luket

The reasons I'm opting for the fishless cycle as mentioned above are:

1. Fishless cycling is faster

2. There is no need to kill, injure, sicken, or damage the gills of any fish

3. Leads to the growth of a much larger colony of good bacteria than would be grown by traditional cycling with fish.

I think this stuff should be ok, it only contains ammonia and water.

http://www.diggersaust.com.au/files/Aqueous%20Ammonia.pdf

Cloudy ammonia also contains a clouding agent.

http://www.diggersaust.com.au/files/Cloudy%20Ammonia.pdf

Eeek! Your right, Cloudy ammonia does contain soap which gives the liquid it's cloudy colour. Hmm.....will this affect my stock? Hopefully not, over the ten day period that the tank cycled it's 180L and a total of 40ml of cloudy ammonia was added, activated carbon was also present so hopefully it removed any trace elements of soap that were present. Roughly 70% of the water has been changed too, to remove the massive nitrate levels left over from the accelerated cycling. *fingers crossed*

Why cycle it like this and not do it naturally using fish?

Bruce

It's quicker and what Ash said.

Yeah you can use a hunk of meat or other decaying matter ~ Ash's smelly prawn .

But if on day one of your cycle you determine that it takes 10ml of ammonia to your 300L to reach 15 ppm you can then administer the same amount each day, with the decayed matter method you can't meter how much or little is in your cycle - when you start seeing nitrites drop your daily dosage to half. By then your cycle is well underway.

Also another advantage of this method, due to the large amount of ammonia initially fed into the cycle means that you will have a much larger colony of nitrifying bacteria present when the tank is cycled meaning more stock can be added sooner rather then slowly increasing your stock so as not to overload your biological filter.

Anyway this is the first time I've tried this method, and it seems to work well

So I went to Woolworths and Bunnings to look for some ammonia to cycle my tank. Woolworths only sell cloudy ammonia and bunnings don't sell ammonia. I have read that you should only use pure or clear ammonia and that it should be free of surfactants, perfumes, and colorants. I think the cloudy ammonia contains surfactants because when I shook the bottle the ammonia foamed. Anyone know where I can buy some ammonia that is safe for cycling a tank?

I use the cloudy ammonia from woolies....no problems so far, it is supposed to only contain nh3/nh4, nothing else.

Do you currently have fish in the tank? Anyone else try the cloudy ammonia?

I do - 18" tank - 5 Platies - been in there for a few weeks, no fry yet...maybe in a day or two. This was my test tank for the cloudy ammonia.

And as of this morning a small breeding colony (1M3F) of adult sized Tropheops sp. "Chilumba" (Mphanga), the tank only completed it's cycle yesterday - no ammonia no nitrites and 10ppm of Nitrates. Fish are active and seem quite content in their new tank. Lets hope it stays that way I paid $120 for them

Both of these tanks were cycled using the fishless cycle method - the cloudy ammonia was the only sort of ammonia I could find at the time and the labeling stated it contained only nh3/nh4 i.e. ammonia/ammonium, my water is crystal clear in both tanks and smells "clean". I kept activated charcoal in both tanks just to be sure, but all seems well.

I currently have a 6' tank being cycled in the same manner.

mark_82 said:

So I went to Woolworths and Bunnings to look for some ammonia to cycle my tank. Woolworths only sell cloudy ammonia and bunnings don't sell ammonia. I have read that you should only use pure or clear ammonia and that it should be free of surfactants, perfumes, and colorants. I think the cloudy ammonia contains surfactants because when I shook the bottle the ammonia foamed. Anyone know where I can buy some ammonia that is safe for cycling a tank?

I use the cloudy ammonia from woolies....no problems so far, it is supposed to only contain nh3/nh4, nothing else.