Thanks, Urban! (I figured you'd have a good answer for me on this!)Originally Posted by urbanfarmer
So if I understand correctly, using the unit mass ratios, 4ppm ammonia would become 10.8ppm nitrite and eventually 14.6ppm nitrate. This tallys within API test kit accuracy at least, with what I am seeing for ammonia and nitrate. Still a bit surprised I never saw any nitrite to speak of, but my assumption is that I seeded the system with sufficient nitrobacter to continuously convert the nitrites as the nitrosomonas produced it.
I'm conducting an experiment currently. Since the nitrosomonas took the ammonia from 2ppm to zero in 12 hours overnight, I figure they will take 1ppm to zero in about 6 hours. I added sufficient humonia (gee whiz!) to bring the ammonia level back up to roughly 1ppm. Gonna monitor nitrites hourly for the next 6 hours to see if I get any sort of bump up. At the end of the experiment, if the ammonia is all converted and I haven't seen a nitrite spike, I'll know the nitrobacter ate up the nitrites as they were produced. That ought to also bring the nitrates up to 21 or 22ppm as well. (Won't be able to tell about that though since both API color charts I have show no difference in color between 10ppm and 20ppm nitrate. Grrrrr!).
Film at eleven!