[zum14]

Hello. My searches in the normal places couldnt find an answer so new thread. Being that I've got some water circulating in my tank now I figure I should get the cycle started. I've done it with pure ammonia in the past with success and am doing it again this time. The plan was to cycle the tank, when the cycle completes I was going to grab a bunch of rubble from somewhere and add that to my tank to seed it with some pods, worms and probably some algae which I'm really good at growing. Anywho, I'm wondering now when the cycle completes and I add this life to the tank with the rubble I probably shouldn't be spiking my tank with ammonia. So at that point how does one keep the tank alive but empty? I don't want to lose my bacteria base by stop feeding and have to cycle again. The plan is to keep it this way till sometime in July. Being that I'm starting with dry rock I want to take things really slow and give things a chance to really establish. Plus I'm out of town for a good week and a half in June and don't want the wife to have to worry about the tank. I also will use this time to set up my qt system and maybe get someone in there for monitoring, maybe. Depends on the wife. Thanks for any input.