Cycling the Fish Tank

We cycle the fish tank to get the water ready for the fish.

We needed to add ammonia to get the tank to start to deal with fish pee. We put 4 dead prawns in but that was too much, because it made too much ammonia. It made my bedroom stink! It stunk so bad I had to sleep in my brothers room. So we took 2 prawns out.
We had to take half of the water out and get fresh water to put it in, now the ammonia is at 4ppm. That is the right amount to make the bacteria grow that turns the ammonia into nitrite. Then bacteria grows to turn the nitrite into nitrate.

Here is a picture of the cycle, from www.thegab.org which is a very useful fish keeping site.

We can put fish in the tank when ammonia and nitrite are at 0 and nitrate is starting to grow. We stop having too much nitrate with partial water changes.
I keep a notebook for all the tests I do of the water so I know where I am up to.

I also put the heater in the tank and turned it on to speed up the cycle and we measured GH and KH.

My new fish tank

I just got my new fish tank, we set it up on Sunday.
We put it in my bedroom and we put in the filter, we put the sand in, then we put the water in. We got the filter running. At first it didn't work, and then we got it going. We put some rocks and decorations in.
Then we left it to run for a week. We need to cycle the tank, I'll tell you about that in another post.

Here is my tank.