About my 140g tank that is in my signature.

I am running a fishless cycle. Tank set up with 3/4ths new water and have slowly added water from cycled tanks when doing water changes on the other tanks.

Gravel is mostly new except for a small area(front to back of tank) where gravel was moved from an established tank

Filters are described in signature. Uv is not currently running

Plants are in the tank with a couple of hitchhiking regular pond type snails (small)

Water was cloudy this week but has cleared

Params

Ammonia - has remained and is still 0
Nitrites - at a constant 0
Nitrates - at a constant 20
ph - remained at a constant 7.6

Cannot find pure ammonia in local store (most have cloudy ammonia that suds up)

I am now seeing more growth of green algea on the transfered gravel and a bit on one of the new decorative ornaments...... Does this mean, with the algea growth, that my tank is safe to start transfering my goldfish? My first guess is to continue to wait it out, but the algea is confusing me

I would not rely on something as unpredictable and variable as algae growth, but your parameters are plainly saying that the tank is cycled.

I disagree. the nitrAte could have come from the water being added from established tanks or from tapwater (mine has 10ppm out of the tap). the lack of ammonia and nitrIte could be from little to no ammonia happening in the tank.

but I'm a little confused.

The tank was set up 10 days ago with 3 established filters?
and some water/gravel from existing tanks.
and has no bioload (nothing producing ammonia) to speak of since then?

If that is the case and there is no source of ammonia cept for the pond snails, your biofilter bugs are starving.

If the filters you added had established biomedia in them, they would handle whatever load of ammonia they had been handling in their previous tanks.

I found ammonia with no additives at Ace Hardware.

Thanks DataG

I'll check out Ace. Between work, my son's baseball practices and cub scout meetings, I've only been able to check out the local grocery stores. I never would have guessed Ace hardware. I'll see about getting there tomorrow.

Only the emperor 280 is/was fully cycled. The eheim is only a month old and the emperor 400 is brand new. Also there is a small section of gravel that I brought over from the 55g tank. But other than that everything else in the tank is new.

My nitrate from the tap is 0 so it may be coming from the other tank water.

I was so afraid of starting to move my fish and throw the tank into a full blown cycle with water changes everyday...etc. I really wanted to do a fishless cycle but I just couldn't find non-sudsing pure Ammonia.

Thanks again for the info.

It's no a clear picture but here is the algea that's on the new ornament and I've noticed that it's starting on the glass