Hello, For cycling I actually did a fish in cycle with my betta fish. It took about 1 month for my tank to cycle. The steps that I took was I added some of that bacteria in the bottle the brand that I used was API quickstart. That did not seem to work very well but I did see ammonia get up to about 1ppm then fall down to zero followed by nitrites which then fell down to zero. I would do 20% water changes every other day while it was cycling using Seachem prime to detoxify the ammonia and nitrite for my fish.