Too much ammonia?
OK, just a quick edit for those of you who have experienced dramatically rising ammonia levels.
Adding the same amount of ammonia each day (the same orginal amount it took to get to 5ppm) works, just may take longer for non-seeded tanks. You are basically building up an ammonia 'resistance' level of 5ppm per day.
My observations on people who have ammonia levels rising steadily during this process is either because:
1. They added too much ammonia in the first place. Try to be exact the first time around and use an eyedroper or oral syringe or measuring spoons to make sure your adding a more-or-less exact amount of ammonia each day. It does not take much ammonia to make it jump from 5ppm to 10ppm!
2. Some filtration systems take longer to seed than others. I find sponge filters very effective, and some under gravel filters take longer. I imagine bio-wheel filters should speed up the growth process, but I do not own a bio-wheel system so I cannot be 100% sure.
Again, if you need to speed things up, the following works the best.
a) Seed your tank using sponge squeezings from an established tank. Lots of fish stores will do this for you, where they will squeeze a filter sponge into a bag of tank water you can simply dump into your tank. This seems to really speed-up the nitrite cycle process.
b) Add more filter media with 'surface area', like ceramic discs or fludized bed bio-filters. If at all possible, get the filter media from other healty established tanks, like gravel or floss material.
c) Heat it up! Bring the tank temperature to 84F. Warmer tanks seed faster. No warmer than 85F however, or it will actually slow down the process.
Try to avoid doing the following:
i) Do not add too much ammonia or guessing ammonia levels. It just leads to headaches and huge water changes to adjust the levels.
ii) Do not reduce the amount of ammonia you add to the tank each day. It will reduce your nitrite readings, but it will also reduce your bio-load capacilty.
iii) Don't test every day. Once a week at the start should be fine, unless you accidentally drop too much ammonia in the tank or something, just space-out testing a week at a time.
iv) Avoid using filter media that you have to replace or remove once complete. Once you remove the media, you loose its biological capacilty. Try to use dedicated bio-filtrater media, like ceramic discs, fluidized bed bio-filters, gravel, sponge only filters. I don't particularly like the combination fitler/carbon fitlers (ie: Whisper), because of the fact you have to remove them once a month and re-build that biofilter capacilty. If you do have these types of fitlers, try using 2 or staggering the replacement of filters.
Keep up the faith & thanks for all the positive feedback
