Tank Cycling!

Okay, long story short. After and incident involving my axies tank and a 1kg box of washing powder, my axies are now living in the fridge and very effed off about it. I've cleaned their tank a million times and set it up again, added water conditioner and that API biological booster stuff that kinda smells fishy. How long until I can put my little mates back into their tank?
My fiance doesnt like them staring at him when he opens the fridge haha

You'll have to let it cycle all over again which could take a month. I find that the booster stuff your refering to seems to be hit or miss with it actually speeding up the cycling process. Sometimes it seems to work and then other times it for sure doesn't.

How many axies do you have?

I just have the 2 axies. Is there any way I can test it to see if it's cycled?

Yes! Get some liquid tests for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate. Monitor the levels on a daily or at least somewhat frequent (every other day) basis. You need to add a source of ammonia (hypothetically I think the stuff you added should be doing that, but I haven't tried it and people around here seem to have mixed opinions about it). This can be a small piece of shrimp or something, or even a few drops of household ammonia (just don't make the mistake I did the first time, and MAKE SURE it ONLY contains ammonia -- no surfactants, coloring agents, scents, etc.).

Then, watch the levels of the chemicals. First you should see the ammonia go down and the nitrite start to go up. As my ammonia got to zero, I would add some more to raise it to around .5 again. (I used household ammonia...not sure if you would need to do this if you were just letting a piece of shrimp rot though.) As this goes on, you should see the nitrites spike. This means that you have bacteria that are converting the ammonia into nitrites. Now what you need to wait for is to see the nitrates rise, which means you have bacteria converting the nitrites to nitrates. If you have plants, they will consume some of the nitrates. But once they get above 40 or 60 or so, you should do a water change to reduce them.

You will know your tank is ready when can put in ammonia and find it changed into nitrates within a day or (preferably) less.

At least...that's the way I did it...based on info from several different places. Seems to have worked out fine. Some people also cycle using live fish as their ammonia source, but that is usually dangerous to the fish...and you would probably want to make sure the fish aren't sick/carrying parasites, etc. first...

good gravy! a whole month!!

Well, everything settled in fairly good and i put the fish in a few days ago because I went away and I didnt want to leave them alone in the fridge for three days, LOL. Now I am thinking it was a bad idea cause now I have this:



So what can I do? Its attached itself to my plants and ornament and theres a bit on my filter too. Should I remove them from the tank? And what can I do to get rid of it. I know you can get that algae stop stuff or whateer to put in the water but ive always thought that doesnt really fix the problems its just a quick fix

Actually in my opinion, algae growth is more of a aesthetic issue. Most tanks will have a certain degree of algae growth.

If it really bothers you, regularly manually removing them is the best way. Excess detritus and light can contribute to their growth but even with the best precautions, algae is almost impossible to eradicate completely. They can be left alone. They are essentially like a live plant and help with preventing ammonia spikes.

You would have to regularly unclog your filter media if algae gets lodged in it.