Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

cjinVT,

If you are trying to get a system started, drop by your local pet store and get a couple feeder goldfish, a little canister of food, and a sponge filter (like the Hagen Fluval 1 Plus) and run them in your small (10 gal?) aquarium. In a couple months you will have a nice lot of bacteria in the filter that you can wash into your AP system to jump-start it.

If the yuck factor of peeing in it is too high for you and you can't get any urea fertilizer and can't be sure of the purity of the ammonia.......

Well some people have used fish emulsion fertilizer to start off. I've not tried it so can't endorse it.

Um, if you were to soak a cup of alfalfa pellets in a bucket of water for a few days, the resulting liquid might be worth testing for ammonia. (I know when I've left a bucket of alfalfa pellets out in the rain, a few days later the result smelled like it was full of ammonia.) I know many people use alfalfa as green manure and I use alfalfa pellets in my garden (though if they release the GM Alfalfa, I might not be too keen on using it anymore.)

Good luck finding an acceptable ammonia source for your fishless cycling.

Just for we Aussies;
"Alfalfa" is just Lucerne, a leguminous plant used for stock feed that produces Nitrogenous nodules in it's root system. Similar to Green Peas and Beans, which are also Legumes. These are used for rotation planting for soil cropping to replenish the Nitrogen in the soil.
Some people notice that Beans and Peas don't actually do so well in AP, that's because they produce their own Nitrogen etc. and don't deal well with any excess!

Cheers IanK

My beans (and peas) grow just fine in AP....

Why would you use a sponge filter? I thought you want that stuff that would get filtered out.

The pet store said in an ideal situation you'd run the tank fishless for 4 weeks anyway. By then the ice will have melted and I'll be good to go.

The recommendation with the sponge filter would be to use the squeezings from cleaning it to add into a regular gravel bed to kick start the bacteria colony in the gravel.

Also the sponge is not so much to filter out solids as to provide a habitat for the bacteria (rather than them living in gravel as in an AP system). I think the solids in my cousin's ad-hoc marine aquarium in MA simply built up in the sand and gravel. The minnows, crabs, mussels, and sea lettuce did fine for months.

Hanging a small amount of metal in your tank should give you adequate iron levels for no cost at all

Maybe if your pH is low enough to corrode it away but in that case you might not need to add extra iron at all. You do want to make sure that what ever metal you put in your tank doesn't have any other metal alloys mixed in it that could be harmful for your fish. Just any metal might not be so good since copper, zinc, led, nickle, aluminum, chrome, and others might not be what you want to be adding to the system. Plain Iron is fine but most of the rest of those building up in a system unmonitored could be bad for fish and or people.

Hi
I'm new here, yet to post in the new members section but i have found a source of clear ammonia that might be of interest to people for fishless cycling
it's called ammonchlor.
not sure if i'm allowed to post a link for the website here but i can if ok
Will be cycling a new aquarium and my ap system when it's up and running with this stuff so i can post my results as i go

Posting links is generally ok so long as you are not spamming, and not a competitor of BYAP. A link to a possible source of pure ammonia would probably be fine.

There are some good threads on it in other forums (eg http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showthread.php?p=604045) and it looks fine. I do not know why the maker says fish should not be added until you have done a 100% water change...that is really odd.

don't know but if it isn't pure, who knows what other compounds might be in there that would be removed or diluted enough to become safe with a complete water change.

Of course most systems are really difficult to do a 100% water change, at least most of mine are.

Hmph....the stuff is just ammonium chloride. I think I'll just stick with urea or humonia.

Because, as they note.... it is a concentrated ammonia source... ammonia is toxic to fish... therefore you shouldn't add fish until all ammonia is gone....

Changing 100% of water ensures all ammonia is gone....

Mind you.... this isn't going to cycle your tank any faster than using Urea, humonia... or even cycling with fish....

It's just that some people prefer the safety of "fishless" cycling...