Hi all thought this may be of use I purchased some household ammonia from homebase cost £1.99 also photos so you know what to look for.

front of bottle

Attach file:

---

  DSC_0021.JPG (977.53 KB)

back of bottle

Attach file:

---

  DSC_0020.JPG (1,379.84 KB)

Anyone local to me is welcome to use some of my bottle if they cannot find any .

I am going to set up a 165 litre tank, initially for plants only, with CO2 etc. When this is established, I shall add a few suitable fish. Should I go through the fishless cycle, prior to planting, or could I do the fishless cycle with the tank planted??

You can cycle with the tank planted. It will give the plants some time to establish their root systems before any fish are added.

Boots household Ammonia has always worked for me. If you have another source of fully cycled filter media, give this a squeeze into your new tank, looks pretty bad but it seeds the process with billions of bacteria and really speeds things up. I can fully cycle a tank in 10 days using the Squeeze and Ammonia method. Just make sure you do a 90% water change and clean up all the muck from the squeeze. You can add a full bio-load of fish immediately but it you only add a few initially there will be a die-back of bacteria and you will need to introduce fish in small doses thereafter to allow the bacteria to catch up again with the increased bio-load.