Sustained Ammonia spikes are misreads

[brandon429]

A new one

Mini cycle

Hello, I bought a 120g used with sand and lots of rocks and tons of nems, and inverts a few days ago. I should have not reused the sand I'm realizing that now. Ammonia is 0.93 (hanna) nitrate 7.9 (hamna). I already had to do a massive water change about 60-70% because I couldnt transport all the...

www.reef2reef.com

That tank shares details with every tank in this thread. A test outcome on a cycled tank caused the post, ability to carry animals wasn’t a concern. All pics look normal completely through the process.



Do not run ammonia tests on a cycled reef tank if you’d like to opt out of the fray. You can clearly see everyone’s tank is fine, no matter what they reported at the start.

 

[brandon429]

the criteria for being included here as a cycle study:

1. owns a display reef, not a quarantine setup as the focus. We have plenty of surface area in display reefs- all of them- to handle typical ammonia challenges.

2. the alert / emergency title of the example read is not referencing tank losses, it’s referencing pending tank loss as indicated by running ammonia tests on cycled reef tanks. All the rocks in every tank here were long past done cycling. They’d already demonstrated their ammonia command ability, in every case here.


So when someone posts an ammonia alert help post, and they have a display reef, and they’re willing to give us pictures over time as their cycle is hashed out—> that is what we collect.

The dichotomy between the fear of an impending biofilter crash per test outcome vs what the tank looks like in pics during the event playout is what we study


we collect pictures of healthy reef tanks to counter balance pending crash test readouts from nh4 kits as the objective here



We are looking for times, if ever, the reef tank pics also look like impending doom. Year four and none found? that may mean something. We want to keep on logging work examples in display tanks that report ammonia noncontrol issues to see if it always works out this way, where absolutely nothing changes within the tank the whole time as the test reading changed or seemed to get stuck.

Old cycling science at its very heart is a stern warning on how to prevent tank crashes from incomplete cycling


Isn’t it amazing among cycle status debates (every example link in this thread) nobody has a single example that includes a dying reef tank picture?

Extended duration ammonia alerts in reef display tanks are misreads.

I predict future ammonia alert threads for display tanks keep meeting these same criteria over and over as long as we chart it.