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Help A Newbie with Cycling...
Hola Reefers, I'm new to the hobby and starting out my first salt water reef tank. Here are the stats you likely want:
12 gallon Nanocube
~2" live sand
~16lbs Live Rock in the display tank
No "unnatural" filtration in the back
~1.5 lbs of Live Rock chunks in the first filtration section
Charcoal in the second filtration section
Heater and pump in the third filtration section
I've had the tank "cycling" for 12 days now. I got salt water from my LFS, which they make a bit concentrated, and they instructed me to dilute it appropriately in the tank. They actually told me to use tap water that was treated with Prime for the dilution, which I did, and I sort of regret. The sg is about 1.022.
My concern is that my tank doesn't seem to be cycling, or perhaps I'm just not patient enough. The live rock looked pretty clean when I got it from my LFS - assuming it was cured, so I wasn't noticing much in the way of die off. I added half of an uncooked deli shrimp to the tank at about day 3, and it's all decomposed now with nothing left but the shell. Here are the numbers that haven't been changing much.
I'm using the "Marine Lab" test kit from "Red Sea". pH has been a bit low at about 7.9. Alkalinity is "high" which my kit says is 2.9 - 3.6 milli-equivalents per liter.
Total ammonia (in ppm's) has been stuck at 0.25 the whole time (Day 1, 3, 5, 8, and today, day 12).
Nitrite (in ppm's): 0.2, 0.2, 0.1, 0.05, 0 (for days 1, 3, 5, 8, and 12)
Nitrate (in ppm's): 2.5, 2.5, 5.0, 2.5, 0 (for days 1, 3, 5, 8, and 12)
I was expecting the ammonia to spike, especially as the shrimp was decomposing. I'm afraid the "Prime" stuff and use of tap water might be preventing a rise in ammonia?
The tank otherwise has been changing a bit. There's definately a few living things in there - lots of what I'm assuming are bristle worms. A few mini brittle stars it looks like, and one other starfish. I started to see air bubbles forming on the live rock at day 5. More and more bubbles appeared throughout the day and eventually they were rising from the sand as well. At about day 7 a lot of brown algae started appearing in the tank. Day 8 I saw some green plants growing on the rock that looked like little tree's. They're getting bigger and bigger. Looks like a similar plant growing out of the sand now by day 12, but the green plants seem to get coated in the brown algae pretty quickly. Oh, and I've been running my pc lights during cycling. Started out at 12 hours/day and once the brown algae started I shifted down to 10 hours/day.
Does it sound like things are going correctly???
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