Alright thanks.
How do I feed it? Will putting in Stress Zyme+ which says it has millions of live bacteria in it, help the tank any? Once the tank has cycled, it will have a reading of 20 for nitrate? What level is it good enough to put the fish in?
Hello; The beneficial bacteria (bb) will use any source of ammonia for nutrition. This can be waste from living things such as fish, snails and I suspect plants. Other suggested ways to get ammonia include adding it from a bottle of ammonia and allowing something to decay in the tank. Some have posted that they throw a piece of shrimp or some fish food in an empty tank and let it rot.
An issue with getting enough bb in a brand new setup is that it takes a while for the bb colonies to reproduce to sufficient numbers. This is likely why you were told that the tank was not cycled in a couple of weeks.
My take from what has been posted so far is that you did what many new to the hobby have done. That is you added too many fish too soon. On top of this new fish keepers often tend to feed too much food which adds to the excess ammonia and also other decay products.
If you once get a tank established then it will be much easier to set up a second as there will be a rich source of bb in the established tank. I have not had to set up a tank from scratch for a very long time.
I believe you already have some fish in the tank. It may be worth considering not adding any more fish until the colonies of bb have shown to be adequate enough to remove the ammonia. In this, the suggested use of a water test kit is sound advice.
Leave the filter media alone unless it gets so clogged that there is very little flow. If that happens you may well be overfeeding.
As suggested, keep up with water changes in order to dilute the ammonia and give the fish some relief.
At some point the tank will be cycled/established. Then you can add a few fish at a time.
Why a few at a time? Every time you add more fish or feed too much the ammonia load increases. It takes the bb a while to increase in population to handle the extra ammonia. In a cycled tank there are enough bb colonies for this to happen more quickly than in a newly set up tank.
As you have already witnessed there are differing opinions about how to run a tank. Some tend to push their point of view very strongly. I do not know how a person with little experience can know which advice is sound. One thing is fairly certain and that is that fish shop employees are very prone to give poor advice.
As for advice from these fish forums, perhaps a few searches to confirm a suggestion may help. I started keeping tanks over 50 years ago and had an information source like this been around it would have saved me from a lot of mistakes. I do not know how to resolve the issue of which advice to follow for you, but even with the differences there are gems of good fish keeping knowledge to be had.
