It's been 10 days since I flooded my new 3ft aquarium, which got 18L of Tropica soil and 9L of Yi Ding soil.
I've been testing the water parameters everyday and never detected any ammonia and nitrite since day 1. For the first week, nitrate level was 10-20ppm, which went down to 0-5ppm for the past two days.
Haven't done any water change. Tank is lightly stocked with 10 neon tetras and some snails, which are still alive. Got some plants and pothos in the tank.
I did seed my filter with some media from an established tank. Could it be possible my tank's been cycled from day 1? I though aqua soil was supposed to leach ammonia a lot. Or it takes some time for the aqua soil to leach ammonia? Or defected API test kit?
Posted by __foo_
2 Comments
Your plants look suspiciously guilty, they might have eaten it all up
Yeah, ammonia/nitrite/nitrate does not HAVE to spike when cycling, despite purported by a lot of guides. There are many potential reasons: https://www.reddit.com/r/AquariumCycling/comments/xs7uz1/psa_this_chart_should_generally_not_be_used_as/. One of them being plants, which can consume nitrite directly, well known, but also ammonia! Established biomedia is another reason why you may never see spikes.