cabo650 said:
I also am a new hobbyist with a 120 litre. same situation. only i have added just 10 ml of ammonia. levels are currently .25ppm ammonia, .5ppm nitrate, 1ppm nitrite. Not really sure what the benefit of doing a fishless cycle is. What it means, or really how to do it and where these levels should be, and for how long?
As stated in the preceding posts, there is no benefit whatsoever in turning your tank into a toxic waste dump site. Ammonia is a lethal substance. It is lethal to many of the very same germs that you are trying to cultivate in the tank. That's why if you check under the kitchen sink you'll find a couple of cleaning and disinfectant products that contain ammonia.
Ammonia is even toxic to plants, but at the same time this substance is very high in Nitrogen, which is a critical component to life itself, so the plants have figured out a way to use it by storing it internally as Nitrate and then re-converting Nitrate back into Ammonia in order to use it. Ammonia in the water can also cause algal blooms to form if there is sufficient light in the tank. The use of Ammonia in tank cycling and in planted tanks specifically is a flawed and useless concept.
Since Ammonia is constantly being produced in any biological system, nature has devised a way to de-toxify the environment by the use of certain germs that, like plants, employ a mechanism to pull the Nitrogen from the Ammonia molecule. These are the bacteria that you are trying to cultivate in the sediment, in the water, in the filter and on every "wetted" surface in the tank. Bacterial species such as Nitrosonomas sp. are very popular for combining Oxygen and Ammonia to create Nitrite. Other species such as Nitrobacter sp. then combine Oxygen with Nitrite to create Nitrate.
The development of these species occurs naturally in any tank and the bacteria multiply quickly, however, certain numbers of the bacterial colony are required to effectively deal with the ammonia production of living systems. If you set your tank up and did nothing else, then in 6-8 weeks it's a certainty that sufficient populations of bacteria will have colonized filter, water, sediment and surfaces to deal with the waste production of a small population of fish. After another week the populations will have grown even more and that way more fish could be added. But everyone is impatient and instead of waiting, they want to add fish right away so the thinking is that by adding ammonia, this will generate the bacterial populations faster. Of course this doesn't really happen and those who go over the top wind up killing as many bacteria as they create simply due to toxic levels of Ammonia which also wipe out the other types of useful bacteria which perform other functions and which have nothing to do with nitrification. It's just like using Mr. Clean on your kitchen floor. Even the nitrifying bacteria themselves are killed because unless there is sufficient Oxygen, they cannot convert all that extra Ammonia anyway and the concentration levels fry them.
In a planted tank, the plants themselves help create the infrastructure for microbial action in the sediment and filter. They interact with the bacteria. Plants, if well fed and cared for, add Oxygen to the system and perform other functions such as excreting carbohydrates, proteins and amino acids which feed and encourage the development of all useful bacterial colonies. Plants will also uptake Ammonia and so will help in direct de-toxification of the tank, which helps support the fish.
cabo650 said:
My tap is extremely soft with 7.2 pH. I desire a stable pH of acidic to neutral.
Why? stable pH has no bearing on either plant or fish health. This is not a good goal and it will not help you to have a healthier tank. It is not the necessarily the tank pH itself which adds any benefit, but instead one has to determine the reasons of the movement of the pH.
cabo650 said:
Not sure how to increase hardness to stabilize the pH without increasing the pH in the process. I read about adding baking soda to increase hardness, but this did not work and only raised pH to 7.6+
The more you worry about pH the less successful you will be, especially if you are operating a CO2 enriched tank. ph and KH are related but you have a poor understanding of this relationship. You need to go to the Water Chemistry sub-forum and carefully study the sticky thread
All about Water Hardness
You should also pay a visit to the Tutorials sub-forum and read the articles there. This will help to focus your attention on the things in a planted tank that really matters. All the other things will automatically be taken care of if you execute the fundamentals correctly.
Cheers,