The number of parameters measured allowing your start date is now reduced from three parameters measured (ammonia nitrite nitrate) into only one-nh3 form free ammonia. We dont need three-parameter compliance anymore to begin reefing safely. we need know only that ammonia is controlled.
you specifically do not need to move ammonia down from 2 ppm to zero to be cycled, those are the old rules. Most cyclers don’t even own test kits that can report 2 ppm accurately, or when it does move down they’ll still show high levels due to myriad conflicts in non digital color compare kits.
any ammonia moved down, if you own a kit able to show that, indicates a cycle ready because it’s not going to pause on the way to the safe zone. once either the time variable has been met, or the direct dosing of live bacteria has taken place, ammonia does not stick or hover or stall...it moves to the same levels that anyone who owns a seneye machine can see ammonia trending by the hour
search out some seneye nh3 threads to see the consistency when the meter is digital vs a color tube guess. I’ll let you find the working levels on the reports
Where are places nobody has trouble cycling, ever?
every reef keeping convention you ever went to or read about had already been managed this way, it just took us on forums twenty years to accept the notion. When you went to or read about MACNA, was exacting cycling required to start four hundred reefs all by Friday? They lined up one param, not three. A complete reef bioload was carried, not just a partial at these conventions that started on time. Quick cycling is a specific benefit conveyed by putting water bacteria in water and then reselling it to us as a quick filter, or by moving already live rocks among aquariums as filter transfer skip cycles.
-nitrite no longer needs to be factored or tested for in any phase of display tank reefing. to not own the kit saves you money, saves you invalid hesitation. Nitrite is the most unneeded to know param in all of reefing and in direct contrast to YouTube videos on cycling, nitrite does not stall a reef tank’s ability to process nh3 ammonia I believe we can prove with work thread links.
this is one.
www.reef2reef.com
how to unstick any stalled cycle (=change out your water and begin, you were never stalled)
We have a hundred nitrite positive reef starts on file when needed for inspection, and nobody agrees that one hundred examples of an api reading are to be accepted as fact anyway. But we all accept api nitrite as incontestable...stop testing for nitrite at all if your goal is to run a display tank reef, it will save you a headache.
nh3 free ammonia is the only parameter we need to verify active control for in reef tank cycling. One param, not three api params to wrestle with.
what nh3 does in every post cycle tank is consistent, not inconsistent
see this example
www.reef2reef.com
one water sample, two 100% polar opposite nh3 readings from two of the most popular kits people use to determine cycle status. Forum umpires use these pictures too, in deciding if cycles are done, in deciding if more bottle bac is needed
-if the poster owned only the Red Sea kit, 100% of observers would agree he wasn't cycled.
-if the poster owned and posted only the ammonia badge pic, we'd agree he was cycled. completely polar opposite assertions, independent from the truth.
That's the impact of non digital test kits on cycle assessments the last two decades
This is a hallmark rule from updated cycling obersvations. It means we don’t have to toil with ammonia measurement because we already know what it will be doing by taking a common cycling chart’s ammonia line and referencing that to the age of the tank in question.
in the immediate example above, his ammonia from the badge matches the ammonia drop date from a cycling chart, the badge is correct for nh3 form ammonia
*cycling charts do not vary site to site or book to book* that’s old school cycling that got it right, this inherent consistency in wet biosystems
Reef tank cycles do not stall causing you to need to buy something to unstall
-reef tank cycles do not stall, they complete in relation to the type of boosting used such as bottled bacteria (1-10 days average completion time until a 100% water change does not affect the nitrification ammonia test, it’s truly locked in place per Dr. Reef’s thread) or in the case of cured aquarium live rock transfers, an instant skip cycle into the new glass container.
Moving rocks among tanks in reasonable delay does not kill the cycle or mini cycle, it simply transfers alive with no help. This is the vast majority of instant reefs from a macna convention, which is a collection of folks who’d never be caught stalling a cycle. Shows it’s possible to accomplish what I’m saying....They’ve been pulling off five hundred instant reefs for twenty five years now. Imagine all the other conventions too, collectively, how’d they get so consistent? As you read forum cycle examples, could they have made a given Friday’s start date? What must change for them to do so?
2020 cycling evenly distributes allowed start dates for everyone, no flaming allowed. We can all have the quick starts, legitimately, if we want. Also handy: you can now download songs in one second vs forty two minutes. There is a Moore’s law for reef cycling, we‘re in the vortex. Accept it.
*Also in the vortex: thousands of fish to be killed by crypto ich by skipping fallow preps*
Just because nh3 control is easy doesn't mean another killer isn't going to take your fish. It won't be free ammonia as the cascade starter
It is both easy and possible to fully opt out of cycling a reef tank using today’s updated rules for the arrangement and verification. That includes full dry start systems using no live rock, I have handy entire reefs created in one day using bottle bac.
if someone doubts the ability, longevity or equality of a convention skip cycle vs a 60 day ramp old school cycle, let’s compare links. I have links where skip cycle reefs are tracked out years of growth, my own reef is one and its fifteen years old.
why is it that cycling charts are the same duration page to page vs as varying as a forum cycle? why weren't cycle charts written to allow ammonia non control for ninety days, as many api posts show? That misalignment is why we need rule updates
We need to get back to trusting thats not a sixty or seventy five day system; at worst it’s a 30 day system, and nowadays with bottle bac avail it’s under a week to ammonia control and a safe start.
2020 revalues the cycling chart and it’s eighty + years of reliability. Only recently with the advent of single-point api reading did the hobby want to remake charts showing ammonia rising back up and holding for sixty + days at .25. Thats not how cycling works in reefing. It works like a cycling chart, perhaps quicker with the good bacteria
Reef tank conventions never failed to be ready by Friday, but forum cyclers had to wait 30-60 days for a legitimate start? I don’t think so: 2020 cycling gives pure control to everyone, equally, with very predictable timeframes.
this poster below hit 8 ppm for days, and was told his cycle stalled as the YouTube videos would agree. Then we applied updated rules, and now he has fish and an anemone in the same tank deemed stalled. We changed out the filthy cycling water and revealed the working filter underneath it. The old rules said you have to wait 30+ days for the wastewater to clear on its own
Can we run a reef conventions off those rules?
www.reef2reef.com
Truth in surface area mechanics-
Updated surface area physics rules allow for this massive increase in fish bioload, while not providing ramp up time nor extra activated surface area or bac when the fish were added.
www.reef2reef.com
100% of poll takers would vote that impossible, but there it is on file.
can you instantly remove an entire remote DSB from a full blown sps reef and not recycle it? Using updated surface area rules, certainly yes you may
www.reef2reef.com
-live rock is the fundamental base filtration system for your reef, you can work with the surface area surrounding the rock in a free manner knowing which portion of the reef runs the life support, it’s not in the sand as some required link. Extra bacteria are expendable at all times in a common display tank.
a sandbed or a bunch of filter media inline is not an integral link to preventing a recycle or inability to handle nh3 waste ammonia just because the tank is adapted to the sand or extra filter media. That’s what the old rules thought
It is possible to remove a sandbed all at once, or a filter, and not cause a cycle because the stand-alone ability of live rock is enough even without your sand. Detritus in the bed can kill a system when cast into the water- but not lack of bacteria from sand removal, so the way you remove sand matters (cast no clouding among your corals and fish) but we do this routinely in large work threads if someone wants to see the patterning. See the forty page sand rinse thread for reference.
removing sand instantly does not mean your live rock must take on replacement bacterial mass, the old rules placed restrictions on actions incorrectly because .25 api was the lowest they were permitted to see ammonia levels. Nobody could move home from a MACNA exhibit if we had to re cycle every time a sandbed was removed....they move the tanks all at once
Live rocks do not take on more bacteria to make up for sandbed removal. Anyone who has ever typed that was following groupthink.
Live rocks are full of bacteria already, no open spaces, before surrounding surface area was removed. The reason live rocks do fine as filters in bare bottom setups is because LR is the greatest surface area in our systems, and it’s enough on its own.
If more bacteria had to stack layers on existing ones in order to keep with demand, that would *decrease* vs increase surface area presentation so efficiency would drop- not increase. Filtration would be worse not better if bacteria mass had to relocate to another place in the tank.
filtration is most efficient when the active bio layer is as thin as possible due to flow and water shear such that contact surfaces remain as open as possible, for contact.
the masses have been polar opposite wrong about how surface area works in a reef aquarium, and we made work threads to prove it. Reef tanks are too sensitive to keep lucking into not killing them in our instant sand removal jobs. The work runs five years without a loss because live rocks do not take on bacteria when extra surface area besides live rock is removed. It’s a functional tenet...off paper, and now caring for half a million bucks of reef tanks here:
www.reef2reef.com
-the rules about fish + bottle bac + wet caribsea sand + adding it into a reef together at the start vs a 30 day wait have changed.
- don’t take my word for it- ask yourself: is fish - in cycling (Fish plus bottle bac and wet sand and no wait time) increasing or decreasing on a daily basis, across the web forums? It’s quadrupling.
its the new wave, nobody wants to wait and they don’t have to, In this decade we learned that selling aquatic bacteria to someone in water was not revolutionary and that it transfers among tanks quite well. We can accept that now, no more doubt for the sake of doubt, seneye readings are out there to compare nowadays.
bottle bac preps move the bacteria to the new tank and along with initial dilution quite well, the efficacy of bottle bac has presented a forum’s worst nightmare: a deluge daily of new reefers with dry start tanks no longer having ammonia issues with two cycling clowns in tow (the fish behave well and eat and not die because it’s under control) but now there are scourges of dinos invasions and crypto/brook challenges requiring us to look past simple misreading test kit cycling challenges and into some logical way of handling fish disease en masse
Here is final proof using a delicate seneye machine that fish- in cycling is not harming fish, nh3 is instantly controlled.
www.reef2reef.com
*Notice* how his seneye was .001 with zero activity in the new setup, then it ran thousandths ppm nh3 on his matured 120 gallon reef (which is what all display reef tanks run at regardless of what red sea or api might have to say) and then in a quarantined setup the nh3 ran at hundredths ppm all on the same meter *** we are seeing actual surface area dynamics at work, live time, for the first time, right there.
Not having to look at the world of nh3 control through api goggles has given a new view, and a new set of rules.
disease control is the challenge, nh3 control is as easy as untwisting a bottle and titling some in the tank
The fundamental summary of reef tank microbiology for 2020 and this decade in my opinion is the amazing consistency and resilience inherent to these natural bacteria, we are not as reliant on retail purchases and careful arrangement control to complete a reef rank cycle as we recently started thinking after the 80s
if you’ve added water, it’s going to cycle. Time is the variable, not ability to complete, and than means you dont need to buy so many supports - these systems work without our help given the timeframes a common cycling chart shows.
critiques as well as testimony from anyone using amended cycling rules or exclusively old ones are welcomed. All the info above is a condensed summary of hundreds of available work threads, for any claim made we have several tanks to track out for inspection. I think I can find a reasonably-matched work thread for any verification needed, more than one per point.
in closing, here’s a collection of fifty reef tanks immediately started with zero cycle wait, NO bottle bac, for the ultimate expression of updated rules for forum cycles in 2020 but still what conventions have been doing for thirty years in secret:
www.reef2reef.com
you specifically do not need to move ammonia down from 2 ppm to zero to be cycled, those are the old rules. Most cyclers don’t even own test kits that can report 2 ppm accurately, or when it does move down they’ll still show high levels due to myriad conflicts in non digital color compare kits.
any ammonia moved down, if you own a kit able to show that, indicates a cycle ready because it’s not going to pause on the way to the safe zone. once either the time variable has been met, or the direct dosing of live bacteria has taken place, ammonia does not stick or hover or stall...it moves to the same levels that anyone who owns a seneye machine can see ammonia trending by the hour
search out some seneye nh3 threads to see the consistency when the meter is digital vs a color tube guess. I’ll let you find the working levels on the reports
Where are places nobody has trouble cycling, ever?
every reef keeping convention you ever went to or read about had already been managed this way, it just took us on forums twenty years to accept the notion. When you went to or read about MACNA, was exacting cycling required to start four hundred reefs all by Friday? They lined up one param, not three. A complete reef bioload was carried, not just a partial at these conventions that started on time. Quick cycling is a specific benefit conveyed by putting water bacteria in water and then reselling it to us as a quick filter, or by moving already live rocks among aquariums as filter transfer skip cycles.
-nitrite no longer needs to be factored or tested for in any phase of display tank reefing. to not own the kit saves you money, saves you invalid hesitation. Nitrite is the most unneeded to know param in all of reefing and in direct contrast to YouTube videos on cycling, nitrite does not stall a reef tank’s ability to process nh3 ammonia I believe we can prove with work thread links.
this is one.
How to unstick any seemingly stuck cycle
Updated Cycling Science in Action This is a testless reef tank cycling thread, the only one from any board. If you ever had trouble with reef tank cycling in the past, you won't any longer after working some jobs with us. chances are you are using/about to use a method of reef tank cycling...
www.reef2reef.com
how to unstick any stalled cycle (=change out your water and begin, you were never stalled)
We have a hundred nitrite positive reef starts on file when needed for inspection, and nobody agrees that one hundred examples of an api reading are to be accepted as fact anyway. But we all accept api nitrite as incontestable...stop testing for nitrite at all if your goal is to run a display tank reef, it will save you a headache.
nh3 free ammonia is the only parameter we need to verify active control for in reef tank cycling. One param, not three api params to wrestle with.
what nh3 does in every post cycle tank is consistent, not inconsistent
see this example
Ammonia Still Up on Day 5 Using Dr. Tim's One and Only
I started off ghost feeding my 10 gallon QT and using Microbacter 7. After some feedback, I siphoned out the food and stopped adding Microbacter 7, and went with Dr. Tim's One and Only. I'm currently on day 5 of cycling my tank using Dr. Tim's One and Only process. On Day 2, the ammonia went...
www.reef2reef.com
one water sample, two 100% polar opposite nh3 readings from two of the most popular kits people use to determine cycle status. Forum umpires use these pictures too, in deciding if cycles are done, in deciding if more bottle bac is needed
-if the poster owned only the Red Sea kit, 100% of observers would agree he wasn't cycled.
-if the poster owned and posted only the ammonia badge pic, we'd agree he was cycled. completely polar opposite assertions, independent from the truth.
That's the impact of non digital test kits on cycle assessments the last two decades
This is a hallmark rule from updated cycling obersvations. It means we don’t have to toil with ammonia measurement because we already know what it will be doing by taking a common cycling chart’s ammonia line and referencing that to the age of the tank in question.
in the immediate example above, his ammonia from the badge matches the ammonia drop date from a cycling chart, the badge is correct for nh3 form ammonia
*cycling charts do not vary site to site or book to book* that’s old school cycling that got it right, this inherent consistency in wet biosystems
Reef tank cycles do not stall causing you to need to buy something to unstall
-reef tank cycles do not stall, they complete in relation to the type of boosting used such as bottled bacteria (1-10 days average completion time until a 100% water change does not affect the nitrification ammonia test, it’s truly locked in place per Dr. Reef’s thread) or in the case of cured aquarium live rock transfers, an instant skip cycle into the new glass container.
Moving rocks among tanks in reasonable delay does not kill the cycle or mini cycle, it simply transfers alive with no help. This is the vast majority of instant reefs from a macna convention, which is a collection of folks who’d never be caught stalling a cycle. Shows it’s possible to accomplish what I’m saying....They’ve been pulling off five hundred instant reefs for twenty five years now. Imagine all the other conventions too, collectively, how’d they get so consistent? As you read forum cycle examples, could they have made a given Friday’s start date? What must change for them to do so?
2020 cycling evenly distributes allowed start dates for everyone, no flaming allowed. We can all have the quick starts, legitimately, if we want. Also handy: you can now download songs in one second vs forty two minutes. There is a Moore’s law for reef cycling, we‘re in the vortex. Accept it.
*Also in the vortex: thousands of fish to be killed by crypto ich by skipping fallow preps*
Just because nh3 control is easy doesn't mean another killer isn't going to take your fish. It won't be free ammonia as the cascade starter
It is both easy and possible to fully opt out of cycling a reef tank using today’s updated rules for the arrangement and verification. That includes full dry start systems using no live rock, I have handy entire reefs created in one day using bottle bac.
if someone doubts the ability, longevity or equality of a convention skip cycle vs a 60 day ramp old school cycle, let’s compare links. I have links where skip cycle reefs are tracked out years of growth, my own reef is one and its fifteen years old.
why is it that cycling charts are the same duration page to page vs as varying as a forum cycle? why weren't cycle charts written to allow ammonia non control for ninety days, as many api posts show? That misalignment is why we need rule updates
We need to get back to trusting thats not a sixty or seventy five day system; at worst it’s a 30 day system, and nowadays with bottle bac avail it’s under a week to ammonia control and a safe start.
2020 revalues the cycling chart and it’s eighty + years of reliability. Only recently with the advent of single-point api reading did the hobby want to remake charts showing ammonia rising back up and holding for sixty + days at .25. Thats not how cycling works in reefing. It works like a cycling chart, perhaps quicker with the good bacteria
Reef tank conventions never failed to be ready by Friday, but forum cyclers had to wait 30-60 days for a legitimate start? I don’t think so: 2020 cycling gives pure control to everyone, equally, with very predictable timeframes.
this poster below hit 8 ppm for days, and was told his cycle stalled as the YouTube videos would agree. Then we applied updated rules, and now he has fish and an anemone in the same tank deemed stalled. We changed out the filthy cycling water and revealed the working filter underneath it. The old rules said you have to wait 30+ days for the wastewater to clear on its own
Can we run a reef conventions off those rules?
100% Water Change
So in my previous thread, I had an ammonia issue that was out of hand. As suggested, I did a 100% WC and now i’m wondering when I should start adding fish back. If anyone has suggestions, let me know!
www.reef2reef.com
Truth in surface area mechanics-
Updated surface area physics rules allow for this massive increase in fish bioload, while not providing ramp up time nor extra activated surface area or bac when the fish were added.
Suddenly add 20 fish to Established tank
@brandon429 I have to admire your ability to convince people that their tank won't crash and everything won't die. You are becoming a pro at it. I agree that Tou will be fine. If I can remove my 25-30+ adult cichlid tanks sandbed in a move without a toxic ammonia event then anyone with...
www.reef2reef.com
100% of poll takers would vote that impossible, but there it is on file.
can you instantly remove an entire remote DSB from a full blown sps reef and not recycle it? Using updated surface area rules, certainly yes you may
Removing remote deep sand bed
I setup a removable deep sand bed in my sump 9 months ago but now I’d like to remove it to give me more room in the sump. What do you think the impact to tank chemistry might be and how to mitigate any negatives?
www.reef2reef.com
-live rock is the fundamental base filtration system for your reef, you can work with the surface area surrounding the rock in a free manner knowing which portion of the reef runs the life support, it’s not in the sand as some required link. Extra bacteria are expendable at all times in a common display tank.
a sandbed or a bunch of filter media inline is not an integral link to preventing a recycle or inability to handle nh3 waste ammonia just because the tank is adapted to the sand or extra filter media. That’s what the old rules thought
It is possible to remove a sandbed all at once, or a filter, and not cause a cycle because the stand-alone ability of live rock is enough even without your sand. Detritus in the bed can kill a system when cast into the water- but not lack of bacteria from sand removal, so the way you remove sand matters (cast no clouding among your corals and fish) but we do this routinely in large work threads if someone wants to see the patterning. See the forty page sand rinse thread for reference.
removing sand instantly does not mean your live rock must take on replacement bacterial mass, the old rules placed restrictions on actions incorrectly because .25 api was the lowest they were permitted to see ammonia levels. Nobody could move home from a MACNA exhibit if we had to re cycle every time a sandbed was removed....they move the tanks all at once
Live rocks do not take on more bacteria to make up for sandbed removal. Anyone who has ever typed that was following groupthink.
Live rocks are full of bacteria already, no open spaces, before surrounding surface area was removed. The reason live rocks do fine as filters in bare bottom setups is because LR is the greatest surface area in our systems, and it’s enough on its own.
If more bacteria had to stack layers on existing ones in order to keep with demand, that would *decrease* vs increase surface area presentation so efficiency would drop- not increase. Filtration would be worse not better if bacteria mass had to relocate to another place in the tank.
filtration is most efficient when the active bio layer is as thin as possible due to flow and water shear such that contact surfaces remain as open as possible, for contact.
the masses have been polar opposite wrong about how surface area works in a reef aquarium, and we made work threads to prove it. Reef tanks are too sensitive to keep lucking into not killing them in our instant sand removal jobs. The work runs five years without a loss because live rocks do not take on bacteria when extra surface area besides live rock is removed. It’s a functional tenet...off paper, and now caring for half a million bucks of reef tanks here:
Official Sand Rinse and Tank Transfer thread
If you are reading this thread to cure a tank invasion from a link I sent you, we do not need to identify your type of invasion here we do not need you to test anything at anytime regarding nitrate, phosphate etc Above all, we do not need to see a microscope slide picture of your invasion at...
www.reef2reef.com
-the rules about fish + bottle bac + wet caribsea sand + adding it into a reef together at the start vs a 30 day wait have changed.
- don’t take my word for it- ask yourself: is fish - in cycling (Fish plus bottle bac and wet sand and no wait time) increasing or decreasing on a daily basis, across the web forums? It’s quadrupling.
its the new wave, nobody wants to wait and they don’t have to, In this decade we learned that selling aquatic bacteria to someone in water was not revolutionary and that it transfers among tanks quite well. We can accept that now, no more doubt for the sake of doubt, seneye readings are out there to compare nowadays.
bottle bac preps move the bacteria to the new tank and along with initial dilution quite well, the efficacy of bottle bac has presented a forum’s worst nightmare: a deluge daily of new reefers with dry start tanks no longer having ammonia issues with two cycling clowns in tow (the fish behave well and eat and not die because it’s under control) but now there are scourges of dinos invasions and crypto/brook challenges requiring us to look past simple misreading test kit cycling challenges and into some logical way of handling fish disease en masse
Here is final proof using a delicate seneye machine that fish- in cycling is not harming fish, nh3 is instantly controlled.
Is anyone with a mindstream or seneye ammonia reader willing to co-fund a cycling experiment with me
@Dan_P can you let us know if you feel that prior copper treated substrates would affect nitrification testing. I wouldn't think the old rocks would, was mainly concerned about the actively-dosed system altering the reading. lots of people reef with prior copper rocks and can't keep snails, but...
www.reef2reef.com
*Notice* how his seneye was .001 with zero activity in the new setup, then it ran thousandths ppm nh3 on his matured 120 gallon reef (which is what all display reef tanks run at regardless of what red sea or api might have to say) and then in a quarantined setup the nh3 ran at hundredths ppm all on the same meter *** we are seeing actual surface area dynamics at work, live time, for the first time, right there.
Not having to look at the world of nh3 control through api goggles has given a new view, and a new set of rules.
disease control is the challenge, nh3 control is as easy as untwisting a bottle and titling some in the tank
The fundamental summary of reef tank microbiology for 2020 and this decade in my opinion is the amazing consistency and resilience inherent to these natural bacteria, we are not as reliant on retail purchases and careful arrangement control to complete a reef rank cycle as we recently started thinking after the 80s
if you’ve added water, it’s going to cycle. Time is the variable, not ability to complete, and than means you dont need to buy so many supports - these systems work without our help given the timeframes a common cycling chart shows.
critiques as well as testimony from anyone using amended cycling rules or exclusively old ones are welcomed. All the info above is a condensed summary of hundreds of available work threads, for any claim made we have several tanks to track out for inspection. I think I can find a reasonably-matched work thread for any verification needed, more than one per point.
in closing, here’s a collection of fifty reef tanks immediately started with zero cycle wait, NO bottle bac, for the ultimate expression of updated rules for forum cycles in 2020 but still what conventions have been doing for thirty years in secret:
A thread tracking pure skip cycle instant reefs, no bottle bac
This is a testless cycling thread, we don't want ammonia testing here for any job if possible, because we are teaching reefers/readers that moving live rocks system to system does not restart the cycle: many in our community don't understand that rule and feel that any tank being setup simply...
www.reef2reef.com
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