Ok so,
I'm back from my few days away with some interesting (to me anyway) on my test kit
When I went away my ammonia was between 3 and 4 with nitrite and nitrate at 0
Ammonia
Untitled by Michael O’Sullivan, on Flickr
To me this looks about .25ppm, This reduction in ammonia could be completely or partially a result of the drip system that was running at about 70% with no water being manually removed only flowing over the sump drain to the outside.
Nitrite
Untitled by Michael O’Sullivan, on Flickr
Absolute zero, this suggests the ammonia is reducing because of the drip overflow. this would at least show proof of concept of the drip system being able to manage some ammonia's. I wonder how much different this would have looked with the manual removal of 70 liters a number of times a day. The same water would have gone through the system but the removal would have been different.
Nitrate
Untitled by Michael O’Sullivan, on Flickr
This makes my last thoughts on the nitrites a little redundant as there is about 5 ppm of nitrate in the water. That means the cycle has well and truly begun.
This aquarium was started completely clean without seeding from another aquarium. I did add Seachem Stability as per instructions for a week at the start of the cycle about 2 weeks ago now.
I'M going to add ammonia at about 4ppm and leave it 24 hours to see how it processes that amount in a set period of time to know how much ammonia is being processed already !.
This appears to be happening quicker than i expected. I'm looking forward to what tomorrow brings !!
Mick