Wanted to get your feedback on this.

As you all probably know, I just set up a new (to me) 150g. To seed the cycle, I've used between 5 & 10 pounds of gravel (which I put underr my silica sand) directly from my 55g Discus tank. I also have several pieces of driftwood, rocks, two heaters, a seeded Whisper 60, and a seeded Magnum 350 in there. Also on my initial fill, I used 32 gallons of the 55g Discus tank water.

I've been testing everything but hardness about every 12 hours. My first test showed a trace .25 of amonia. Everything else was zeros. The next mornining the ammonia was also at zero.

I added some corys and juvenile BN just to see if it moved a bit. Everything is still testing zero. Almost three days in with fish living, eating and - well, making waste.

My question is - based on your experience - is my spike yet to come? Or since I used so much seeded material was my small trace initially my spike?

How would you proceed in monitoring the water and in adding more fish?

As you have added aged water and seeded filters (i would have recomended you did this anyway) i think you will find you should have very little in the way of problems, but i would introduce the rest of the fish slowly so as not to overload the system, how long have you got before you have to strip the other tank down ?

The spike thing seems to be pretty cut and dry. We've all seen the charts of that 35 day cycle.

Even with no 'seeding' you're yet to reach the first spike of Ammonia.

What you're likely to find, and this is basically "educated guess" material, is your 'seeding' will platau or 'cap' those spikes, so that although they may still occur, they won't be as severe.

This is exactly what we wanted Monkeh to do, when he installed that rack of tanks. He was going to monitor those tanks through cycling, under differing conditions. One with fish, one fishless, etc.

Then the Bub' came along..