Cycling experiment.

[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.

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]

You're a lot of help! 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.