hello! i'm a scuba diver and often freshwater tank enthusiast who is starting my first saltwater tank. i'm going to use this thread as a personal journal to keep myself accountable. 
how this started is that my wife found a pea crab in an oyster last valentine's day and wanted to keep it alive so we overnighted a 3 gallon tank from amazon and got saltwater from our local petstore (petqua - highly recommended) and (i'll be danged) we kept the dang thing alive for 6 months with frozen plankton. it even released a clutch of eggs before it died.
we kept the tank cycling because of the eggs and a neighbor recently gifted us their child's 20 gallon tank so i got saltwater and 20 pounds "live rock" from petqua and live sand (40 pounds caribsea fiji) and a filter and light (aquaclear 50 and smatfarm 60w) and dumped the old tank's ingredients in and am cycling (with light off). i plan on adding microbacter clean and tim's 1 and only and purple up for the next couple weeks and testing my guts out and praying for cca.
i'm long term oriented and in no rush at all and eventually want a complex coral tank. my main questions/concerns right now are:
plenty of algae on the old tank, need to get rid of that
next to a window - not ideal but only spot for us - how to combat sunlight and temperature flux
which fish or two to add once it's stable, because these will probably be permanent residents of a small reef tank
how to grow the cca - if anyone in nyc has a cca source, i'm happy to pay ofc
don't want to kill anything
photo for continuity (light on). thanks for reading!
how this started is that my wife found a pea crab in an oyster last valentine's day and wanted to keep it alive so we overnighted a 3 gallon tank from amazon and got saltwater from our local petstore (petqua - highly recommended) and (i'll be danged) we kept the dang thing alive for 6 months with frozen plankton. it even released a clutch of eggs before it died.
we kept the tank cycling because of the eggs and a neighbor recently gifted us their child's 20 gallon tank so i got saltwater and 20 pounds "live rock" from petqua and live sand (40 pounds caribsea fiji) and a filter and light (aquaclear 50 and smatfarm 60w) and dumped the old tank's ingredients in and am cycling (with light off). i plan on adding microbacter clean and tim's 1 and only and purple up for the next couple weeks and testing my guts out and praying for cca.
i'm long term oriented and in no rush at all and eventually want a complex coral tank. my main questions/concerns right now are:
plenty of algae on the old tank, need to get rid of that
next to a window - not ideal but only spot for us - how to combat sunlight and temperature flux
which fish or two to add once it's stable, because these will probably be permanent residents of a small reef tank
how to grow the cca - if anyone in nyc has a cca source, i'm happy to pay ofc
don't want to kill anything
photo for continuity (light on). thanks for reading!
