Great Article On Cycling An Aquarium, Fresh and Saltwater

I don't want to get to deep into it for fear of walking the plagerism line, but this is a great article on the topic of cycling a home aquarium. Gobble it up beginners, it is well worth it!

Using Household Ammonia for Humane Cycling of a Tank

 

Good article. I was wondering if the author would consider the daily addition of ammonia that a fish would create, and compensate accordingly (He did). The idea of using the ammonia alert was good, too.

 

Snails ans more snails

HI,
I am cycling a small tank with snails and dirty filters,
I take a dirty old penguin filter out of my cycled tank and rinse it in the tank and instal those filters in the new tank, Put the brand new clean ones in the older cycled tanks, I also transefer a pound or two of the dirty old used sand to the top of the new clean sand.
I feed the new tank a little for the snails and let it go, every so many days I pull out five gallons of water and pour it in the older system and replace the water with water from the cycled tank. I will eventually drop a overflow in the new tank to the sump and let it use the sump and add to the water column.
I put in 20 or so pieces of dead rock and 2 -3 live rocks.
This adds alot of bacteria.
I let the tank run the water becomes very cloudy after the filter swap and rinse its crystal clear by the next day, I repeat the procedure daily swapping back and forth.
I seem to cycle faster, without any major problems. The snails are adding their deposits to feed the cycle. No fish involed I may even toss in a couple hermits. They are great indicators for water quality.
I also do something similar with braquish tanks and freshwater.
Bacteria in a healty fresh water tanks smells like garden soil its a good thing. I ve noticed in saltwater filters can smell like rotten eggs that may the nitrogen burning bacteria. I don't worry to much my DSB is handling all the nitrogen very well. Those expensive algone pads smell a little too after they cycle, Its probably loaded with dried bacteria powder and their food to help burn off nitrates I believe you can do the same thing with filtration for a fraction of the cost. If you have a cycled tanks to steal the bacteria from. Clean isn't always a good thing sometimes a little snail poop and some dirty filters are good for new systems to cycle..

Doug

PS Ther was a very well written article about cycling new systems in that Torpicalfish magazine how this expert says that cycling freshwater is bad to just use your existing dirty filters and pads to speed up the process this prevents ammonia spike and fish deaths mostly freshwater systems saltwater is a little slower to process.