/diy/ - Do It Yourself

I am trying to help my son with aquaponics for a science fair project. I've never done this before, and he is doing it small scale in a 25 gallon tank.

We put the first water in on 9/26. It is now 10/19 and we are having huge Nitrite and Nitrate numbers. I did a water change last night of 2/3 of the tank, and we are still hitting 40-80ppm Nitrate and 1ppm Nitrite. This was after letting it sit over night.

We have Fluval soil top layer, vermacompost bottom layer, and we have only 5 plants in there right now, that are aquarium plants. We want to put his edible plants in a garden tower we made, but we were told to wait for the cycle before doing this, and add fish (no fish in tank yet).

Ammonia is holding steady at .25 but was about .5 last night before change.

At what point do the numbers go down? When can we expect to put fish in if the nitrate and nitrites are going down? Should we just add more plants now?

I am getting mixed info on it all.