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Pure Ammonia Dose


mlopez112308

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Quick question about cycling with pure ammonia. I've been reading, just want to make sure I do this correctly. Starting up a pico with dry dock and plan on dosing pure ammonia. I just dose ammonia to 5 ppm and wait correct? Once ammonia drops, check nitrites and monitor ammonia. Once ammonia gets around 0 ppm, add more until around 5 ppm again. Once bacteria can process ammonia and nitrite down to zero, cycle is "complete"? I understand the cycle is an ever continuing thing. 

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Sounds reasonable. And, yes- if you add ammonia and it gets processed down to only nitrates in 24 hours or less, your cycle is complete enough for livestock. 

 

I would really add something other than dry rock, though, if you can. If you really want to avoid wet rock, it's going to take you far longer to get anything like decent biodiversity going, since you'll be working only off of what's added on frag plugs. At least see if you can get some algae-covered shells and whatnot from an established tank, or a big handful of sand, and/or buy some macroalgae. 

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36 minutes ago, Tired said:

Sounds reasonable. And, yes- if you add ammonia and it gets processed down to only nitrates in 24 hours or less, your cycle is complete enough for livestock. 

 

I would really add something other than dry rock, though, if you can. If you really want to avoid wet rock, it's going to take you far longer to get anything like decent biodiversity going, since you'll be working only off of what's added on frag plugs. At least see if you can get some algae-covered shells and whatnot from an established tank, or a big handful of sand, and/or buy some macroalgae. 

I plan to use live sand as well. Should I still use a handful of sand from an established tank?

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I wouldn't dose your ammonia quite so high, the general recommendation whether it be salt water or fresh water is to dose to somewhere around 2ppm then later top it up as required. 

 

It's not to say you can't but I have always dosed to 2ppm in fresh water and recently when starting my salt water tank something went wrong when I followed the instructions to dose to 2ppm and found myself (accidently) somewhere between 4-8ppm. It was fine I just left it to process but in turn my Nitrites also went off the scale when the ammonia was processed and then of course my nitrates went super high as well. 

 

I stopped dosing ammonia after my first dose and waited two weeks and everything from an ammonia perspective was eventually back on track but nitrites were taking a while to catch up on the processing side of things so I ended up doing a 75% water change to bring parameters back down and in week 3-4 and I'm back on track. 

 

Just food for thought based on my own experience but personally I'd never dose over around 2ppm again, and in researching about what I considered to be slowed Nitrite conversion I came across quite a few people who stated that they found if their ammonia levels got too high initially it inhibited the bacteria from establishing and processing at their optimal rate. 

 

Guess it all depends what methodology you plan to follow and how hands off you want your cycle to be. If you just wanted to dose once then come back in a month and expect a cycled tank I can't see anything wrong with your plan. Personally speaking I test my parameters along the way and although I like things to take the time they need to I prefer to see it done faster than slower so I go with what most people seem to recomend which is dosing to 2ppm and then topping up. In my case I also found it very frustrating constantly finding the parameters so high I couldn't really get a proper reading off of my kits which is why I changed out my water during the cycle to bring things back into what was a more measurable range for me

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