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Fish-less tank cycling


BCAquarium
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Hello Fish-Folks! 
 

I am preparing a new tank which will be home to my first Discus fish, and I would like to establish and cycle the tank before it is stocked. I have heard about the fish-less cycling technique; seeding bacteria with “Stability” and feeding them with household ammonia. 
 

My question is; how high a concentration of ammonia should I be maintaining in the water for this to be effective? I routinely test using the API master kit, and plan to measure the concentration of ammonia by adding and testing, but how many ppm should I be aiming for? 
 

My gut feeling is something like 2ppm, topping up as necessary to maintain that concentration and running like that for a month or so. What are your thoughts?
 

Thanks In advance Folks!  

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Personally, I try to keep it between 1-2 PPM. Keeping it a higher PPM is virtually pointless to me, because eventually that's all just going to get converted to nitrates which would be required to water change out at that point. Once all of that Ammonia has turned to nitrites, keep the same dosage of whatever you were applying. At that point in the cycle you shouldn't be reading any Ammonia and strictly nitrites, or you'll just keep increasing the bio-load in a never ending cycle, literally 😆Goodluck! 

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I just feed the tank fish food as if the fish were there. I figure the food will decompose and create ammonia at about the same amount as the fish would. It probably adds a day or two from adding ammonia directly, but has worked fine for me.

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I don't think there are set rules for this, my guess is that around 1ppm per day is more than enough ammonia to seed a colony of bacteria in an aquarium which will be housing one discus fish? Ideally, you'd want to consider the bioload of the fish you are planning to add and mimic that environment in the cycling process. Like Jeff said, I just feed my empty tank the same amount of fish food I'd be feeding as if I already had fish in the tank. The amount of food you're feeding correlates to the amount of bacteria living in your tank. You feed the fish, they create the bioload based on how much you feed and the bacteria grow based on the bioload. If you keep the ammonia at a high level and complete the cycle, add your fish and it only produces .5 ppm of ammonia each day, well then the extra bacteria will die off. Simple as that. Just keep testing for nitrates.

Best of luck and good looking out waiting to add fish before your cycle is complete. They will thank you !

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Thank you all so much for your help, that’s really appreciated. Previously I have used the “feed the tank” method, but I didn’t like all the manky bits of fuzzy grot floating round, so decided to explore other options. With my first steps in to Discus keeping I was very keen to keep the water as pristine as possible, so the ammonia route seemed the best plan. 
 

I will begin with 2ppm, drop to 1 after a couple of days and fall to .5

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