? about cycling another tank

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wilson038

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MFK Member
Dec 24, 2010
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so i got my 55g tank setup again yesterday, and i have ammonia in our well water so i didnt think i needed to add any to get it cycled, i mix 50/50 RO water and well water for the tank and put a emperor 400 from another tank on it, the filter was on the other tank for like 5-6 months. i tested the ammonia yesterday after getting everything setup and it was around 2ppm and i tested it today and it was about 0ppm, i used the API test kit with the 2 bottle droppers. o and i didnt add anything to the tank yesterday.
so i guess what im asking is, can the ammonia drop that fast and is the tank ready for a few fish or did i mess something up with the test.
thanks
ive been reading on this forum for a few months but this is my first post, thanks for all the help
 
Yes they can drop as you are using an established filter with tons of BB in it.

I would advise that you quickly get some fish or the bacteria would die due to the lack of ammonia (food). Or you would have to do daily wc with well water to feed the BB while you are deciding on the fish.

Else, the BB would die and you would have to start the nitrogen cycle all over again.

Oh almost forgot, :welcome: to MFK
 
Did you check Nitrites?
Better to be safe and make sure Nitrites are 0 as well, Ammonia is converted to Nitrites, then Nitrites are converted to Nitrates, Nitrites are as dangerous for fish as Ammonia is. To confim the tank is cycled you would have 0 Ammonia and 0 Nitrites and 0> Nitrates
 
wilson038;4748801; said:
so i got my 55g tank setup again yesterday, and i have ammonia in our well water so i didnt think i needed to add any to get it cycled, i mix 50/50 RO water and well water for the tank and put a emperor 400 from another tank on it, the filter was on the other tank for like 5-6 months. i tested the ammonia yesterday after getting everything setup and it was around 2ppm and i tested it today and it was about 0ppm, i used the API test kit with the 2 bottle droppers. o and i didnt add anything to the tank yesterday.
so i guess what im asking is, can the ammonia drop that fast and is the tank ready for a few fish or did i mess something up with the test.
thanks
ive been reading on this forum for a few months but this is my first post, thanks for all the help
Click to expand...

This is how I've set up my last two tanks without cycling at all. It's a little
tricky and you should monitor your water, but it shows how you can cheat the system a bit.

About 10 years ago my wife and I set up a 20 gallon with an eclipse 2 overhead filter. That tank stayed setup for about 7 years so it was very mature.
When we bought our 90, we took the biowheel from that tank and placed it in the top of our new wet dry, moved in the new gravel and wood and transferred all the fish. Same bioload as the 20 so there was no ammonia or nitrite spike and bought a new biowheel for the empty 20( which became my qt tank). Each week we would add a few fish to the system and test the water while performing our water changes. Before too long our tank was fully stocked .
Then we bought a 60 gallon for our office. Ironically, the emperor 400 has the same size wheel as that original wheel we put in the 90. So we bought an emperor,took that original wheel out of the wetdry on the 90 and swapped it out for one of the new wheels on the emperor and started adding fish. Once again we started adding a few fish and skipped the cycling process altogether. If you look in my 90 there is still to this a day a fully mature wheel ready to go at a moments notice.

The trick is to go slowly with your stocking, but that's a practice I've always used whenever adding fish to any tank so for me it was just the same ol same ol. Now each of our tanks has 4 filters each, fully seeded so whenever we need a fully established bio filter we have several ready to go, and the tank we are taking it from won't really miss it at all.
 
Scorponok;4749273; said:
I never knew Emperor 400 can has tons of BB in it.
Click to expand...

Maybe it's Metric tons
 
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