Nitrate spike

[vincephuket]

Hello everybody. I m cycling my 30g using Dr Tim s one and only + ammonium chloride, currently at day 6. Dr Tim recipe says to add ammonium chloride 3 times (day 1, day 3, day 6), assured your ammonia and nitrite are zero. My ammonia and nitrite are zero but my Nitrate spike is already quite high (25 ppm). Adding more ammonium chloride would cause in more nitrate, should I proceed or can I consider it cycled already (this doesn t mean I will stuff the tank with corals and fish immediately, no worries).

 

[lazycouch]

Hello everybody. I m cycling my 30g using Dr Tim s one and only + ammonium chloride, currently at day 6. Dr Tim recipe says to add ammonium chloride 3 times (day 1, day 3, day 6), assured your ammonia and nitrite are zero. My ammonia and nitrite are zero but my Nitrate spike is already quite high (25 ppm). Adding more ammonium chloride would cause in more nitrate, should I proceed or can I consider it cycled already (this doesn t mean I will stuff the tank with corals and fish immediately, no worries).

the thing about dosing pure ammonia is that it causes high nitrates vs when you use the raw shrimp method due to the fact that both will output different ppms of ammonia. 1ppm of ammonia will translate to 3.9ppm of nitrate, if you were able to dose amount x of ammonia and in 24hrs that ammonia went down to 0ppm + 0ppm nitrites then your tank is cycled!

 

[vincephuket]

Thanks mate, I think it s time to turn the lights on!

 

[blasterman]

While I'm a fan of using ammonia for dry cycling tanks I'm not a fan of dosing ammonia more than once. You should dose it once, wait until it starts to dive, then move on.

Producing that much nitrate so fast seems odd unless you had some live rock or sand. Or your test kit is reading nitrite.

 

[vincephuket]

While I'm a fan of using ammonia for dry cycling tanks I'm not a fan of dosing ammonia more than once. You should dose it once, wait until it starts to dive, then move on.

Producing that much nitrate so fast seems odd unless you had some live rock or sand. Or your test kit is reading nitrite.

I do have live sand (Caribsea aragonite), I checked the nitrate, nitrite and ammonia after adding the sand for two days before dosing ammonium chloride and they were all at zero. It may be that the sand nitrate realese is slow... in any case I will stop dosing ammonium chloride, not having nitrite and ammonia I d consider the tank cycled.