Newbie with a question

J

jgosdin00

My tank has been up and running for a little over a month now. I have a little over 100 lbs of marco rock (base rock) in the tank and I added 3 pieces of cured rock from the LFS to seed it with. I have a 3 1/2 deep sand bed. i placed 2 pieces of raw, cooked shrimp from the super market in the tank and both of those have decomposed and disappeared. i have my refugium light over 10 lbs of miracle mud and spaghetti culerpa on all the time and am just running my actinics 6 hours a day right now. I have my protien skimmer running as well and it is now just breaking in but not pulling any gunk out. I have tested every week and other than my ph running around 8.0, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate have been at a constant 0 reading. I have not made a water change since starting all of this as my salinity/specific gravity is just at the top end of what is acceptable. when should I expect my parameters to go up? do I need to stop skimming? do I need to leave the light off? Have I had a small cycle and just not known it? Any guidance would be much appreciated.
 
I cycled my tank with Fort Worth tap water - they add ammonia to the water to help eliminate the chlorine smell. I checked for nitrites each day until I got a reading. Then I checked for nitrates each day until I got a reading, and then each day until nitrates went to zero. You may have missed the cycle by waiting for a week between testing.

David
 
David, then would it be safe to say that I have infact had a cycle? I have been adding ph buffer to get my ph in check and purple up to help with the algea growth on my rocks. do I continue to go the path I have laid out now or do I need to tweek the lights by turning them off and turn the skimmer off to allow for additonal growth?
 
It probably cycled, but you could do it again and watch it more closely this time to verify a cycle. As I understand it, a new tank is really in a state of cycle for about the first year while it is building colonies of bacteria throughout the tank. The bacteria need to be fed, and they need time to increase in numbers, and spread all through the tank!

I would think that a normal light cycle would provide the conditions for building up the kinds of bacteria that will ultimately inhabit your reef. That is my guess. There is nothing for your skimmer to pull out right now, and I would want to leave it turned off for a few months so that you leave all the "goodies" in there at the beginning. There is not an over abundance of nutrients in the tank, so no use for the skimmer right now, and no use for water changes.

You joined the club in 2005. Are you just now setting up a tank?

David
 
i had a 72 gal back then and had it up and running for a about a year but i lived in an apartment and separted from my girlfriend at the time, i had to take it down. i met my wife 3 years ago and we purchased a house with a room dedicated for the tank one day. i accumilated over time the equipment I believed to be the best set up for what I wanted and then LED's came out and screwed everything up. JK. i like the MH's i have but they do put off some heat. i am working towards a mixed reef set up with around 7-10 fish in total and just let the tank mature. i didnt have a decent skimmer on the tank before nor the equipment I have now so I want to make sure I do it right.

I will turn off the light to the tank and turn off the skimmer. that should definitely help with the heat issue I currently have. My chiller shouldnt go off as much. I will go ahead and add a couple of more shrimp as well to give the tank some more bacteria to grow from.

i have a couple of books i have read but there is nothing specific that states what you will see or how things will react. it is always a process and once the process is over then you can move to the next step.

I appreciate your responses and will let you know how things progress. I will also take a couple of picture before I turn off the lights and post so I can get some feed back as well.
 
I think that they were recommending that you run a normal light cycle (not turn it off) but my personal opinion is that you don't really need too much light each day to have a cycle, based on my understanding on the bacteria growing.

Make sure that you didn't accumulate ammonia/nitrite test kits that have gone bad and isn't registering anything, as they do go bad after a couple years :)
 
I ran my tank for 3 months before I put any coral in the tank. I think it was 6 months before I put any fish in there. But I have read where some have have had coral and fish successfully in their tanks after a week. Everyone interprets what they have learned a little differently, so we all end up doing things a little different, I think.

David
 
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