Cycled or not?

[Maddi1553]

Hi,

 when will I know when my tank is cycled? 

[brandon429]

it’s long answer Sunday 
 

 

I have never seen any common cycling post that wasn’t cycled, so the chance you’re the first is: 0001%

 

post your details 

 

 

*we don’t see seneye based cycles is why what I wrote is hard to believe. If we search them out, and find the pattern among ~500 or so online, you see they all controlled ammonia on day one. So, has your tank been set up more than one day?

 

the bottle bac we use on seneye show immediate ammonia control. Cycles tested on api, Red Sea, salifert, any non digital kit range all over the place. We see in seneye comparison posts that compare readings to these kits the seneye machine shows able to carry fish on day one, and the other kits take 10-30 days to register the same reading, the result is that non digital cycling kits and those who report nh4 vs nh3 have wrecked the truth in actual cycling.

 

so, I bet you’re cycled because the tank potentially exists with water and bacteria in it, for more than one day. 

 

post your pics and details 

 

there are no Dr Tims, biospira, or Fritz cycles in reefing that weren’t able to process ammonia to safe levels within one hour after they were added….you may see a million non digital test kit posts claiming otherwise, but they are wrong. Folks who think it took 10-30 days for their aquarium to process 2 ppm are simply not seneye owners and wouldn’t believe a seneye post even if shown one. (This truth is why when you see fish-in cycle posts, fish added with bottle bac, the fish are always acting normal and not burned)

 

 

If you set up a dry sand, dry rock tank filled with water and nothing else was added, then you may not be cycled. In 20 years of tracing online cycles, I’ve never seen that once. They’re all bottle bac cycles, live rock skip cycles, or cycles with uncured rocks that aren’t actually building up bacteria but they are waiting for ocean animals on the rock to stop dying, the wait time associated with that stop loss isn’t actually cycling though many call it that. 
 

 

restated, in summary: every cycle post on this site and any other site in reefing is already able to carry fish if they’re dealing in a bottle bac cycle using Dr Tims, biospira or Fritz or if they’re using skip cycle live rock transfers. The reason you got the long answer vs “when your tank can process 2ppm in 24 hours” is because the only time that statement is true is when the cycler can assess nh3 digitally. If they can’t, they’re waiting twenty times too long because non digital kits have a terribly slow lag report time, the initial blast of load ammonia confounds the kit taking days and weeks to show what a seneye will show in one hour flat. 
 

 

waiting weeks past the ammonia control date is not healthier for fish compared to day one on bottle bac, a common misnomer. Fish are healthiest when specific disease prep protocols have been applied and feeding is top level quality, fish health and longevity has nothing to do with cycling. In the disease forum on reef2reef, nearly every poster there for 100 pages of work needing disease help completed the normal 3-4 weeks cycle. Waiting longer past the ammonia control date didn’t get them healthier fish when disease protocols were excluded. You are cycled when ammonia waste from a bioload is controlled. Your tank is safe for fish when the disease protocol you studied and chose has been applied.

[brandon429]

The chances the next coming post says “wut” is approximately 98.9% likelihood merely going off prior patterns 🙂

 

 

That landslide of tldr was written to get readers honestly thinking about what it means to prepare a tank for healthy fish…your focus belongs elsewhere vs the actual cycle concerns, if you dumped in bottle bac you’re good to go for cycle issues. Preventing the fish from dying in eight months, now that’s worth all the focus one can muster.