Stinky Cycling Problem

C

cheryl

Guest
The water in my cycling tank absolutely reeks. Is this normal? I have had 2 prawns floating in there for about a week and a half now... not sure if i was supposed to take them out? The ammonia levels are still only at 1. It is a 4ft tank.
 
probably because of the prawns - rotting stuff in the tank stinks REALLY badly. lol when mine was cycling i had a steak in there, i almost died when i went in my room from the smell
 
so i havnt wrecked it? im so paniking about starting over... lol
 
No you haven't
happy.gif
mine finished cycling, and it was a couple water changes before the water stopped stinking after the steak was out though. lol do the prawns look gross? the steak certainly did.
 
yeah... they have fur, and "jelly fish" floating off them. very gross. I think im going to have to start putting on oil burner on top of the tank. This is in my kitchen!! putting my hand in to test the water is just hideous. Next time im going to find pure ammonia instead of using meat.

do i have to get the water to the point where it doesnt smell before i put axolotl's in it?
 
maybe try brine shrimp next time cause i had no problems with smell at all. but i also ran carbon in my filter, maybe that helped a bit too...
 
Umm after finishing the cycling, I just did daily 10% water changes and the smell was gone in a week, then i added the axies in. Them being carnivores, they might like the smell? :p kind of makes me want to go vegetarian though!
uhoh.gif
Lol the steak went green and fluffy.
 
use normal fish flakes- no smell there from what i experienced. once all your levals have settled (ammonia and nitrite 0) you do your water change of say 50% to get those nitrates down.

rob- carbon helps to mask smells so that would have been the trick!

skylar- EW
 
I have carbon in both filters, but its just not cutting it.

we put sand in instead of the large stones today- looks nice, but its still pretty cloudy.
 
my sand took about 3-4 days b4 the cloudiness was gone, but i didnt wash it as good as i probably should have..
 
Throw out the floating prawns. Cycling doesn't require so much decaying stuff to make THAT much smell. By this point, there is probably enough organic material in the water to last for the remainder of the cycling process.
 
I agree with Jen. If you increase the aeration in the tank this will also help to decrease the amount of odor in a day or two. If you read the cycling article on caudata culture (http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/cyclingEDK.shtml) you would see that you only need as much organic material as would cover a small coin like a USA dime (or your thumbnail). Two whole prawn is a lot of organic material....

Ed
 
we have two filters going in the tank, so there is a fair amount of airation. I also changed the substrate last night from big pebbles to sand. This morning there is no odour. I dont know if it is because we disturbed the water so much or if it had something to do with the rocks. I have taken out one prawn (whats left of it, anyway- pretty gross... just like a piece of jelly now).

My ammonia levels are only 1.5... is that high enough? i expected higher.
 
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