[Jaye]

I've been testing amonia and nitrites twice a day trying to figure out what's going on. I test in the evening (before daily 20% water change and dosing amonia to feed the cycle), and everything is zero. Amonia yellow, nitrite light blue. Then I dose ammonia (57 ml/150 gal total system volume) and test to make sure I'm over 2ppm. In the morning, I again test nitrites and they're sky high - betwen 2 and 5 ppm.

The tank has been dropping from 2+ ppm of ammonia to 0 in 24 hours for weeks now, but the nitrite thing has me worried about adding fish. Is it just that the bacteria would rather work on ammonia than on nitrite so it eats that first, letting the nitrites accumulate overnight? In that case will this stop being a problem when the ammonia is being steadily dosed as fish poop as opposed to my dumping in a quarter of a cup each evening?

I really think it's cycled, based on the ammonia, but I don't want to buy fish and kill them.

 

[KC1994]

If nitrite is detectable the cycle is not complete.


And why are you adding ammonia to cycle the tank but then doing daily water changes?

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[Jaye]

Water changes are to keep nitrate under control since I'm dosing EI. I'm just not getting the morning/evening nitrite level. I did skip dosing ammonia one night just to see what would happen, and nitrites were 0 in the morning. This is why I suspect this issue would self resolve if I weren't creating a huge ammonia spike every evening.