Cycling Sponge Filter With Ammonia Bicarbonate, Doing it the fishless way Options

[square_guy]

Method:

- Use a 2 gallon tank, put in 2 sponge filter. run at max airflow.
- put in a pinch of ammonia bicarbonate which can be bought from phoon huat.
- "toxic" on Seachem ammonia alert.
- buffer water well.

1 week later:
- "safe" on ammonia alert.
- nitrite is off the chart on test kit.
- nitrate is off the chart on test kit.

Conclusion:
- necesssary bacteria for breaking down both ammonia and nitrite are already present. only issue left is the quantity of such colony.
- is the filter cycled? this have to depend on final stocking ratio and feeding...
- sponge filter is really really fast acting...

ps: this is only for cycling filters, not for kickstarting green water. I suspect it'll not work for green water as the algae is probably targetting organic waste instead of inorganic ammonia.

[HappyBuddha]

ps: this is only for cycling filters, not for kickstarting green water. I suspect it'll not work for green water as the algae is probably targetting organic waste instead of inorganic ammonia.

Thanks for the write up!

Since you have ammonia bicarbonate, would you consider giving it a try to cultivate green water. It seems BB are living things too and they accepted ammonia bicarbonate. So maybe algae would too? To compare, maybe you can cultivate 2 seperate containers; one with ammonia bicarbonate and the other with organic wastes. In this light, I kinda wished you have also cycled another sponge filter with organize wastes, just to compare the results with the other.