Cycling issue

[wilddiscuss]

Quick question.... I have been doing a fishless cycle and here is what happened so you understand my question. I had a 75 gallon tank. To make a long story short, the tank broke and had to be drained. The tank was broken during the fishless cycle. The ammonia had droped and the nitrite and nitrate were both spiking. The trickle filter below still had water in it with air being fed with a sponge filter in the trickle filter. There was a 2 week period that I did not add any ammonia. Just kept air in the water in hopes of some media surviving. Well I think it worked. I got the new tank and put water in it. Hooked it up to the trickle filter and added my ammonia between 3-5 ppm. The next day I checked it and the ammonia was almost at 0. So then I kept adding ammonia every other day at about 1-2 ppm. It has been almost 2 weeks and the nitrite is still spiked along with the nitrate. Am I getting impatient or is this normal and the nitrite should drop soon? I do see media turning brown on the white material I have sitting on top of the drip plate. Just want to make sure everything sounds like it is moving along normally.

Thanks for your time :)

Todd

[Graham]

Sounds normal...it takes time

[geleen]

Sounds ok

When I did one recently I got impatient and did a 50 % water change the levels of nitrite dropped to 0, 2 days later and stayed there.

Could have been coincidence?

I felt the nitrite was soo high that the filter was overwhelmed and could not keep up.

The discus I added on day 3 after the change were fine!
J

[mktorn]

In my experience with fishless cycling, I had a week till ammonia dropped to 0, but nitrites spike was stable for another week. It drops only after I get 2 cycled hydro sponges inside. I also used Stability bacterial conditioner to speed up the cycling. Without all of those the cycling takes 6 weeks in average. So if you need it faster there is a way to speed it up.
Good luck,
Michael

[Graham]

Sounds ok

When I did one recently I got impatient and did a 50 % water change the levels of nitrite dropped to 0, 2 days later and stayed there.

Could have been coincidence?

I felt the nitrite was soo high that the filter was overwhelmed and could not keep up.

The discus I added on day 3 after the change were fine!
J

Hi NO2 and NH3 have to be pretty high to affect nitrification/bacteria. A 50% water change would have dropped the nitrite level by 50%...if there were not enough bacteria colonized to handle the other 50% plus whatever else was being produced then the levels would have been right back up...so coincidence that it dropped to zero. It's not unusual for nitrite levels to drop very quickly once the bacteria get established