Tank Demolition

Hey everybody, so I'm totally done with trying to cycle my obnoxious but totally inanimate tank, with everything I had in it that is. It used to have plants and a bunch of cool stuff in it...
But now I'm switching to a simplistic and easy to clean set up, my other setup id literally have to take everything apart every damn water change to vacuum the sand and that's just time I don't have to spare. So my current set up is like this. Necessities only.

I'm done with my tank not cycling after 2 months and even when it is almost done cycling, it crashes because there's too much waste being missed by the vacuum, ammonia was at 8 ppm today when it was 0.25 a couple days ago, back when I thought it was just done cycling, after my ammonia and nitrite and nitrate spike...
So yeah, yippee for the ugly simplistic design of my tank now!

Let me know what you guys think of it before AND after, and any thing I could do to kind of finally finish my cycle and stop anymore unnecessary stalls. I know to do 50% water changes every day or two, sometimes I miss a day because of work exhausting me, and just dose with Prime to keep them safe.

Edit: it's a 40 gallon tank housing my 2 axolotls which are 7 inches each or so, the golden maybe 6 inches. love them to death!

Haha even your necessities only is a lot more than some people have in their tanks.
Maybe you could get your axies out of the tank for a little while to get the cycle ready? That way you could keep the ammonia around 4 ppm and it would be done a lot faster.

keiko said:

Haha even your necessities only is a lot more than some people have in their tanks.

Maybe you could get your axies out of the tank for a little while to get the cycle ready? That way you could keep the ammonia around 4 ppm and it would be done a lot faster.

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I have a really old refrigerator, so it's not trustworthy when it comes to controlling the temp, it stays quite cold.

So I don't mind changing the water and adding prime to keep stuff detoxified while they stay in there.