Cycle questions

[timm]

Ok, just a quick post to get advice on how my cycle is going, or if it is going, and how much longer it should be. My timeline is as follows:

1st Week - couldnt find pure amonia so put a couple shrimp in the tank, nothing much happened.

2nd week- beginning of this week I finally found the amonia and followed the instructions located in the stickied post at the top of this forum. added about 5 drops a day and kept it at the 4 ppm level. by the end of the week Nitrites began showing up. Every day I checked the amonia level and nitrite levels.

3rd week- At the beginning of this week the nitrite level was quite high. kept adding amonia, maintaining aprox. 4 ppm. I am at the end of the 3rd week, I still add about 4 drops of Amonia a day, keeping the levels pretty constant. Nitrites are high, hard to tell, but I think they are off the chart. It has been like this for 4/5 days.

I have a long bubbler that is half the length of the tank so I think there is alot of air in the water, the heater is running and the water is a good temperature.

Basically, I am worried that my cycle is stalled and I will never wake up and find 0 amonia , 0 nirtite.

Any tips or suggestions?

Thanks in advance

Timm

[Nick_Pavlovski]

It has to drop eventually...are you giving the shrimp anything to eat, so that they can excrete and add some useful bacteria into the system?

[Nick_Pavlovski]

Have you got any live plants in there?
Live plants (even just one) will help too.

[timm]

I should have been clearer, the shrimp I put in the tank were not live shirmp, just the raw variety from the grocery store. They were supposed to decompose and cause the amonia levels to rise, but then I found the amonia at Walmart so took the shrimp out as I no longer need them.

[RobbieG]

The bacteria that eat the nitrite tanke longer to grow than the ones that eat the ammonia. If you have had nitrite for 4-5 days it may take 4-5 more for it to be gone.

[Sasquatch]

Yeah, nitrite eating bacteria take longer to show up and reduce nitrites, just be patient.

Also, aren't you supposed to cut the ammonia addition by half when nitrites show up? I've never done a fishless cycle, but from all the posts I've seen on the subject, I think that's what you're supposed to do.

Keep it up, you're almost there.