How to unstick any seemingly stuck cycle

brandon429

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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 majority understand when they’re cycled without using test kits at all


*absolutely do not dose your cycling reef tank to 2 ppm ammonia, it’s a total non requirement, it’s a hindrance to success here. In all these coming pages, we will never do that


a bottle bac salesman who gets paid well if you buy 4 bottles of bacteria vs 1 invented that arbitrary practice and it’s the chief reason this hobby cannot align its cycles correctly. We don’t have test kits that can deal with that initial blast correctly. The cause of false stalls is the hand-in-hand sales advice to dose a huge degree of ammonia into a new tank then believe what a cheap colorimetric test kit says about the resolve rates. We do opposite here.


This is a testless reef tank cycling thread. All the test kit readings you see posted aren't used to get people's cycle finished because those non digital test kit readings cause misread confusion; however, it's understandable that people will lead with test kit levels posted because that's how all cycling threads other than one advises readers.


I don't factor people's posted test kit readings to state their cycle end date, the posted readings from API and Red Sea non digital kits are allowed simply so people won't feel discounted. the posted reads are then overlooked, and we discern how many days their tank has had water in it as the main factor. the way they set up their cycle is also co factored along with # of days the tank has been up and running.

Our results logged speak to the method, try and scroll through these working examples and find fish wipeouts or inability to reef on the date stated.

Cycling bacteria adhere to surfaces in a known number of days that is consistent tank to tank, it's why we don't need test kits to fix up all these cycles. A common cycling chart shows you these wait times, and charts don't vary in timeframes across sources. The arguments that occur in typical cycling threads don't center on the ability to carry life within the tank, they center upon varying interpretations of the test kit readings. We managed to earn an argument- free thread going on multiple years by omitting test kit readouts from our ruleset

The hidden truth of updated cycling science: a common cycling chart is correct, and we don’t need to know nitrite and nitrate at ALL- we don’t need that data, exclude it from this thread.

we just reduced 2 out of 3 common test kits from the cycling process, that’s two less misreading factors to mislead us here. The last factor is ammonia. We don’t test for it: we predict it’s ready date instead and it always works out. Anyone with a seneye can feel free to spot check us and post those results at any time.

we do need ammonia control in reef cycling, that’s still a requirement, but we don’t have to test for it because a simple ammonia load will be resolved by day ten in any common cycle arrangement in a display setup.



New cycling science:

****Nitrite has no basis here in reef tank cycling. We don't want to know the levels, nitrite cannot stall your cycle that was a made up statement by bottle bac sellers and the impact to the hobby was that thousands of people registering nitrite well past their cycle end date bought several extra bottles of bacteria. Simply don't post or factor nitrite levels here, that way we can set this thread far apart from all the other cycling threads.

**unfactoring nitrite isn't my idea, it's Randy Holmes-Farley's idea. Search out any post he's made on this site, plus his article on nitrite written in 2005 and you'll see why we eschew testing for it here. It's chemically neutral in reefing but very impactful in freshwater setups. We only work with ammonia compliance date prediction here and we do it without testing... that's what sets this thread apart from the rest.

Impress us with your fish disease control planning instead, research how you'll stock the tank and prepare your fish via quarantine and fallow approaches


Reef tank cycling must include disease preps, that’s what’s been left out for all these decades we were taught to hyperfocus on ammonia, nitrite and nitrate

the fish disease forum is the busiest forum showing dead fish on this site, it’s not the new tanks forum where the cycling work is done. We adapt to that predicted loss now as we apply advanced/updated cycling science to your new reef tank.






Fish food + cycling bacteria + ten days wait is ideal for cycling large tanks: it saves the owner from having to run a large water change at the end.


Skip cycle setups


There is a certain subset of reef tank cycles that totally skip the wait time process so let’s exclude that type from our thread: when cured live rocks are brought home and set in a tank, from another reef tank lets say from a pet store, they bring a full complement of bacteria into the new tank and they don’t have dieoff. They just transfer over and are immediately cycled without a single minute of wait time. This is how marine conventions like MACNA are able to align hundreds of display reefs on the start date of the convention, they’re all skip cycling but the buyers walking around buying bottle bac for all cycles don’t know that trick. We do

****read this thread to see skip cycle reef examples



A common type of cycle you may encounter comes from buying uncured ocean rocks and having them shipped to you, TBS live rock for example. We will handle those cycles on a case by case basis as they arise here because those systems don’t necessarily follow the common cycling chart

Definitions used here:

Cured live rock=has been sitting in a tank of water at the pet store or in someone's running reef tank long enough to have the attachments we can see that aquariums carry: coralline algae, small bits of algae, micro starfish, pods, sometimes there are attached corals.

Uncured ocean rock: looks like it came from the ocean, has attachments and growths that aquariums don't promote and you don't see in routine reef tank pictures. extremely diverse pigmentation ranging all colors + dense stands of attached clams and barnacles, dense groups of various macro algae, all manner of crabs and worms hanging out of the rock, diverse groups of sponges and tunicates + the rock didn't come from a pet store holding tank is how you identify uncured live rock.

Skip cycling: any approach to reef tank cycling that doesn’t factor a calculated wait time until the system is ready to carry life. Reef conventions have used this method for decades, it’s largely hidden from buyers in that no cycling articles published discuss it, and there are ways of using common bottle bac + dry rock systems to be skip cycle setups for use in emergency tank prep and hospital tanks/special cases.

In summary, everything about your reef tank cycle is so predictable we dont need to test for any aspect of it.
Fish disease preps are where all your concern should aim


seneye owners have a believable test kit, I hope several of them will post their cycle readings as benchmark tests of our updated cycling science.
 
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brandon429

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Old cycling science is inconsistent with their rules on cycle testing




look at that thread. The cycler dosed ammonia three times and the lowest reading they can attain is 1 ppm and the umpires agree it’s cycled

not zero, darker green ammonia vs yellow is accepted as cycled there. in other threads, 1ppm api is deemed a stuck cycle, or even .5 but we came across a lucky thread where they decided just this once the green reading means cycled

they didn’t arrive there by factoring the number of days the tank had been running, they simply chose 1 ppm= cycled. I wonder if they’d agree that 2 ppm = cycled or that’s too high of a subjective number?

the reason we don’t use test kits in this thread is because cycle umpires change up the set points that signify a completed cycle on a whim, we need something more solid than that to align forty pages of completed jobs as of October 2023
 
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Krixic

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A major theme here will be changing out the cycling water causing myriad test read outcomes for new water, and beginning to reef.

What's going on with nearly all stuck cycle claims is a full established biofilter, clung to rocks and sand, underneath a bunch of random ammonia addition wastewater.

If you remove the wastewater for new, leaving the adhered bacteria, you now have a functioning biofilter underneath clean water (and I still bet api says you're stalled lol)

At that point, when you begin reefing things will live, because you're cycled.

To observe what happens in an uncycled tank within 48 hours, add totally dry rocks to a five gallon bucket of new water and add a mix of snails and crabs/ clean up crew, and check back in 48 hours

Conversely, in a cycled system the cuc will thrive day to day

In the end, cycling is about the stark changes that occur between able to keep animals alive, and clearly unable to keep animals alive... it's not ever about earning zero ammonia on a test kit as any working seneye owner can tell us that free ammonia is never zero in a reef tank, ever

Expecting a zero measure when zero doesn't exist in nature comprises 99.99% of stuck cycle claims- it's the test as the problem not the actual cycle.
Thats some good info! Never really understood why my ammonia tests never wanted to read zero.
 
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brandon429

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an opposite example of how we fix reefs here below.

do you see how the peers have withheld disease prep info, and subbed in hyperfocus and pure worry over a neutral parameter? See how he has no start date, just days of worry upcoming? Multiple water changes, fear, totally opposite beginning vs every reef in our 30+ page thread? Do opposite of this approach:

 
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brandon429

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Part of updated cycling science is that nitrite simply does not factor in -marine- tank cycles, with no nuances, we don’t need to know nitrite in any reef coming up and I’ll drive this thread to twenty pages by 2022. Only ammonia is required to know

In freshwater cycling nitrite matters.


nitrite can’t stall a cycle (though MACNA videos say it can, aware, I’m debating that directly) and no testers today read nitrite reliably they’re all cross reading somehow or contaminated by a water prep. We can’t test for it correctly as a hobby, we tend to make extra unneeded purchases from testing alerts for nitrite.

in Randy’s chem forum they discuss how the chloride content of s water occupies all receptor sites for nitrite damage in fish, we‘re too salty to matter. I have numerous separate threads showing it cannot stop or stall ammonia control; only ammonia control matters here
Corals and pods and inverts worms and bacteria and fish aren’t harmed by nitrite presence in a cycling tank, if there’s harm it’s from only ammonia.

we have 100% cycle compliance coming up here because we only factor one param, ammonia, and we predict when that’s ready a tester isn’t required. Time frame underwater + boosters used alone will determine every cycle start date coming on this thread

the start date is the date we can add life and it lives, vs what happened in the test bucket with a full clean up crew in new water over dry rocks (totally dead and smelly gray water in 48 hours)


test kits are lying to everyone, we will use the life in the reef tank to show ammonia is under control in all claimed stuck cycles.


any seneye owner is welcomed to post ammonia data. I trust those three hundred dollar digital testers that test free ammonia out to thousandths ppm

no other kit can be trusted here.

we have a special way to use api ammonia to proof a cycle, it’s by using the test differently than the directions.

most people have api, and if we rearrange how the test is used they can proof a cycle quite well
 
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Krixic

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Part of updated cycling science is that nitrite simply does not factor in -marine- tank cycles, with no nuances, we don’t need to know nitrite in any reef coming up and I’ll drive this thread to twenty pages by 2022. Only ammonia is required to know

In freshwater cycling nitrite matters.


nitrite can’t stall a cycle (though MACNA videos say it can, aware, I’m debating that directly) and no testers today read nitrite reliably they’re all cross reading from some other param or interaction between ammonia or nitrate in some way. We can’t test for it correctly.

in Randy’s chem forum they discuss how the chloride content of s water occupies all receptor sites for nitrite damage in fish, we‘re too salty to matter. I have numerous separate threads showing it cannot stop or stall ammonia control; only ammonia control matters here


we have 100% cycle compliance coming up here because we only factor one param, ammonia, and we predict when that’s ready a tester isn’t required. Time frame underwater + boosters used alone will determine every cycle start date coming on this thread

the start date is the date we can add life and it lives, vs what happened in the test bucket with a full clean up crew in new water over dry rocks (totally dead and smelly gray water in 48 hours)


test kits are lying to everyone, we will use the life in the reef tank to show ammonia is under control in all claimed stuck cycles.


any seneye owner is welcomed to post ammonia data. I trust those three hundred dollar digital testers that test free ammonia out to thousandths ppm

no other kit can be trusted here.
Fascinating, ill be sure to follow along any more info you post here. Thanks!
 
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brandon429

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Team

we mentioned above first read that quarantine and disease prep take priority over cycling concerns and hyperfocus. Quick relay of best practices here:

our resident author and oldest-reef-on-the-board owner Paul Baldassano has posted below what he uses for quarantine holding and observation before adding fish to the main display. he watches them for disease he does not medicate them, his qt method is for observation and calm smooth holding so the fish aren’t weakened and stressed while residing here a while. Think of your average quarantine- bright. White. Reflective. pvc pipes. bare bottom, all very unnatural


now look at his holding tank setup below, consider these adjustments if you’re taking the observational route and I’ll bet you get lower incidence of fish disease with these tested methods

Brandon, I use bricks in my local New York tanks but some people even use them to build houses out of. :rolleyes:

(the black "rocks" in there are asphalt) :oops:





 
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brandon429

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***if any readers here are using cured rocks from another reef, non dry rocks, then this is your cycling thread please divert here all reading pertaining to rocks that were already live from a different aquarium and moved to your home (not the ones shipped to you from the ocean, those are different and may leak ammonia, tank transfer rocks never will)

 
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brandon429

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has positive nitrite at week seven, we dont mind. still done, ready, and already reefing a while now
 
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brandon429

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Here’s one, ammonia is not at .5


his cycle was ready (unaffected by a full water change, bacteria locked in place on rocks) about forty days ago.

reasons for his misread: that’s probably TAN reading and the nh3 portion is .05, people remind us of those conversions routinely, my friend Dan P is a strong chemist and keeps that reminder going so I’ll relay it here
 
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brandon429

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# of times we use bottle bac re-added to unstick a cycle, zero.

# of times we will actually encounter a stuck cycle here, pull examples from any forum we want and post them, zero.

stuck cycles are a false claim, it was about to cause more bottle bac sales above and this is always the case.

stuck cycles are caused by false test ammonia readings, or the occasional tomfoolery where someone sets up an all dry system, doesn’t add bottle bac, doses ammonia to 1ppm and it holds for a month and then posts that to mess with me endlessly.


if we’re talking about any form of bacteria inoculation into saltwater, and a week or so, you’re cycled. The way to unstick a stuck cycle is to verify inoculation source + time underwater related to the 8 days ammonia control on a common cycling chart, and then type out that they’re not stuck, they’re just not using seneye. Fixed. No cycles stall in reefing, the sum total of being told that is we buy bottle bac in droves, making cash leave us and outflow
 

Cbones1979

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Going on 2 weeks using bactra start and dead shrimp. Should I take out the shrimp? Add more bac? Start the skimmer? I have dry sand and 1/2 dry rock. Other half was live rock I kept in saltwater for many weeks....hope it remained alive

image.jpg
 
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brandon429

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Cbones thank you very much for our first challenge. Your cycle is complete in the way mentioned, due to three clues you 100% have a functioning biofilter layer where a water change + remove shrimp + add animals works. They’d die in an uncycled tank, but here they will live for an easy 3 clues:

1. time- submersion time rules all in cycling -not- parameter testing. You are at fourteen days. Locate any cycling chart to see what ammonia is doing at day fourteen...and those charts don’t count bottle bac speed boosting. Your ammonia is controlled due to what the time axis on a universal cycling chart shows, that the ammonia test above appears stalled is expected. It cannot report the real levels.

2. we can see nitrite in the pic, and nitrate. If they were hard zero no action + hard yellow ammonia after fourteen days that would be strange, but we see nitrification in action right there. It’s not stuck, only those testers make the cycle seem stuck no biology or seneye testing will read what those read. Nitrification in steps is occurring per your pics. Our thread here uses updated cycling science to prove it can’t stall just above completion, there is no half cycled. There’s able to carry fish, cycled, or will kill new fish in 48 hours, uncycled. Reef tank surface area doesn’t allow for a middle ground at day 14 all cycle charts and seneye meters show.

3. Live rock inclusion. Any bioload you add will be carried by the live rock alone, that the dry systems have been given feed and inoculation time matching chart times is extra, this tank is cycled and if you wait for api to show it, could be sixty more days. Fish or a clean up crew are going to act the same then, or now. This cycle is not stuck, the ability for api to read correctly is stuck. Living animals or seneye readings are the only ways to prove readiness.

wet live rock stays self-fed per this thread (three years no feed in garage, passes ammonia oxidation movement down)



please update pics when you begin. I’m certain no animals will show ammonia poisoning behavior at all, and seneye ammonia would never spike above .05 ppm nh3 bad ammonia at any time in this cycle due to live rock inclusion. Change the water, begin. We want to use repeatable science to name safe start dates and then this thread is held accountable for the call. Your safe start time is now.
 
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Pricey89

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Hi Brandon,
Thanks for this thread - makes perfect seneye (see what I did there...)

I transferred all my LR, ceramic media and livestock from my Reefer 170 to new 625XXL + new dry rock + all new sand + 64 Oz ATM Colony (just to be safe). Lo and behold I was still measuring 0.2-0.4 ammonia after 2 weeks.

Clearly I know it’s b/s because;
1) My filtration and bioload did not change - the transfer was immediate so wouldn’t have seen any bacterial die of
2) I ADDED good bacteria, which would have supported any die off and sped up the seeding of new dry rock
3) All of my livestock is absolutely fine & behaving normally

Just some questions for you;
1) What is my Red Sea ammonia test reading and why?
2) How big a water change is required to remove whatever is creating the NH3 reading?

Thanks
Matt
 
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brandon429

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Agreed 100% with your assessment it is not stuck, in retrograde, or cycle harmed in any way. i do not know what kind of artifacts or cross-reads make these non seneye testers read high levels. We can also add to confusion when many people can get a Red Sea or api ammonia to read zero. The majority can’t.

We are reminded of nh3 conversion charts for red sea where we divide our total ammonia nitrogen readings to get hundredths ppm for most readings, but seneye doesn’t agree that normal reefs run at hundredths ppm, their collective logs shows that reefs convert free ammonia at the rate of thousandths ppm-much faster than titration kits has us believing. even after conversion, no titration kit patterns to match what seneye shows. That is a clue we’ve been believing falsely what ammonia does for potentially thirty years lol in the hobby.

as I study ammonia control over the years here using other people's readings and post patterns, one thing has become apparent: no reef I’ve seen ever hits tenths ppm nh3 and no reef sustains it. Not once. The worlds most oft-reported measure (try google and find us an ammonia measure not in the tenths, it’s everyone’s read) has never occurred on anyone’s seneye (machine that digitally reads to thousandths ppm)

I keep a fun tiny cash bounty going for twenty bucks: $20 PayPal to the first poster who sources out a seneye log online and posts it here showing tenths ppm sustained more than two hours. Even when baited by cash its hard to find a single seneye agreeing that any cycle sticks, stalls or hangs or retrogrades.
Even when reefers input the calc’d amount of ammonia to hit 2 ppm in a seneye setup during cycle, the bottle bac they add is quick enough to begin work- in two hours they will not even be in the tenths itll move down into hundredths ppm and that aligns with ten thousand fish-in cycles where newbies who aren’t even measuring ammonia keep getting away with it-totally happy fish during a period everyone says they’re being ‘burned’

and the test kits indicating a ‘burn’ are never seneye. Patterns :)
 
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brandon429

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* I believe there is a way to make Red Sea and api ammonia work for us, it’s the calibrated zero approach. What you read above on your Red Sea is it’s calibrated zero, the lowest it will report in this particular arrangement at this time.

the safe zone you can see functioning well in your reef happens to be .2 or .4 on that tester. So if you had no fish corals or cuc in there and you wanted to verify, we’d add ammonium chloride into the tank until that ammonia reading goes one increment up as positive free ammonia, a discernible color change up but not 2 ppm, one degree darker than it is now. a re test in 24 hours will move it back down to this level above, the movement down is proof of cycling work and not required to hit zero, the majority will never get a zero so we change the calibration levels for the kits and they work.

a funny secret for this thread is I expect 0% of posts to be stuck, cycles cannot stick or freeze or stall as we have been told. Anyone who posts here is already cycled because they’re all older than 5 days and Dr. Reef’s bottle bac test thread shows nearly all brands of bacteria adhered to surfaces, immune to full water changes, in that time. Every ammonia reading here will be artifacting and we don’t care what the nitrite or nitrate shows, though they can still be handy indicators of action like in Cbones’ tank

these cycling charts we can find on google are fifty years old from textbooks, that science runs waste treatment facilities that produce our clean drinkable tap water, nitrification is well understood in those industries it’s only our hobby who soundly believes an aquatic system of high surface area doesn’t follow universal nitrification timelines. Ammonia is controlled by day ten on all cycling charts for a reason, and our tanks are complying the animals routinely show.

why we dont care about nitrite in this thread: Randy Holmes-Farley's article on nitrite in the reef tank, its neutral impact to us. If we were freshwater, it would matter. It might matter in brackish cycling I havent asked.


why we dont care about nitrate: we can find zero nitrate posts in all types of reefs new and old, to be zero on nitrate could indicate denitrification, plant binding, bad test reading, we'll never know. Nitrate is for algae tuning and color tuning in corals and prevention of certain invaders; its absence in a cycle means nothing. If ammonia is being oxidized nitrate is produced, by rule, and we may or may not detect it with nine dollar testers.


only ammonia control matters in reefing because a tiny fractional amount not under control will kill animals and make them behave in distressed ways and they will never act normal when ammonia is not under full control.
 
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xiholdtruex

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I had a issue in 2017 where I was cycling my tank and kept getting wierd number high ammonia and nitrate. I emailed dr tims and they pretty much told me the same thing. do a large water change the bacteria is on the rocks and sand and add fish your good to go! I am a firm believer that large water changes do not effect aquaria as long as the alk ca and mag match I have never had any issues and have see it with a few members in the local club as well. @brandon429 Good info as always!
 

Cbones1979

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I'm guessing i should pull the shrimp? it's been 2 weeks and my skimmer is pulling nutrients although ammonia and nitrites were higher yesterday. I added more microbactar start as recommended.
 
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