Cycling experiment.

[dakar]

Okay, finally getting our 180, wet about 1/2 way there now. Poor RO unit has been running for three days straight (good RO unit, poor water pressure & well water @ 60* isn't helping). Just using a 1" sand bed. Tossed in a heater and PH's to keep the circulation going for now, and of course a large cocktail shrimp to jump start the ammo.

Now I managed to locate some great looking base rock, super porous, and lightweight for its mass, water will litterly run right through it, so @ $1.59/lb tough to go wrong there, so I grabbed up the best looking 50lbs I could find. My guess is this stuff should turn into fantastic live rock in a short amount of time given the tremendous amount of sruface area. As soon as the LFS restocks with some new stuff I'll get another 50-100 lbs of this stuff. I realy like it. As soon as I get the rest of the water in and the sandstorm subsides I'll get some pics.

Now the expiriment part, I srcubbed and rinsed all the rock down pretty good and now the experiemnt, just tossed it in. Think the bacteria from the cycle will populate the rock as is without havign to add LR to the tank? I am going to toss in a few cups of live sand from the existing fuge to jump start the sand bed in a couple weeks.

Ultimate goal is to see if I can get the whole tank up and running WITHOUT having to pay out the nose for LR. I'm going to add 20-30lbs of LR rubble later to help boost the little critter population and establish itself.

[Reptoreef]

May take some added time, but should work just the same.

[dakar]

Well she's FINALLY filled up, and the sandstorm is starting to settle, can see about halfway to the back of the tank... gotta love that SD cloud. Definately going to have to create some sort of transfer pump or something. 180gals were toted upstairs 5g at a time :shock: lotsa up and down the stairs, that and I think my right arm is now an inch longer than the left. :lol:

Now the hardest part of all....waiting, waiting, and more waiting, good thing I have the 55 to play in for a while yet.

[Reptoreef]

It's the wait that seems to be the fall of us all.

[peregrinus]

i did some thing simaler to that with this last tank i just setup. i had a few utah rocks in my sump. put them in the tank with 2 cups of live sand to seed the utah sand i put in the tank. let it run for a couple of days to clear the water and put corals in. just some xeina, zoo's, encrusting gargonins. its been running for about 3 weeks has tons of pods and misys shrimp. i'm using natural sun light with 4 40 watt NO's.

[Reptoreef]

The next phase of "experiment tank"...

[dakar]

i did some thing simaler to that with this last tank i just setup. i had a few utah rocks in my sump. put them in the tank with 2 cups of live sand to seed the utah sand i put in the tank. let it run for a couple of days to clear the water and put corals in. just some xeina, zoo's, encrusting gargonins. its been running for about 3 weeks has tons of pods and misys shrimp. i'm using natural sun light with 4 40 watt NO's.

:shock: That's pretty agressive, have you been keeping a record of the water param's? That'd be quite the interesting nitrogen cycle to see recorded as it aged from startup.

[Grandmaster_Toad]

The experiment will work just fine. I am a bargin hunter.....and I have added $1.89 base rock to beginning tanks with much success. (after curing the rock of course) It was a great idea to add some live sand and a bit of rubble rock to the mix.

as a side note: regarding your dust cloud....lol...have you added your salt yet? I find that when setting up a tank adding some extra salt will help clear the tank up right away. Then a small amount of substrate vaccumming will clean up any of the settled debris.

GT

[dakar]

as a side note: regarding your dust cloud....lol...have you added your salt yet? I find that when setting up a tank adding some extra salt will help clear the tank up right away. Then a small amount of substrate vaccumming will clean up any of the settled debris.
GT

Adding extra salt? care to elaborate on that a bit? I put down the sand, and then added the water pre-mixed to 1.024SG, of course got really tired of chasing the plate around trying not to stir up the sand too badly and just started dumping it in, so it got good and stirred up.

Good thing is I tossed in the cocktail shrimp late last week, tested water last night and ammo is already up to 40ppm and nitrite up to .50ppm, no nitrate forming yet. That's a lot of water to populate. So at least the finer sand particles that are still cruising around will hopefully be bound up by bacteria and settle faster and stay that way. I did crank up the heater a little to bring the tank up to about 85* to give the bacteria a little metabolism boost since I didn't 'cure' the base rock, scrubbed it down and rinsed and tossed it in. The real experiment is to see how much longer if any for the critters to grow out and start populating the base rock.

[Grandmaster_Toad]

here is a few pics for an example...

1st pic (bottom of post) is tank 2 days after adding Southdown

2nd (middle pic) is 1 day after adding salt

3rd (top) is 3 days after salt addition.I also added a hang on filter just to help with the cleanup. The haze you see is actually on the glass.

I had the salinity running at about 1.30. When you clear up simple do your next few WC with less salt. The bacteria and microbes in your sand and rocks wont care a bit.

GT

[dakar]

Cool, thanks for the tip, I wasn't sure of what you meant originally. Might have to give that a whirl. Haven't built the canopy yet, so the top is wide open, a lot of surface area and evaporation is pretty rapid even without any lighting running yet.

Is there any scientific type explantion as to why the sand particles would settle faster with higher SG? (In english though, I'm no Randy Holmes, so covalent molecular bonding by whatever will go straight to the bit bucket.)

[peregrinus]

i did some thing simaler to that with this last tank i just setup. i had a few utah rocks in my sump. put them in the tank with 2 cups of live sand to seed the utah sand i put in the tank. let it run for a couple of days to clear the water and put corals in. just some xeina, zoo's, encrusting gargonins. its been running for about 3 weeks has tons of pods and misys shrimp. i'm using natural sun light with 4 40 watt NO's.

:shock: That's pretty agressive, have you been keeping a record of the water param's? That'd be quite the interesting nitrogen cycle to see recorded as it aged from startup.

i have not been testing like i should. i was going to test today when i get home. i did one test 1 1/2 weeks after setup ph was a little high and that was it.

[dakar]

Okay here we are just three weeks later, the large cocktail shrimp is completely gone, rotted away to nothing. Saw a small ammo spike (to about 10ppm) but i was testing sorta sporadically, saw nitrite jump to .5 for a tad, but never saw any nitrate. Everything has been testing out at 0's across the board for the past few days. (same test kit on the 29 that is cycling shows ammo and nitrate, sorta validates the tests)

Think it's likely there was not enough ammonia generated from the shrimp to populate that much water volume and the cycle never got rolling enough to make it up and over the hill? (nitrite would still be present then right?)

I suppose I could have missed the nitrate spike completely and I got lucky with a very short cycle. I started with dead sand, dead base rock, and a few pieces of LR from an existing tank, never got around to fetching the LS up from the 55's fuge, nor did I get around to ordering the LR rubble. Thought I'd have a lot more time.

What to do now, toss another cocktail shrimp in there and see what happens, or maybe adding a couple of small fish to the system and monitor params closely? I hate the idea of using critters to cycle, but this way if they start the cycle I can move them to another tank.

I will get the LS up this afternoon and add a few cups to jump start the SB, doubt I'll see much if any die off during the 2 minute shipping time :D

Thoughts?

[Reptoreef]

IMO, the LR and LS should be great for the cycle. Are you gonna drop you SG and temp to NSW levels, now???

[dakar]

Dropped the temp back down to 80 yesterday, and SG is at 1.028 now, so guesstimating about a 15-20 gal waterchange with just RODI should bring SG back down to normal levels.

You think I just missed seeing the nitrate cycle?

[Reptoreef]

Possibly...

[dakar]

:lol: You're a lot of help! :lol: Just concerned that the cycle ran out of steam due to shear water volume and not enough ammonia. Though it took a solid two weeks for the shrimp to break down completely.