I got a seneye a few months back and accidentally over ordered some slides thinking they were expired... Long story short I have a ton of live rock, a fairly useless piece of equipment and a bad case of a desire to put some numbers behind cycling and experiment with some variables to determine how tanks process ammonia. I don't think cycling is a big deal but seeing thread after thread of new reefers being told "you have to wait for nitrites to drop to zero or fish will die" is a driving force behind these tests.
For the first two months I let it sit in my tank, got some par readings and just observed. I did a test at one point dosing into my sump which I removed via a water change and was impressed with it enough to do some digging. @brandon429 (you may have seen him replying to a new reefer that his tank is cycled and posting links) asked me to perform my first experiment which was evaluating if it is possible to cycle a tank using dry rock and no bacteria in under a month. You can read about it on page 5 and 6 on this thread
Overall I found that on day 27 (before my vacation) that after seeing some drops in ammonia that even a dry rock setup that is ghost fed or dosed with lower dosages of ammonia can easily process 20% of ammonia added in 24 hours. Sure we can argue that this is not fully cycled but if dry rock is left to sit in a bucket with an ammonia source and moved to a tank on day 30, I wouldn't imagine a failed cycle would happen with a small or moderate bioload. The bacteria has enough time to establish. Yay
On this next slide I decided to take some more time for trim settings and collected the following data. I calibrated my ph, salinity, temperature probes and made a solution for ammonia dosing. In an insomnia filled night I got the following data.
Using a free ammonia calculator from https://www.hamzasreef.com/Contents/Calculators/FreeAmmonia.php to derive an expected value we can see that a new slide doesn't do great with trace ammonia without a trim factor. Post 2 will detail some experiments I am thinking about.
For the first two months I let it sit in my tank, got some par readings and just observed. I did a test at one point dosing into my sump which I removed via a water change and was impressed with it enough to do some digging. @brandon429 (you may have seen him replying to a new reefer that his tank is cycled and posting links) asked me to perform my first experiment which was evaluating if it is possible to cycle a tank using dry rock and no bacteria in under a month. You can read about it on page 5 and 6 on this thread
Sustained Ammonia spikes are misreads
Neon wow you packed a lot of observation into this experiment. I thank you heartily and can’t wait for updates ! I did not know that nitrite data was available from those sources I truly thought only api had nitrite data, someone mentioned Red Sea did too the other day. The ability to compare...
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Overall I found that on day 27 (before my vacation) that after seeing some drops in ammonia that even a dry rock setup that is ghost fed or dosed with lower dosages of ammonia can easily process 20% of ammonia added in 24 hours. Sure we can argue that this is not fully cycled but if dry rock is left to sit in a bucket with an ammonia source and moved to a tank on day 30, I wouldn't imagine a failed cycle would happen with a small or moderate bioload. The bacteria has enough time to establish. Yay
On this next slide I decided to take some more time for trim settings and collected the following data. I calibrated my ph, salinity, temperature probes and made a solution for ammonia dosing. In an insomnia filled night I got the following data.
Using a free ammonia calculator from https://www.hamzasreef.com/Contents/Calculators/FreeAmmonia.php to derive an expected value we can see that a new slide doesn't do great with trace ammonia without a trim factor. Post 2 will detail some experiments I am thinking about.