Quote Originally Posted by Grandmaster_Toad
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.