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Hello all! I'm in the process of starting a new tank, after having had to give up my previous baby after a string of house-movements about eighteen months ago. Although I've historically cycled with fish, this time I figured I do things 'by the book' and attempt a fishless cycle. Having read a number of posts and articles both here and on overseas websites, I decided to try it with fish food, due to the difficulties in getting pure/non-cloudy ammonia here in NZ. The issue I'm running into is that I've been dutifully adding fish food to the tank every day for the last six days, and I'm still getting no detectable ammonia. There are definitely heterotrophs developing, in that the water is cloudy, so I'm fairly confident that the food is actually decaying. If anything, I honestly thought I was overdoing it - there's a lot of food on the substrate, and the amount I've been adding has been a large pinch (far more than I would ever actually feed fish in a tank this size). The product is just the generic Nutrafin flakes. I'm not in any great rush - I'd rather do this right than quick - but I figured that it was strange not to have any ammonia after putting so much organic material into the tank. Does anyone have any thoughts? Should I just keep it up, or do I need to change tactic? I've heard good things about shrimp or shrimp pellets, so my next tactic would be to vacuum the excess flakes up, and start using shrimp/shrimp products instead. Readings Ammonia 0 ppm Nitrite 0 ppm Nitrate 0 ppm KH 4.0 dKH pH 7.8 Temperature 26 °C (increased the heater setting to 28 °C last night, so will be warmer by now) Tank Profile Total Volume: 69 L Actual Water Volume: ~ 60 L Heater: Aqua One 100W Filter: Hailea BT700 Internal (2 x sponges instead of the usual 1 x sponge + 1 x carbon cartridge) Livestock: None Plants: Macrandra, Java Fern, Java Moss, plus a couple of generics

Hey guys, I'm in a bit of a dilemma. So, I've been cycling a tank and I have some really weird readings. I've been adding fish food to the tank ( four or five decent sized flakes every day) for about two weeks ago. I got some seed material from a friends tank about a week ago. The water I tested just now was no ammonia, no nitrite and no nitrate. So everything I thought was; -It's impossible for me to have been adding food for two weeks and no ammonia be present so the bacteria must be using it. - I never detected nitrites before, so either they where never present, or the seed material speeded up the cycle so fast that I never saw the spike before it was processed by the second lot of bacteria. -I do have live plants so it is possible they are absorbing all the nitrate? What do you think? I REALLY need some help!