On Fri, 16 Jan 2004 14:53:02 -0500, Harry Muscle wrote:
right away. After two weeks of letting the plants settle in, I'm gonna
transfer the first 9 fish into the main tank, and also move a sponge filter
from the quarantine tank into my Fluval 404 filter (attached to the main
tank). This way I have a cycled filter that is perfectly ready to take on
the 9 new fish (since it was already doing that in the quarantine tank).

Not quite. True, you will have some of the good bacteria in your
filter, but not enough to process the bigger load of a tank that
is ten times the size of what it's used to IMO. I did similar
taking filter media from a 2ft tank to a 4ft, I'd even worked
out that I'd need a lot more media and had that in the 2ft tank
(in a breeding net cage, so the bacteria could be populating its
surface in advance of getting the bigger tank) and I still took
a few days to cycle the tank and needed to seed it twice - once
so the ammonia-munchers would increase, then again so the nitrite-
eaters would increase. The nitrite-eaters won't grow while there's
any ammonia in the water, so you do need to consider it in two
stages. YMMV obviously but that's what I found.

See http://www.gorge.org/fish/beatingcycle.shtml for an account
of my experience trying to hurry the cycle up!

I appreciate that in your case the filter being used is the same
as on the big tank, rather than seeding a brand new filter with
used media, but you will still find that filter hasn't experienced
the same load as in a big tank and need to allow time for the
bacterial colonies to grow.

At least that's what I think - I'd love to hear what happens.



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