Updated Cycling Science in Action
This is a testless reef tank cycling thread, the only one from any board. If you ever had trouble with reef tank cycling in the past, you won't any longer after working some jobs with us. chances are you are using/about to use a method of reef tank cycling that has already been charted for # of days to completion. All cycling charts in books and print have a timeline, then a parameter arc that solves for a given interval on the timeline.
You can discern the closing date for your reef tank cycle status using parameters, if you have good test kits and rules to view them with, or you can use the time axis to solve for your cycle end date.
we can use # of days running to cycle your system and not test kits, this saves you from crucial distraction due to misreads.
Old cycling rules harmed the hobby by omitting requisite fish disease preps to new cyclers, and instead turns out millions of cyclers who think they're ready when API shows zero nitrite and ammonia, only to have their entire tank wiped out 8 mos later in a huge velvet crash. That's what studies in the disease forum show.
To fix your cycles here we want pics of your tank, and for you to tell us how long it's been running and your basic cycling approach. with that info, I'll tell you a specific calendar date you will be or already were ready to reef, ready to apply the disease plans you chose during prep reading. you then begin reefing on that date, and only post pics the whole time/no test kits.
anyone who cycles a tank here, please stop back in time to time and post your tank updates so we can see the living animals. tell us of the disease preps you chose and applied. New cycling science fixes your cycle quickly, but we spend all the focus aiming you to self-directed study in Jay's disease forum.
Old cycling science is harming reefing because it causes disease to spread at a massive rate and nobody can tie that to how we're trained to cycle.
I can make that tie-in.
old cycling science tells people their tank is safe for fish when chemistry test kits say so, it doesn't take into account disease vectoring and the big losses Jay manages daily in the fish disease forum, of all completely cycled tanks.
Old cycling science can never, ever, in any case, state an exact date a reef will be complete in it's cycle-- open-ended waits are all it knows. Dependency on test kits is all it knows
this is a testless cycling thread we don't want test kit levels stated here. I tell any entrant here the exact date their cycle will be ready, without using kits. YAs of April 2024 we have 42 pages of cycles on file, safe. I want this thread to reach page 680 of jobs, to show a pattern of new science available to cyclers who once thought it was complicated and chemistry-heavy.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The prep reading requirement for this thread if you are a brand new reefer is this one below:
Fish Disease Forum at Reef2reef
https://www.reef2reef.com/forums/fish-disease-treatment-and-diagnosis.771/
spend 5 days truly in self-directed study there before posting here for help if you are a brand new reefer.
Getting your cycle set is easy, ten seconds of discussion easy. But the disease preps are what will kill your fish if you aren't a very very lucky person. Take control of your tank disease course with a plan, before you stock it
read the stickies there. read Jay's never-ending stream of new help posts...what are those keepers doing that they may not know, that gets them into the disease forum typically within 8 mos of starting up a tank that had no disease preps? They have ways to avoid those losses, when should they have started applying disease preps?
As part of their cycle, not nine months later after their first velvet wipeout.
Old cycling science never mentions disease, but directs people to bring it in the tank as long as api ammonia is yellow zero. That is killing millions of our fish we could be saving, if we could change the cycling rules.
We don't need to test for nitrite anymore in display tank reefing, old cycling science and many youtube Guru videos state the requirement of tracking nitrite in the cycle but that's incorrect info, it's yet more distraction away from disease preps because we don't need to test for it, or dose bacteria in response to a nitrite reading in a reef display. simply don't measure it, it's neutral, if this was freshwater cycling that'd be different.
but for reefing, you need to know nitrite can't stall a cycle. That means you've been told/sold incorrect info on nitrite if you've read nitrite presence in your tank can stall your cycle, it does not. People who sell bottle bac should not be allowed to write cycling rules, their false info just makes people determine a nitrite spike is in place and they will reactively buy multiple bottles of bacteria in response, helping the seller.
I once collected in a thread I can link to anyone, about 100 repeating examples of posts where someone said they bought extra bottles of bac because of nitrite.
Old Cycling science has fake rules in place that take your cash.
if you know of Randy Holmes-Farley on the site, then we can look to him for non sales related advice about nitrite in a display reef. Run this search, using our search bar on the upper right hand side of the page: "Randy Holmes-Farley, nitrite"
what you read him saying about nitrite is exactly why updated cycling science doesn't want to know your nitrite levels.
***When old cycling science said your tank is ready for fish when ammonia under loading goes to zero, with zero nitrite, and some degree of nitrate, it was wrong. That edict we've all followed for 30 years is why Jay is so busy daily in the fish disease forum. We must change cycling approaches to mitigate massive disease loss rates evident for years now in the hobby.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
New Cycling Science: your tank is safe for fish when you have a disease plan well-studied and ready to apply to everything that will be stocked in the tank, and when you have passed the known ready wait time for your type of cycle.
That is why I requested a five-day pre read in Jay's fish disease forum. How we stock these tanks after prepping them with a powerful and quick cycle is what determines disease rates along with basics like feed quality and system care.
Notice I did not mention test kit readouts in the updated cycling rule paragraph above, this is a testless cycling thread. all jobs worked here are done by timeline counts not test kits.
Cycle Types and their known completion timelines we use here in every job, anyone with a seneye can audit this arrangement and post the reading here:
bottle bac cycles = ten days or less wait time from day 1.
all bottle bac cycles in this thread are called ready at day ten, how's that working for four years as of 4/24/24 just counting to ten days wait with no fuss over what API said? Bottle bac cycles are ten days or less (reference: see Dr. Reefs gigantic bottle bac thread test series. All major brands were done by day ten. A common cycling chart from a book shows ten days to the ammonia drop: we did not pull ten days out of a hat, that's how long nature takes to work things out unless a very odd cycle approach is in place.) <-------------this method accounts for 98% of the work in this whole thread even when it's up to 100 pages.
Live rock skip cycles
When you move cured rocks from a pet store to your home, or from one tank to another in your house, or from a friend's house 16 blocks away, that's a skip cycle. The wait is 0 days for that type of cycle. You don't use test kits, its a skip cycle. We don't use reef cycle test kits here because they mislead people via the old ruleset
If you are reading a forum post where people are arguing about the readiness of live rocks moved from one tank to another, you're reading a battle of old cycling science. New/updated cycling science already knows it will never uncycle when moved.
Blended cycles are 50% live 50% dry white rock combined, or some ratio thereof.
the timing rule for blended cycles is we assume the skip cycle live rock timeframe (0 days wait) because using 50% live rock will still carry your full intended bioload. It doesn't matter the white rocks aren't cycled, they pick up systemic bacteria from suspension rafts and get cycled by contact alone in 20 days or less.
In the prior example, full skip cycling, it wasn't that moving over all cured rock required the whole stack to run some fish. They could have moved 1/3rd of the normal stack, and still run a full tank of fish (NSA aquascape, anyone?)
a 50/50 blend follows the course of the full live rock skip cycle unless its an impractical ratio of dry to live surfaces. If you move over any practical degree of live rock to a new tank, the new tank is a skip cycle. Placement matters: has to be in the display not the sump (bottlenecking in the sump can stall wastewater delivery in some settings if all the active material is in the sump)
Fully uncured ocean rock
fully uncured rock usually has attached animals that came from the ocean and not a fish tank. they lived on the rock because of the food and supports from the natural environment and will now starve and die in a barren fish tank.
When you see people's reef tanks on the site what do you see on their rocks? coralline and coral. it's not barnacles and blue tunicates and sixteen species of algae with eight clams in a clutch and six brain corals embedded from 30 years ago. rocks tend to cure down to what we see in average Joe's reef tank, your uncured rock will require quite a while to reach safety, depending on rot levels.
If it was mine, I'd remove all those high level growths using a knife not a brush down to just the rock and coralline and keep that part, it leaves less mass to to die and rot into the system. Then I'd put them in a brute in my garage with cheap saltwater in it, do water changes over ten day's time and then on the tenth day I'd skip cycle move them without testing into the desired reef tank.
We can do tested or testless either way on uncured rocks, they're the outlier among cycles.
New cycling science makes the complicated not complicated, and shows you up front what is most likely to harm your valued investment (fish disease, not ammonia)
New cycling science uses the objective # of days running/cycle type/to get the stated ready date for any tank posting to this thread/ all future ones predicted compliant just the same.
**If you remove the subjectivity from cycling, you can align infinite cycles to be ready on the date you want them to be ready on vs a long protracted open-ended wait. That's what we do here.
Order of Ops, what goes in first in your newly cycled reef tank?
The second link posted below in this thread is Jay's biosecurity article as pre-reading material, that's so you'd know what order to stock animals after we call your cycle end date.
If you stock unquarantined animals/corals after paying for $ pre-quarantined fish, that reinfects the fish and wastes all the money spent and brings disease into the tank. That's the whole point of Jay's biosecurity article below. Reactively adding something that wasn't quarantined and fallowed first 4 years from now can be a breakpoint for 48 months of hard work if you did choose a disease plan at the start of your build.
Fish first stocking, vs coral first stocking has BIG implications in your disease forecasting.
Jay's Biosecurity Article
https://www.reef2reef.com/ams/biosecurity.812/
Test type matters
__________________________________________________________________________________
We are a testless cycling thread because today's test kits don't lead testers to timely conclusions in their cycle, todays test kits given confusing readings and any search for a stuck reef tank cycle thread will show that mechanism in action.
Those reef conventions we all read about? MACNA, reefstock, reefapalooza, aquashella, those are gatherings of 400+ display reefs who did not use open-ended wait cycling or they'd have missed the convention by week's time.
Fully stocked and running all by the start date, those vendors utilize the skip cycle science timeframe stated above, OR they go under the first timeframe stated by bottle bac cycling and they simply put fish and bac together in and the bacteria do their work while in suspension, before implantation on surfaces which is the ten day's timeframe we spoke about. All fish-in cycles with bottle bac we read about are using the same approach, there's nothing wrong with that method it's not harming fish.
Dr. Reef's detailed studies on bottle bac show common cycling-specific strains handling ammonia waste immediately when added to the tank, before deposition onto surfaces.
All reef tank cycle's I've ever seen fall into our 4 part group.
Maybe we'll see some new types here for this thread one day to make predictions on
Test type matters
the reason we're testless here is because ten different people read API in ten different ways, using ten different rules sets, to determine cycle ready dates.
We need something objective instead, we use those formulas for wait time categorized above. we count time, we don't use testing.
we are here mainly cleaning up messes left by cheap api and red sea nh4 ammonia kits. But are there any kits we would like to see ammonia readings from?
for sure. a tuned seneye ammonia reading is relished here. post anything you want from a seneye nh3 readout and I'll love it. they're so rare, only a small % of people have seneyes we get to see cycling data with
tell me if your ammonia was safe by day ten with it's digital logs on file from day 1
Dosing a cycling reef tank with Ammonia and bottle bac
bottle bac cycling is currently the #1 top method of cycling in reefing. 98% of our jobs here are predicting cycle end dates using bottle bac already charted for efficacy timeframes by countless professional reefers and chemists. this isn't a magic show...anyone who intently studies Dr. Reef's bottle bac thread will see the 10 day max timeframe, anyone who reads Taricha's work will see it.
*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. bottle bac makers told you to do that already knowing it will overpower most test kits and cause misreads which then make you buy more bacteria. Again, I have links of this phenomena occurring in posts, I have a certain thread with maybe 100 or more examples of reflex bottle bac purchases after dosing 2 ppm ammonia and getting a false stall, it's a terrible thing to have told the hobby. Run it with half a ppm instead if you must.
The best thing you can do to make a bottle bac cycle testless is to add bottle bac to the new tank not used for tank cleaning, but for direct cycling, something Dr. Reef has already reviewed like Fritz will be fine.
then add a few drops of ammonia, a ground up pinch of fish food into powder put into the tank and the bottle bac. wait ten days, do a water change, and you're testless-cycled.
I don't endore using MB7 or sludge cleaning bacteria as cyclers, my timeframes cover common cycling specific bac like Dr Tims, fritz, or biospira and I'll accept ATM and fluval too, the things Dr. Reef has already tested and logged in his giant work thread.
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 use the ammonia drop date from any cycling chart as our ten day deadline. All seneye testing I've ever seen supports it as well, and all outcomes on file here are of vibrant thriving reefs, that means cycled.
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.
What are the parameters that we care about in updated 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 by old cycling science teachers.
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 by adding too much nitrogen (ammonia) at the start we never needed. 2 PPM ammonia cycling is old cycling science, we should stop doing it.
If you want to see several live rock skip cycle setups worked, read this:
www.reef2reef.com
Definitions relevant to our thread
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.
Who Else uses Predictive Ammonia Control cycling?
Dr. Reef does. In his fish facility, you can run businesses with what we're doing here.
see this exchange:
My question yesterday to Dr. Reef:
His response which caused my heart to leap with joy:
Testless reef tank cycling is coming to the masses as we evolve reefing with giant work threads all centering around a given theme (here, 10 days is cycled) and it's coming in full replacement of old cycling science with a retrained focus away from ammonia fears and directly into where the losses are: disease issues.
Efficiency in cycling establishes a clear start point for disease preps.
thank you for reading
Brandon M.
This is a testless reef tank cycling thread, the only one from any board. If you ever had trouble with reef tank cycling in the past, you won't any longer after working some jobs with us. chances are you are using/about to use a method of reef tank cycling that has already been charted for # of days to completion. All cycling charts in books and print have a timeline, then a parameter arc that solves for a given interval on the timeline.
You can discern the closing date for your reef tank cycle status using parameters, if you have good test kits and rules to view them with, or you can use the time axis to solve for your cycle end date.
we can use # of days running to cycle your system and not test kits, this saves you from crucial distraction due to misreads.
Old cycling rules harmed the hobby by omitting requisite fish disease preps to new cyclers, and instead turns out millions of cyclers who think they're ready when API shows zero nitrite and ammonia, only to have their entire tank wiped out 8 mos later in a huge velvet crash. That's what studies in the disease forum show.
To fix your cycles here we want pics of your tank, and for you to tell us how long it's been running and your basic cycling approach. with that info, I'll tell you a specific calendar date you will be or already were ready to reef, ready to apply the disease plans you chose during prep reading. you then begin reefing on that date, and only post pics the whole time/no test kits.
anyone who cycles a tank here, please stop back in time to time and post your tank updates so we can see the living animals. tell us of the disease preps you chose and applied. New cycling science fixes your cycle quickly, but we spend all the focus aiming you to self-directed study in Jay's disease forum.
Old cycling science is harming reefing because it causes disease to spread at a massive rate and nobody can tie that to how we're trained to cycle.
I can make that tie-in.
old cycling science tells people their tank is safe for fish when chemistry test kits say so, it doesn't take into account disease vectoring and the big losses Jay manages daily in the fish disease forum, of all completely cycled tanks.
Old cycling science can never, ever, in any case, state an exact date a reef will be complete in it's cycle-- open-ended waits are all it knows. Dependency on test kits is all it knows
this is a testless cycling thread we don't want test kit levels stated here. I tell any entrant here the exact date their cycle will be ready, without using kits. YAs of April 2024 we have 42 pages of cycles on file, safe. I want this thread to reach page 680 of jobs, to show a pattern of new science available to cyclers who once thought it was complicated and chemistry-heavy.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The prep reading requirement for this thread if you are a brand new reefer is this one below:
Fish Disease Forum at Reef2reef
https://www.reef2reef.com/forums/fish-disease-treatment-and-diagnosis.771/
spend 5 days truly in self-directed study there before posting here for help if you are a brand new reefer.
Getting your cycle set is easy, ten seconds of discussion easy. But the disease preps are what will kill your fish if you aren't a very very lucky person. Take control of your tank disease course with a plan, before you stock it
read the stickies there. read Jay's never-ending stream of new help posts...what are those keepers doing that they may not know, that gets them into the disease forum typically within 8 mos of starting up a tank that had no disease preps? They have ways to avoid those losses, when should they have started applying disease preps?
As part of their cycle, not nine months later after their first velvet wipeout.
Old cycling science never mentions disease, but directs people to bring it in the tank as long as api ammonia is yellow zero. That is killing millions of our fish we could be saving, if we could change the cycling rules.
We don't need to test for nitrite anymore in display tank reefing, old cycling science and many youtube Guru videos state the requirement of tracking nitrite in the cycle but that's incorrect info, it's yet more distraction away from disease preps because we don't need to test for it, or dose bacteria in response to a nitrite reading in a reef display. simply don't measure it, it's neutral, if this was freshwater cycling that'd be different.
but for reefing, you need to know nitrite can't stall a cycle. That means you've been told/sold incorrect info on nitrite if you've read nitrite presence in your tank can stall your cycle, it does not. People who sell bottle bac should not be allowed to write cycling rules, their false info just makes people determine a nitrite spike is in place and they will reactively buy multiple bottles of bacteria in response, helping the seller.
I once collected in a thread I can link to anyone, about 100 repeating examples of posts where someone said they bought extra bottles of bac because of nitrite.
Old Cycling science has fake rules in place that take your cash.
if you know of Randy Holmes-Farley on the site, then we can look to him for non sales related advice about nitrite in a display reef. Run this search, using our search bar on the upper right hand side of the page: "Randy Holmes-Farley, nitrite"
what you read him saying about nitrite is exactly why updated cycling science doesn't want to know your nitrite levels.
***When old cycling science said your tank is ready for fish when ammonia under loading goes to zero, with zero nitrite, and some degree of nitrate, it was wrong. That edict we've all followed for 30 years is why Jay is so busy daily in the fish disease forum. We must change cycling approaches to mitigate massive disease loss rates evident for years now in the hobby.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
New Cycling Science: your tank is safe for fish when you have a disease plan well-studied and ready to apply to everything that will be stocked in the tank, and when you have passed the known ready wait time for your type of cycle.
That is why I requested a five-day pre read in Jay's fish disease forum. How we stock these tanks after prepping them with a powerful and quick cycle is what determines disease rates along with basics like feed quality and system care.
Notice I did not mention test kit readouts in the updated cycling rule paragraph above, this is a testless cycling thread. all jobs worked here are done by timeline counts not test kits.
Cycle Types and their known completion timelines we use here in every job, anyone with a seneye can audit this arrangement and post the reading here:
bottle bac cycles = ten days or less wait time from day 1.
all bottle bac cycles in this thread are called ready at day ten, how's that working for four years as of 4/24/24 just counting to ten days wait with no fuss over what API said? Bottle bac cycles are ten days or less (reference: see Dr. Reefs gigantic bottle bac thread test series. All major brands were done by day ten. A common cycling chart from a book shows ten days to the ammonia drop: we did not pull ten days out of a hat, that's how long nature takes to work things out unless a very odd cycle approach is in place.) <-------------this method accounts for 98% of the work in this whole thread even when it's up to 100 pages.
Live rock skip cycles
When you move cured rocks from a pet store to your home, or from one tank to another in your house, or from a friend's house 16 blocks away, that's a skip cycle. The wait is 0 days for that type of cycle. You don't use test kits, its a skip cycle. We don't use reef cycle test kits here because they mislead people via the old ruleset
If you are reading a forum post where people are arguing about the readiness of live rocks moved from one tank to another, you're reading a battle of old cycling science. New/updated cycling science already knows it will never uncycle when moved.
Blended cycles are 50% live 50% dry white rock combined, or some ratio thereof.
the timing rule for blended cycles is we assume the skip cycle live rock timeframe (0 days wait) because using 50% live rock will still carry your full intended bioload. It doesn't matter the white rocks aren't cycled, they pick up systemic bacteria from suspension rafts and get cycled by contact alone in 20 days or less.
In the prior example, full skip cycling, it wasn't that moving over all cured rock required the whole stack to run some fish. They could have moved 1/3rd of the normal stack, and still run a full tank of fish (NSA aquascape, anyone?)
a 50/50 blend follows the course of the full live rock skip cycle unless its an impractical ratio of dry to live surfaces. If you move over any practical degree of live rock to a new tank, the new tank is a skip cycle. Placement matters: has to be in the display not the sump (bottlenecking in the sump can stall wastewater delivery in some settings if all the active material is in the sump)
Fully uncured ocean rock
fully uncured rock usually has attached animals that came from the ocean and not a fish tank. they lived on the rock because of the food and supports from the natural environment and will now starve and die in a barren fish tank.
When you see people's reef tanks on the site what do you see on their rocks? coralline and coral. it's not barnacles and blue tunicates and sixteen species of algae with eight clams in a clutch and six brain corals embedded from 30 years ago. rocks tend to cure down to what we see in average Joe's reef tank, your uncured rock will require quite a while to reach safety, depending on rot levels.
If it was mine, I'd remove all those high level growths using a knife not a brush down to just the rock and coralline and keep that part, it leaves less mass to to die and rot into the system. Then I'd put them in a brute in my garage with cheap saltwater in it, do water changes over ten day's time and then on the tenth day I'd skip cycle move them without testing into the desired reef tank.
We can do tested or testless either way on uncured rocks, they're the outlier among cycles.
New cycling science makes the complicated not complicated, and shows you up front what is most likely to harm your valued investment (fish disease, not ammonia)
New cycling science uses the objective # of days running/cycle type/to get the stated ready date for any tank posting to this thread/ all future ones predicted compliant just the same.
**If you remove the subjectivity from cycling, you can align infinite cycles to be ready on the date you want them to be ready on vs a long protracted open-ended wait. That's what we do here.
Order of Ops, what goes in first in your newly cycled reef tank?
The second link posted below in this thread is Jay's biosecurity article as pre-reading material, that's so you'd know what order to stock animals after we call your cycle end date.
If you stock unquarantined animals/corals after paying for $ pre-quarantined fish, that reinfects the fish and wastes all the money spent and brings disease into the tank. That's the whole point of Jay's biosecurity article below. Reactively adding something that wasn't quarantined and fallowed first 4 years from now can be a breakpoint for 48 months of hard work if you did choose a disease plan at the start of your build.
Fish first stocking, vs coral first stocking has BIG implications in your disease forecasting.
Jay's Biosecurity Article
https://www.reef2reef.com/ams/biosecurity.812/
Test type matters
__________________________________________________________________________________
We are a testless cycling thread because today's test kits don't lead testers to timely conclusions in their cycle, todays test kits given confusing readings and any search for a stuck reef tank cycle thread will show that mechanism in action.
Those reef conventions we all read about? MACNA, reefstock, reefapalooza, aquashella, those are gatherings of 400+ display reefs who did not use open-ended wait cycling or they'd have missed the convention by week's time.
Fully stocked and running all by the start date, those vendors utilize the skip cycle science timeframe stated above, OR they go under the first timeframe stated by bottle bac cycling and they simply put fish and bac together in and the bacteria do their work while in suspension, before implantation on surfaces which is the ten day's timeframe we spoke about. All fish-in cycles with bottle bac we read about are using the same approach, there's nothing wrong with that method it's not harming fish.
Dr. Reef's detailed studies on bottle bac show common cycling-specific strains handling ammonia waste immediately when added to the tank, before deposition onto surfaces.
All reef tank cycle's I've ever seen fall into our 4 part group.
Maybe we'll see some new types here for this thread one day to make predictions on
Test type matters
the reason we're testless here is because ten different people read API in ten different ways, using ten different rules sets, to determine cycle ready dates.
We need something objective instead, we use those formulas for wait time categorized above. we count time, we don't use testing.
we are here mainly cleaning up messes left by cheap api and red sea nh4 ammonia kits. But are there any kits we would like to see ammonia readings from?
for sure. a tuned seneye ammonia reading is relished here. post anything you want from a seneye nh3 readout and I'll love it. they're so rare, only a small % of people have seneyes we get to see cycling data with
tell me if your ammonia was safe by day ten with it's digital logs on file from day 1
Dosing a cycling reef tank with Ammonia and bottle bac
bottle bac cycling is currently the #1 top method of cycling in reefing. 98% of our jobs here are predicting cycle end dates using bottle bac already charted for efficacy timeframes by countless professional reefers and chemists. this isn't a magic show...anyone who intently studies Dr. Reef's bottle bac thread will see the 10 day max timeframe, anyone who reads Taricha's work will see it.
*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. bottle bac makers told you to do that already knowing it will overpower most test kits and cause misreads which then make you buy more bacteria. Again, I have links of this phenomena occurring in posts, I have a certain thread with maybe 100 or more examples of reflex bottle bac purchases after dosing 2 ppm ammonia and getting a false stall, it's a terrible thing to have told the hobby. Run it with half a ppm instead if you must.
The best thing you can do to make a bottle bac cycle testless is to add bottle bac to the new tank not used for tank cleaning, but for direct cycling, something Dr. Reef has already reviewed like Fritz will be fine.
then add a few drops of ammonia, a ground up pinch of fish food into powder put into the tank and the bottle bac. wait ten days, do a water change, and you're testless-cycled.
I don't endore using MB7 or sludge cleaning bacteria as cyclers, my timeframes cover common cycling specific bac like Dr Tims, fritz, or biospira and I'll accept ATM and fluval too, the things Dr. Reef has already tested and logged in his giant work thread.
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 use the ammonia drop date from any cycling chart as our ten day deadline. All seneye testing I've ever seen supports it as well, and all outcomes on file here are of vibrant thriving reefs, that means cycled.
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.
What are the parameters that we care about in updated 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 by old cycling science teachers.
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 by adding too much nitrogen (ammonia) at the start we never needed. 2 PPM ammonia cycling is old cycling science, we should stop doing it.
If you want to see several live rock skip cycle setups worked, read this:
A thread tracking pure skip cycle instant reefs, no bottle bac
THE GOLDEN EXAMPLE OF A SKIP CYCLE DAY 1 REEF https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/octo-high-end-sps-skip-cycle-build.713256/ read that entire thread before you read ours. that's the heart of skip cycling. Everything we do going forward in this thread reflects on that ability above, in the #1...
www.reef2reef.com
Definitions relevant to our thread
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.
Who Else uses Predictive Ammonia Control cycling?
Dr. Reef does. In his fish facility, you can run businesses with what we're doing here.
see this exchange:
My question yesterday to Dr. Reef:
His response which caused my heart to leap with joy:
Testless reef tank cycling is coming to the masses as we evolve reefing with giant work threads all centering around a given theme (here, 10 days is cycled) and it's coming in full replacement of old cycling science with a retrained focus away from ammonia fears and directly into where the losses are: disease issues.
Efficiency in cycling establishes a clear start point for disease preps.
thank you for reading
Brandon M.
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