My baby is UP!

[storrisch]

yeah your nitrates are gonna sky rocket for a bit. The bacteria begin to break down the ammonia into nitrites and then into nitrates. There is nothing in your tank that will consume the nitrates for now. A refugium later on will help with the nitrate level and water changes are the only thing that will fully cut them out.

[Gilraen Took]

Okay, the ammonia has gone down a bit and I'm starting to get a green and brown algae bloom so much for it not moving^_^

[Gilraen Took]

When should I be making my next move with the tank? It's got close to nothing for ammonia levels and the other 2 are still sorta high. Also, the algae seems to be taking over(hence where my worrying begins ) and is covering a lot of my coralline. Should I leave it or do something else with it?

[storrisch]

the algae shows a step in the right direction. depending on how high the nitrates and nitrites are you might be able to add a few inverts to help keep the algae down.

[Gilraen Took]

Hm, as of this morning the ammonia was almost nothing, the trites are about .5 and the trates are around 40. And the algae is covering my tank... So could I get away with a couple of snails then, or should I wait it out a bit longer?

[pledosophy]

Wait until your nitrites drop to zero before adding snails. if it were me i'd feed the tank either fish food or a prawn from the grocery store, wait 4 hours and then test again.

This will make sure that the bacteria is developed enough to handle bioload and not just that the present ammonia has been used.

[Gilraen Took]

I dropped some fish food in and the ammonia level hasn't changed all day. It's still at 0, the nitrites are a little under .25 and the nitrates are a little under 10 ppm.

[110galreef]

Sounds like your just about there.....just want your nitrites to come down some....

Maybe a WC...

[Gilraen Took]

Yes yes YES!!!! JUST did a water chech, will go by the LRS to confirm, but I got a reading of 0s across the board^_^ And the best part about that is that it'll handle bio load. I put 3 nass snails in there yesterday to help with the sand bed and have fed them a bit and the readings STILL are at 0 this morning ^_^ Now to get something on that blasted cyano!

[pledosophy]

48 hours of no light will kill the cyano. It is a common problem during cycling. If the cyano keeps returning it is going to be from a water quaility issue and will need to be addressed differently.

[Gilraen Took]

I ended up waiting, and got the tank fully cycled. I added an ocellaris(erm, yea... was gonna wait on the fish, but I'm a sucker, and the poor little one was being picked on at the store.... by people, not fish...), the nitrites, nitrates and ammonia were still at 0s 6 days later, and I added 2 blue leg hermits, and 3 nerites.

Also, I got some tiny zooanthid frags(few polyps each) they were doing well the other day when I first put them in the tank, but now only 3 of the 4 single polyps, and one of the colonies are open. The rest are staying about half open. There were 2 colonies on the piece of rock that had my majano(which isn't in that tank) and one of the two hasn't opened at all. The bases of them are still dark fleshy gray though. They were under metal halides at the store, and I have them under pc lighting, the amm/rate/rite are all still at 0, the spg is around 1.025, the ph is around 8.0-8.4, themotile inverts are happy. I don't know what the alk. is, don't have a test kit. Also, one of my heads of anthelia is looking half dead this morning. Could it be because I left my lights on too long yesterday? I got off of work late, and didn't get to turn them off for an extra hour... Also, the temp is a couple of degrees too low, I'm going to get a better heater on monday(one with a setting for how hot you want the tank...) so it might work better(I think this one quit working, haven't seen the light on, and it let the tank get too cool last night)

[110galreef]

Just leave the zoo's be they should come around as long as the water params are good as it seems they are. They extra hour of light is not a big deal!

[Loverotties]

It's getting there!

[tabwyo]

My apartment lit up like that from my tank and somebody turned me in for growing pott!!!!!! The cops really dug my aquarium BTW.

[Gilraen Took]

Oh, I'm just waiting for the home owners association to decide that they don't like the light coming from my room *rolls eyes* They're a bunch of whiny brats....