Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Can I fill up my fish tank with water, put that chlorine+chloramine converter solutions in it, then add the gravel, and then after 4 days or so, transfer all that gravel into the grow bed?

- is 3-5 days enough to have decent sized bacteria population? (25 gallon grow bed, 25 gallon fish tank, 10 gallon sump)

- After 3-5 days, will many bacteria die as I transfer the gravel onto the grow bed? I'm essentially playing scramble the eggs with their home while I do this. I don't want to waste manual labor... I'm a scrawny dude I wouldn't want to have to do "heavy" labour and thereafters, all work will be undone (if the bacteria die after transfer)....

- Are products like "Cycle" (Nutrafin brand) safe to use to speed up cycling? Will the bacteria from the be organically identical compared to the naturally grown from gravels?

I'm not quite sure I understand the purpose of this activity? Is this new gravel that you are trying to wash? Or is this already cycled gravel that you are trying to keep the bacteria alive?

Do you still have the cycled system water? Where are you putting the fish during all this?

If you leave cycled gravel with gunk in it sitting in a flooded tank for several days without any flow or aeration, it is likely to get anaerobic. I would probably recommend putting the gravel in 5 gallon pain strainer bags and dipping them in the water a couple times a day but that is only going to work if you have about 8 5 gallon buckets to hold the wet paint strainer bags while they are not sitting in the fish tank (can't put 5 gallons of gravel in a 5 gallon paint strainer bag and still lift it safely.) If you were only talking about two days, I'd say things would be fine sitting in the fish tank, just wet it down a little with fish safe water. But 3-5 days you need to make sure the gravel doesn't dry out and probably want to avoid a stinking mess when it comes time to transfer back.

how long can you leave bacteria laden media dry for before all the bacteria die?

If you let the media dry out completely, you will only have a very small fraction survive. If you can keep the media moist, then the bacteria can survive till they starve.

Ahh, hmm.. I better just wait it out.

Gravel with a good bacteria colony can be kept viable if you can just keep it moist. Could be as simple as putting the gravel in some flower pots out in the shade and hose them down a couple times a day or throw some plastic over to keep them from drying out completely Heck, could probably do that in an empty tank. Put the wet gravel in, put some wet towels over the top of the gravely and lay a bit of plastic losely over the top. I wouldn't want to leave it that way too long as the towel will get moldy but it is sort of like starting seeds, you don't have to water them if they don't dry out.

As TCLynx said, why? I understand that the chloramine converter will produce an ammonia spike from the ammonia released from the chloramine and that would start the cycling, but three days will not get you far. It is, however, a start. If you do it, set up a couple buckets as sump and growbed and run a flood and drain on them using pure ammonia or (aged) urine or urea and you will get a bucket of well-cycled gravel in about six weeks that you can then add to your system (just dump it into the growbed where the water enters) and have it cycled in a few days to a week.


No worries. Some will die, plenty will live. Just don't let things dry out or go anaerobic.


Will be safe. May not work of the bacteria have died. Will not be identical, but that is ok: it is unlikely that your tank will have the same identical strains of bacteria, but they will fill the same niches and perform the same functions.

As many folks have pointed out, bacterial slime squeezed from a working aquarium filter or adding a couple kg of rock from a cycled AP growbed will work wonders on reducing cycling time. I'd bet you could get cycled within a week with a good dose of bacteria. Do you or anyone you know have a working freshwater aquarium? I'm sure a few ml of slime would survive fine for a few hours in a cool liter of aquarium water.

Here's another one...

For how long can the bio-filtering bacteria live without a source of ammonia?

How long is a piece of string

Dependant on temperature etc - however the biggest concern for bacteria i s oxygen.

As long as you have water flowing throught the media, you will have the bacteria. Not a heap of it, but enough to keep everything going.

Maybe try to explain what you are trying to do?

Exactly half of twice its length Fluid dynamics I am not so good at, but basic maths...


P.S. [hijack] If you had a bottomless pit and an unlimited length of string, how much string could you feed into the pit? You don't have to answer, but it is a good thinking exercise and a good distraction from "length of string" questions!

I was originally going to cycle with goldfish but I changed my mind, so... right now? Currently... I am heading off to wal-mart to see if I can find the right type of household ammonia. I already tried Lowe's and home depot - no luck. I saw one at home depot but it fizzed up when shaked.

Yeah this is sorta stupid... I decided to switch over to fishless cycling. I'm going to spend some bucks on a quarantine tank, put the goldfishies in there for the time being. I'm going to need a quarantine tank in the future anyways, so the expense will not hurt.

About the "hummonia", I'm sorta paranoid about it; I really don't know how healthy I am. So what do you do, just piss in a bottle and let it sit for how many days? If I go for a blood test + urine sample test I'd be set back 1 or 2 weeks too.

And then you got people recommending to buy some fresh live shrimp at the market, then kill it and throw it in the tank. Wouldn't this produce a foul smell? I can't have that in my bedroom.

Peeing in a bottle and leaving it sealed up for two weeks will allow the urea content to convert to ammonia which kills off the average pathogens that are normally in the urine of healthy people (things like e. coli that we all have in/on our bodies to some extent.)

If you have something like strep throat or are taking antibiotics, then you probably shouldn't save your urine for use in the AP system (the antibiotics wouldn't be good for the bacteria in the system.) However, if you are healthy enough to be going to school, then you probably healthy enough to contribute to your own AP system unless you are taking some terribly strong medications for something.

As far as pathogens, are you worried that you might give yourself some disease you don't already have?

However, I totally understand that some people are not cool with the idea of pee ponics and that is ok.
If you can't find any pure ammonia, then look for urea fertilizer.

you might call around to see if you can find this stuff: http://www.acehardwaresuperstore.com/ac ... tml?ref=42

I have no problem doing the dirty, lol. And yeah, I'm just a little germaphobic in general. Probably not a good mix with this hobby - but it's not severe enough to suppress my fun

Here is the brand of ammonia I got from wallmart, "Goldex Household Ammonia; "Contains no phosphates or fragrances"; "For all-purpose household cleaning, laundry, wax stripping and stain removal". I poured some into a clear water bottle, shaked it up. There was a bit of foam but it cleared up in a few seconds. Yay or nay?

Not worth risking it I would think......