Cycling your Freshwater Tank

[JennM]

How do you cycle your new freshwater tank?

[Stang69]

You can do it the same as salt with a shrimp. I also recomend to some ppl to simply feed it like there are fish in it it will start the whole amonia cycle.

HTH
Jeff

[icebear]

Yep thats what i used to do.
For whatever reason, it seems that freshwater takes less time to cycle than salt? am i correct in thinking this or have i just been lucky?

I havn't set up my puffer tank yet, but i'm going to use 90% of the water from a 10% water change on the 30 gallon that they're in now. By doing this i assume it will be as if both tanks are getting a noce 10% waterchange and i shouldn't have any cycle problems with the 10 since all the water is currently cycled....

(correct me if i'm wrong)

[Casey]

I got some gravel from my LFS and a filter sponge from there display tank worked great,but I get what I want I have lots of pull around the stores here

[Deborah]

Hi Icebear,
Most people believe the beneficial bateria are on the surfaces in a tank, not in the water column. Try and get the yucky mulm from the bottom of the tank in the water you add to the new tank.
Deborah

[Desolas]

For whatever reason, it seems that freshwater takes less time to cycle than salt? am i correct in thinking this or have i just been lucky?

The nitrogen cycle isn't dependant on the salinity really, so there should be no real difference, it was most likely the setups involved or how it was cycled.

I myself am fond of using ammonia to cycle a tank, I think it's the only real balanced way of doing it. You know how much ammonia goes into the water, and you can accurately test it's depeletion rate. With adding decaying matter (shrimp, etc) you don't really know how much ammonia you've added to the tank. Could be very little, could be a lot, unless you test daily or hourly you won't know what your peak ammonia was. You'll only have a general idea, which works, it's just not my perfered method.

You will of course get some bacteria in your water column, but not as much as if you were to move some substate over. Like Deborah said, most of the bacteria is on the surface area of the tank, mainly in the substrate and wood/rocks. Move a little substate over with the old tank water, your old tank water should have nitrogen in it which the bacteria in your substrate can get started on.

I'll also run a powerhead in an existing tank with a sponge filter on it for several weeks and then move the powerhead to the new tank, this has worked very well.

-Wes

[OodleyBoodely]

I like the sponge transfer method, best, but if I ever set up another fw I want to use the ammonia method. I think a really good way to get a tank ready to support a large bioload would be drip a set amount of white ammonia on a daily basis (The amount should equal to, or exceed the output of all the future inhabitants). This daily drip would continue everyday until the tank water tests 0 on ammonia and nitrite. At that point the entire population of fish could be safely added at once, the drip would be stopped, and the biological filters would continue to process the ammonia produced by the fish without a hitch. In theory this should work and someday I would like to give it a try. Has anyone else tried it this way? Desolas, how do you use ammonia to cycle with?