Cycling my tank

So, I read up a bit on how to cycle a tank before I began (how smart of me). And the mot mandatory requirement is time. Your tank is going to sit full of water and empty of fish for over a month, but it is important I promise, and when you do finally get fish it will make them that much more enjoyable on account of they won’t be dying.

 I started my cycling process by filling the tank with water, adding the gravel, live plants, a sponge filter, and three shnails. I added nothing else. Now this is not the suggested method, but it has worked well for me. I left the tank alone for about a month and a half. I wasn’t to bothered about the empty tank on account of I was out of town for half the month and then it was Christmas, so I was quite busy. After the Christmas season and new years had passed I was able to focus more on my hobby of fish keeping, or at this point, shnail keeping (yes, I know that’s not how you spell snail). By this time there was a large amount of alga growth in the tank, so I purchased an albino bristle nosed Plecostomus and a rubber lipped Plecostomus.  I think the chemicals were wacked because the rubber lipped died after three weeks, but the bristle nosed stayed for a while. They helped with the alga problem, but my water started getting more and more murky. At this point I decided to buy a filter that sits on the side of the tank and that cleared the water almost overnight. I left my sponge filter in for a few more weeks while my new filter built up bacteria then removed it because it was having some malfunctions. Now I decided to start introducing different fish species. I got my water tested and sure enough it was balanced and ready for fish.

 If you are looking at starting a new tank I would not suggest using my method, my method ended up happening because of time constraint and me reacting to different circumstances in my tank. It ended up working out but it’s not the most effective way to cycle. Here’s a website that has a more reliable method of cycling and I suggest you follow their method over mine, https://aquariuminfo.org/cycling.html

 The whole Idea of cycling a tank is to build bacteria in your filter as well as get the proper balance of chemicals in the water, there are different methods out there and the idea is to reach the same destination of a properly balanced tank.