New Here - Need Advice!

There is a product called Dr. Tim's One and Only. It contains some good bacteria to get you started if you are going with all dead stuff (that is the route I took because I ddin't want to introduce any hitchhikers from live stuff). The only thing you would need to add would be some source of Ammonia to feed the bacteria...the common choices being:

A) a hardy fish (I prob wouldn't do this for a few reasons, the first being that ammonia is very harmful to fish and the fish will experience at least some amount of it this way and the second being that you want to choose your fish based on what you like and not what is cheap and hardy because some fish will require you to tear apart your whole tank to get them out.) that will poop ammonia
B) a piece of raw shrimp in a nylon bag so you can pull it out
C) fish food or
D) you could dose the tank with drops of pure ammonia to bring it to 1 - 2 ppm on an ammonia test.

I chose option D because I didn't feel like harming a fish and since my tank was setup in an office environment, I didn't want to wait for the fish food to break down into ammonia, and I didn't want the smell of a rotting shrimp in my office.

Another important piece of information for the cycle, make sure you keep your protein skimmer off. Others have also suggested to remove the carbon out of any filter media you may have, but I am not so sure what impact that will have or not.

The whole idea is, you want to test daily. You will notice your ammonia level spike first, then as that decreases you will see your nitrite levels spike and your ammonia go to 0 because the type of bacteria that convert ammonia to nitrites will increase exponentially. Then, which seemed to take a while for my tank, you will see the nitrites start lowering and you nitrates will spike. Once you see ammonia and nitrites drop to 0 and nitrates are registering, you can do a partial water change
to bring the nitrates to under 10ppm and then you are ready to add a cleanup crew and a fish.

Even with the Dr. Tim's, I would expect to have the tank cycle for at least a few weeks but probably more. There are many good threads on it. If you buy the Dr. Tim's One and Only, I would order it directly from his website instead of through a reseller because it needs to maintain certain temperatures during the shipment or the bacteria will die off. I also believe he will provide some pure ammonia. Be careful if you go the Ammonia route as most ammonia's have more than just ammonia and that would be really bad for your tank because a lot of them have various clensors in them as well.

 

wow, Eric thanks for the info. Thinking Dr. Tims way may be my best route to avoid the harmful hitchhikers I keep reading about.

 

No problem. There are other products as well. I have also had success with Bio Spira. The thing I really want to stress is, before adding any fish, make sure that the ammonia and nitrites are both at zero. This could take up to a month, but the return on investment is huge.