Re: fishless cycling

[Thomas Barr <tcbiii at earthlink_net>]

> As I was browsing the chemical supply store's shelves, I thought about
> fishless cycling.  It seems to me that much of the wait is for the
> bacteria to develop that digest the ammonia and produce nitrites, and
> then the bacteria that digest nitrites and expel nitrates. People have
> successfully been cycling their tanks by addition of pure ammonia and
> waiting. It occurred to me that the process time could be cut in half if
> a source of nitrites was added simultaneously. Does this not sound
> correct to anybody?
> 
> -- 
> Jerry Baker

Sure, it's called not doing fish-less cycling at all and never measuring any
NH4 or NO2 in qa plant tank.

My apologies but Fishless Cycling has quickly become my pet peeve with
planted tanks. 
The whole process gets short circuited by the plants.
They remove what tiny amounts of NH4 that is present in the water from the
start up phase of a plant tank with a few algae eaters.
So there is no NH4, no NO2 etc present in the water.

The Bacteria will adjust to the levels available to them.

I've never seen a need nor found anything desirable about fishless cycling.
If you want bacteria, go get it fresh.
Folks folks caught up with the idea of fishless cycling try this:

Go get a bucket, get a gravel vacuum, go over to the LFS, your friend's
place etc and vacuum out some mulm from the gravel.
Add the mulm to your filter or to your gravel bed.
There you go, a cycled tank.

Now you have sped up the process by adding the living bacteria that you
wanted in the first place, no testing, dosing, algae, waiting etc.
You can also just loan your filter out to a LFS's tank or friend's or so on.
But the gravel is a big biofilter also.

So you can do the above in one simple step. Which method do you think will
establish a tank faster?

You can also see Jared's site on the "silent cycle".
http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/art_plant_newtank.htm

I do the weekly 50% water changes right off on a new tank.
This works and adding a good fish load is no problem once the plants have
filled in pretty good.

Regards, 
Tom Barr