Best way to cycle my new tank?

[Max Rackstraw]

Do I dare comment?

Yes.

 

[Lost in the Sauce]

This tank will be sps dominant so what sps frags to people tend to have luck with in maturing tanks? (If any) i was thinking green slimer but not so sure, they just tend to be iffy in new tanks.

Slow down. Take a breath and be patient. This went from "is this tank ready for any fish?", to "what SPS can I put in there right now?", within a day.

Realistically, very few if any SPS will thrive in that tank right now. It is brand spanking new.

You already know it's going to be months off maturing. Let it do its thing. Nothing happens fast in this hobby.

 

[brandon429]

That open real estate of white rock is an uglies magnet where quite a headache will soon set in for 98% of reefs, some lasting months / years in some cases truly it would be worth it to have the live rock $ instead.

dry rock reefs comprise nearly all of the invasion problems on the site outside of gha issues, all reefs can get those

your cycle analysis came from this thread of skip cycle setups

every tank was a skip cycle day one setup. Yours was just a smaller component of live rock but it’s enough to run whatever bioload the tank will see, you can see we are practiced in the matter

A thread tracking pure skip cycle instant reefs, no bottle bac

I'm at river city Aquatics in Austin rn Now this is skip cycle live rock If kept wet in saltwater it will not: Starve Get uncycled Fail to skip cycle Cause a mini cycle See all the coralline The bottom of the tank has pods and micro brittle stars, all healthy proof of being cycled with no...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[Max Rackstraw]

Slow down. Take a breath and be patient. This went from "is this tank ready for any fish?", to "what SPS can I put in there right now?", within a day.

Realistically, very few if any SPS will thrive in that tank right now. It is brand spanking new.

You already know it's going to be months off maturing. Let it do its thing. Nothing happens fast in this hobby.

Hahaha im wouldn't put sps in it unless specifically told there was types that would be alright! As far as i was concerned you outright couldn't put them in new tanks. Guess none of that comes through on the internet...

 

[c_healy]

Patience.

add your rock and saltwater, you can add some beneficial bacteria if you want but the most important thing is to just be patient and let your tank do what it’s going to do

 

[Crustaceon]

I currently have a quarter sized chunk of raw cocktail shrimp sitting in a perforated ziplock baggy on the bottom of a new system i'm starting that uses newly mixed salt water plus a minimal amount of dry rock and crushed coral substrate. The shrimp has been in there since sunday, when I added that and some bacteria plus a little bit of vodka (not required). The water clouded up on monday and it's been cloudy since. I'm going to remove the shrimp next sunday. The tank will likely clear up by the following wednesday and will be ready the first week of May. If I feel even more paranoid, I'll wait until mid May. I'm probably not going to test ammonia at all TBH due to bacteria in this tank having nothing to eat but whatever ammonia was released from a small chunk of shrimp for at least two solid weeks. That's PLENTY of time. I could swish that ammonia testing beaker....swish swish... oh what if? oh the forum might say OooOo!!! swish swish swish, but I know the tank is going to be fine from experience and applying non-changing factors. Wasting test reagents is wasting money or can create doubt which leads to tank instability (because you try to "fix" a non-issue) via misinterpretation of readings or simply having a defective test (which does happen). Sometimes it's just better to let go and say "yeah, I see the process happening with my own two eyes and when I no longer see that process and give it some extra time beyond that for safety, it's good enough as is". But of course, whatever floats your boat bro. What's going into when the tank is ready? Probably a millepora frag (many more after that) and a handful of blue-leg hermits. I'm not going to add 15 anthias, a clam and a holy grail torch to this 20g the first day it's up and running. That's nuts. The following month, it'll get a cherub angel. Maybe ONE or TWO more tiny fish months down the road. I feel like this is appropriate pacing (aside from starting with sps, lol but I have a lot of experience with them), which is why IME I'll avoid a lot of the nuisance algae issues with this tank. Pics to come.

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

The shrimp has been in there since sunday,

I'm going to remove the shrimp next sunday.

It's been in there longer than needed already. Take it out ASAP.

 

[Crustaceon]

It's been in there longer than needed already. Take it out ASAP.

NO! I don't WANNA! But yeah, you're correct. I probably could. Would it hurt to leave it in for a week? Also no. I've left shrimp in for two weeks to the point where it was unrecognizable as meat with no ill effect aside from the water remaining cloudy until I decided I had enough, removed the putrid shrimp and watched the water clear within a few days. I actually tested ammonia back then and still had a big fat zero on my test kit. That got old after the tenth or was it the fifteenth tank I set up and got the same results.

 

[PotatoPig]

I could purchase some tiny fish like a chromis

Carefully read up on Chromis before adding them if they’re a planned fish. They have potential to be evil little ***** who’ll kill each other and/or other fish in the tank, then go and die of disease anyway.

Nothing happens fast in this hobby.

Nitpick: Nothing good happens fast.

 

[Crustaceon]

Do I dare comment?

It's sad I have to comment on this because it is such a no-brainer, zero complexity topic that once again, has gone WAY down the rabbit hole, turning one of the easiest tasks in this hobby into the contemplating-the-practicality-of-Dyson-Spheres equivalent of when a person can add A clownfish to their tank, just because being technical sounds really dope. When I walk out to my car to drive it, do I measure the circumference of each tire, check and adjust pressure to the closest micro bar and magnaflux the rims to check for metal fatigue and cracking? No. I'm going to look at the car for a second or two, maybe notice if it has a tire with low pressure and get it in the psi ballpark, get in, start the car and go. Is it wrong to check all of those things to extreme detail? No. Is it needed for someone just learning to drive? No and that's a serious problem this hobby has right now. It isn't an F1 car and "the best" isn't a must have. It's an old beat up miata that you can flog on the track if you want to after adding lots of upgrades and massively tuning the chassis or just coast along as a daily driver. Either way, every tank starts as a very basic entity and WE add the complexity to it. Keeping a reef tank isn't inherently difficult. It's actually extremely easy if you know the basics (which are more basic than many experienced reefers here assume). We want this hobby to be accessible to as many new reefers as possible and guide them with the most basic, fool proof information and procedures available that we can all agree on WILL work, without necessarily going too far into detail unless that info is requested. I love and respect the scientific community for your contributions to humanity via your hard work and innovation and also our hardcore reefers who push the envelope on what can be done in a tank. That's fantastic, but I also tear my hair out every time I see a $20k+ reef tank with pale corals and horrible algae problems because they were bombarded with too much information and went down that optimization rabbit hole when their tanks would have completely avoided that fate had they just done the bare minimum.

 

[Crustaceon]

Slow down. Take a breath and be patient. This went from "is this tank ready for any fish?", to "what SPS can I put in there right now?", within a day.

Realistically, very few if any SPS will thrive in that tank right now. It is brand spanking new.

You already know it's going to be months off maturing. Let it do its thing. Nothing happens fast in this hobby.

100% correct. This hobby is all about patience. Sometimes it's being patient to a maddening degree. I look at things as doing something one day and seeing results a week to a few months down the road. This is sps life in a nutshell and realistically, you want to have all of your basic reef keeping down to a science before trying out sps. This is why we tell new reefers about "tank maturity". A major part of that maturity is your knowledge and experience of keeping reef tank WATER.

 

[Max Rackstraw]

Well tbf i remember my dad telling me how his first tank back in the 90s he had just a simple hang in sponge filter, a hob skimmer and a light with nothing but live rock. Kept boxfish, tangs, anemones, seahorses... Even an octopus and he hardly ever saw signs of disease, hardly ever lost a specimen. I have had a THOUSAND more problems than him with MUCH higher end equipment, much more knowledge of the chemistry, much less sensitive creatures and most importantly... All of the knowledge of the internet.

people overcomplicate this nowadays for certain. Theres truth in most things that get said... I learnt the hard way when i was testing and testing and fixating on test kit numbers, i tried to get perfect numbers on nitrate and phosphate only to cause a tank crash due to invinsible dinoflagellates. If i just let that tank do its thing it would have been fine.

Anyway i just started this thread to see if it was a good idea to add my clownfish to this tank yet or do something else to get it to mature more first... I think the little fellas are going in tomorrow along with a cc. Maybe in a month or two we'll start talking frags. But for now it'll just be the clowns and cc.

 

[Lost in the Sauce]

Well tbf i remember my dad telling me how his first tank back in the 90s he had just a simple hang in sponge filter, a hob skimmer and a light with nothing but live rock. Kept boxfish, tangs, anemones, seahorses... Even an octopus and he hardly ever saw signs of disease, hardly ever lost a specimen. I have had a THOUSAND more problems than him with MUCH higher end equipment, much more knowledge of the chemistry, much less sensitive creatures and most importantly... All of the knowledge of the internet.

people overcomplicate this nowadays for certain. Theres truth in most things that get said... I learnt the hard way when i was testing and testing and fixating on test kit numbers, i tried to get perfect numbers on nitrate and phosphate only to cause a tank crash due to invinsible dinoflagellates. If i just let that tank do its thing it would have been fine.

Anyway i just started this thread to see if it was a good idea to add my clownfish to this tank yet or do something else to get it to mature more first... I think the little fellas are going in tomorrow along with a cc. Maybe in a month or two we'll start talking frags. But for now it'll just be the clowns and cc.

The supply lines are not the same as when your dad was Reefing..

The volume of fish being brought in is likely 10x at a minimum, what was coming in, in the 90's. More fish = more chance for disease.

Ask most reefers here, how many coral they purchased in the first year of Reefing. How much new STUFF entered the tank on a yearly basis.

Now ask your dad. You'll likely find the pokemon "Got to catch them all" mentality did not exist then either.

All him how many people started their tanks with ugly blocks of concrete and pretended it was a reef tank.


There was None. Live rock was plentiful, and is still king today.

One thing that hasn't changed, is that patience is rewarded. Tanks take Time to mature. To rush it and get fancy, leads to undesirable outcomes.