Re: [APD] Getting shot of Nitrate Xperiment

[Scott <zerelli at yahoo_com>]

I did not get to catch all of the messages about this subject, so please forgive me if this was covered already. Dr. Tim Hovanec did some research on cycle times when he was working for Marineland. I believe a lot of those are published on the web if you search for his name. One thing I remember they told us about (I worked as a product ambassador for Marineland for a little while) was that White Diamond (Marineland's ammonia "absorber") could be used to shorten the cycle time for a tank by as much as 30%. I never did quite wrap my brain around how that was possible but the conversation reminded me of that factoid. I am assuming that there is a happy level of ammonia where the bio-filter grows as fast as possible and that perhaps going too high might have some deleterious effects on the process. I have seen customers (when I worked in pet stores) that really struggled with the cycling process but never really had any problems with it myself in the last
 30 years or so of fish keeping. I think a well defined fishless process would be of major benefit to pet stores and the reputation of the fish keeping hobby. I have seen first hand the number of customers who are willing to go through a cycling with fish in the proper way and that number is not very large. If you could devise a simple way for people to add a certain amount of "starter"(ammonia) per gallon per day or week and tell them that they needed to do that for X amount of time you would make a LOT of happy pet shop owners.


      
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