I recently bought a JBJ 45 reef tank, that was established, I cleaned it out, used new Live sand, Dry rock and maybe 25 gallons of saved water from the tank before I broke it down. I have been ghost feeding and using Microbacter7 since day 1. It's now day 13 and all the levels are at their ideal state. My nitrites and ammonia are at 0 ppm. Alkalinity 10dkh PH 7.8 and nitrate 2ppm. The highest the ammonia reached since day 1 was .04ppm and nitrite .05ppm. Is it safe to say the tank has cycled? All the livestock is in a quarantine tank, can I slowly start adding a fish a week?
if you use bacteria daily, its eating the ammonia. wait a couple days and test again. better safe than sorry.
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+1. I've had tanks that actually never did "cycle" because they were started with enough live rock and bacteria that I never had the spikes, but for the sake of the livestock, I still waited a few weeks to be sure I didn't subject them to anything that would be poisonous to them (i.e. ammonia).
Test with a few drops of straight ammonia and test 30 min later, test again 24 hrs to see if it dropped back to zero or close to it.
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