My cycle, as charted by Excel

I thought this was interesting. I have been in a cycle since 2/14 and decided today to chart it in Excel, then convert to Word. It wasn't until this past Saturday that I determined I was stuck in a cycle, due to water changes every week... Anyway, here you go .

 

Don't do any water changes at all until after your cycle has finished you will only prolong it, and you know the nitrites and ammonia are back down to 0ppm

 

Actually water changes don't have much of an effect on your cycle. See this:

Reefkeeping 101 - Bogus Information - by Tom Murphy (aka WaterKeeper) - Reefkeeping.com

It's the first thing talked about.

 

if you remove the ammonia, then how will you get enough bacteria grown to convert it efficiently?

the idea of the cycle is to get your bacteria populations in sync with what you have... I don't see how removing ammonia will help accomplish this goal.


OP says his cycle has been going and going and going seemingly from doing W/C's... not saying OP is right or wrong but I'm curious to see if when OP quits doing W/C's, if cycle suddenly finishes up...


Personally, I don't agree with that section of that article and I don't think just because it's on reefkeeping it makes it the gold standard. Admittedly, I'm not the expert here either, so this is just me talking...

I am not on the side that says you shouldn't do W/C during cycle because doing W/C removes good bacteria (I agree with that in this article), I'm on the side that says a W/C removes the ammonia... which is the opposite of what you want to be doing (why else would you add ammonia to kick off the cycle if you're just going to manually remove it?).

I agree with the article that the issue isn't removing good bacteria. If that's the point, I agree. I just also believe you want to let your tank break down its own ammonia and not manually remove it during the cycle.


There's plenty of circumstantial, anecdotal and nonscientific posts here on 3reef that point to W/C extending cycles.

 

besides all that... kick butt chart. Any my g/f thought i was crazy for keeping a reef log...;D

 

Because all that ammonia kills off some of your other "higher organisms" on the live rock that you want to survive, as well. And I agree that just because it's a Reefkeeping article doesn't mean it's gospel. I'd be interested to see what happens with the cycle if the OP stops water changes, too.

JKT was all your rock LR? How big have your water changes been?

 

I started with 20lbs of live rock and about 3 weeks back I added 25lbs of pourous base rock. I had been doing 10% water changes each weekend with RO water. Just this past Sat. I realized I was stuck in a cycle, the LFS told me the same too...recommended I stop the WC, and he gave me a filter pad from an established reef tank that has the good bacteria on it and said I might be cycled by this Saturday...based on the chart above, I don't know if I will get up and back down again in another couple of days.