rare comparative measure set to be working with here

**now I'm really curious to know what comes in that bottle of water bacteria ha nice

I did use Prime once for water prep. I can see how I and my tank are slowly becoming an exciting case study for your thread

 

[brandon429]

I have no idea chemically what's going on but these are the pattern popups that occur in cycling posts, Prime= readings affected in strange ways, some say positive false reads some say negative. Not sure, but its presence is a sideways tangent usually we find.

45 gallons of water is a lot to toss out and refill with new so we can blank each test again for accuracy, spike with ammonia and wait for the classic drop to assess how this wait time worked out.

that's why I use guesstimation artistry which that is above, its not on paper science, its pattern works so that we dont have to make 45 gallons to be sure and just in case you had a needed start date for the tank we could meet it.

In my opinion its ethical to just add life because you added bottle bac that carries it every time we carefully analyzed prep steps above to generate a start date for them. If you add fish, and those fish die in a smelly gray cloud of haze doom I'll move your thread up to read #1 as a warning to non feeders. I predict it will work great every day we get updates with disease variables being the hard to predict aspect.

 

[SlugSnorter]

No, I have not dosed ammonia. Neither did I add dead shrimp or fish food. Just the prescribed dose of Stability and waited for nature to take its course. I wasn't in a hurry back then for the cycle to finish soon.

Maybe I should've added one of the above and tracked the test results?

I dont think stability has any ammonia for the bacteria.

 

[Dan_P]

Hello all,

First post in here. Started cycling my new tank 14 days ago and just wanted to know what's going on inside my tank.

The setup is as follows:
45 gallon tank
Aquaforest rocks (Dry)
Crushed coral substrate (Dry)
Nano Taro rolls x 15

After setting up, I filled in the water and added Seachem Stability for a week as recommended. Been monitoring the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels from day 3.

As it stands now, the test kits are returning 0 ammonia, 0.5 to 1 Nitrite and about 50 Nitrate. The problem is, the nitrite level is not going down for a while.

Has the cycle completed?

14 days is a long time when starting an aquarium with bottled bacteria. Assuming Seachem is like other bottled nitrification bacteria, your system is probably ready for your first fish within a day or two. Some aquarists like insurance and will dose additional ammonia to make sure the bacteria are still working after the initial dose. Probably unnecessary if you are certain that the first dose of ammonia was consumed by your system.

You already received advice on nitrite not being all that harmful to saltwater creatures.

It takes awhile for nitrite oxidation bacteria to get going. The nitrate value is bogus as long as nitrite is present as Randy has stated.

 

[Sebastiancrab]

I used Stability to cycle and put in a pinch of fish food for two weeks. After that I was good to go!

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Probably unnecessary if you are certain that the first dose of ammonia was consumed by your system.

But there was no first dose.

It may be cycled, or not.

 

[Dan_P]

But there was no first dose.

It may be cycled, or not.

Totally missed the innovation. But where did the 1 ppm NO2- come from?