When I do a fish in cycle or ads a massive bioload to a tank that was previously lightly stocked I use Microbacter quick start fresh water. Beneficial bacteria in a bottle. It's the best stuff iv ever come across personally. The key is to turn your filters, pumps, power heads off when I add it. Spread it around and leave it for ten to 15 minutes to settle down and colonize on the substrate. My Ammonia usually is clear 20 minutes later, no water changes. I keep a bottle of this on hand all the time just in case.
ammonia spike and new fish.
- Thread starter milkman407
- Start date
I keep all bare bottom tanks, I'll look into this though, I appreciate the time you took to respond <3.
I stopped doing water changes, I'm on day 3 of stability ( if it's working, who knows ) but today the ammonia is slightly lower and I'm now showing .25ppm ( maybe less) of nitrite. So the bacteria is doing what it's supposed to. I just wish I would have left everything alone in the first place.
what's weird is another tank I have running with my mandarin and Korean perch (120 gallon, just the two fish who are about 6") just had a huge nitrite spike. I'm starting to think something happened with the city water because right out of the faucet it's reading ammonia levels. Which wasn't the case prior to my issues. ( I always check before a water change, this time I didn't)
It's tough with bare bottom tanks. Most of my tanks I could probably pull the filters off now and just circulate the water with a power head and the bacteria on the hardscape substrate and plants is enough to run my cycle. I mainly use my filters for purigen and polishing. My fish are also much smaller than yours. Best of luck to you
stability is trash, if anything I feel like it's done nothing but raise my ammonia. Will try Dr. Tims after a big water change and see how that does. May have to divide my larger tank and transfer some of the other fish to that, think my perch may knock down a divider though.
Agreed Stability is trash. There's a video of Dr Tim online. When I first started using micro bacter, it didn't work. I watched Dr Tims video of how to apply his product wich is very similar to micro bacter. The trick is to turn the filters off and let the bacteria settle down and colonize on the substrate. That's how Dr tims works. It will also colonize quickly and efficiently on a sponge filter. Iv had no luck adding it to my canister filters. My suggestion from my experience (which is limited) get a couple extra large sponge filters, seed them with Dr Tims or micro bacter. And keep them as an intank media to supplement your canister as well as adding redundancy to your tank. Also gives you the ability to pull out a sponge and set up a hospital tank. You could try adding some large lava rock hard scape. Now, I could be wrong here. It is my personal experience though that with a bare bottom tank a product like Dr Tims won't work, it could potentially make things worse. With out a media to colonize on, such as hardscape, substrate or sponges the bacteria itself will just die off and add to the current issue. When I dose a live bacteria product I turn all filters, power heads, really everything but the light. I add the bacteria evenly around the tank and allow 15 minutes before turning everything back on so it has time to colonize. It needs somthing to live on. It won't be effective just in the water column
Side note, my local fish store has a display tank. It has a massive Arrowana, fresh water sting ray and some other larger fish. The whole set up is ran on DIY sponge filters built around sponge blocks almost as tall as the tank and probably 8 inches by 8 inches square. I remember the first time I saw it somthing clicked in my mind and my media struggle was over. Some medias may colonize slightly better than others bit they will all mostly do the job. Don't under estimate things in this hobby just because they are cheap. You could buy some sponge filters to seed or you could buy a block of foam and build your own with some PVC. You could probably just by some foam pads, lay them in the bottom of the tank, seed them and remove them in a month when your canister catches up. The point that I'm driving at is creating surface areas for your biological filtration bacteria to live on. A bare bottom tank really limits you. The display tank I spoke of at my LSF is bare bottom. However he had massive pieces of foam in there to create surface area for bacteria. There are a lot of ways you can attack this problem. I feel personally that for the mean time, maybe not forever. That you need to add somthing extra, lava rock hardscape, sponge filters, substrate. Foam Matt's on the tank bottom. To increase the amount of biological bacteria and especially for a product like Dr Tims to work. If you put live nitrifying bacteria in a bare bottom tank. You will get no results. I hope I was helpful and wish you success
Hmm, I have a diy sponge filter in there at the moment. why wouldn't it work in a canister filter though if that has a sponge type media as well, or even the ac110 that has a sponge in it. The only reason my tanks are bare bottom is because they're acrylic and I don't feel like getting them scratched.
As I said. My posts are only made from my personal experience with live nitrifying bacteria additives like Dr Tims. He has a video showing how to use his product. If you already have a sponge filter that's great. I'm not saying it can't work in a canister. I'm just saying from personal experience after 10 years of setting up tanks. Adding bacteria additives to a canister has never worked for me.
