First reef, Fluval Evo 13.5 -- Help needed!

[clatwo]

Hi!

I have experience keeping freshwater aquariums, my favorite being my highly planted 30Gal high-tech setup but I’m mostly clueless when it comes to reefs.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and a few days ago I had an opportunity : this local guy had to get rid of his setup for 300$CAD as he wasn’t taking care of it anymore for personal reasons I guess..

Hardware wise, here’s the deal:

- Fluval EVO 13.5, no lid.

- Jebao (Jecod) DXP-1500 DC controllable water pump (395GPH)

- Eheim Jager water heater hooked to an InkBird Smart controller

- Jebao SW2 Wavemaker

- Nicrew HyperReef 30W with a Nicrew LED Dual Timer

-InTank Media Basket

- Fzone ATO with optical sensor

- Refractometer

- Salifert Ammonia Testkit

And on the Live Stock side:

- A clown fish
- A fire shrimp
- 5 or so snails
- 3 or 4 hermit crabs
- 5 or 6 anemonas
- a **** ton of others things I couldn’t tell you about even if it killed me.

Now, I moved it home on Wednesday, kept everything underwater in clean buckets, kept the livestock separate in bags, “cleaned” the aquarium (mostly just rinsing the sand a bit, cleaning the windows, it was in a very sorry state..) added some biological filter media (biomax) as he only had like 3 rings in there, added a fresh filter pads on top of the media basket, removed the 2 years old activated carbon that was still in there, added a bit of new rinsed sterile sand to the old one (he had a very thin sand layer), put the rocks back in there carefully and then put the livestock back in.

I tested for ammonia, no issues there, BUT the salinity dropped from 38-40ppt to 32ppt because I needed to top it off with deionized water as I lost some water during the move and it wasn’t enough to get the pump working anymore. (The dude I bought it from had left the tank sitting for long enough that the water was really low when I got there and he didn’t have anything to top it off with). He told me he kept the salinity at 38-40ppm which seems really high..)

— I am totally aware I probably caused a salinity crash or something, basically like crashing my pH in a freshwater tank, but hey, what can you do? It was moving day in Quebec, every dang pet store was closed and even yesterday (Thursday) I called them all and none of them had any saltwater ready as they were just done using it for their own water changes.

So I bought a kilo of RedSea Coral Pro intending to make my own mix and slowly bring it back to 35ppm while doing water changes in the next two to three weeks… I have access to a Lab with a system to make my own deionized water so I should be fine on that side.

Once I was done with putting everything back together, I put the wavemaker on “else”, kept the water temp at 25.6 (that’s what it was set at) and kept the light off for almost 48hours to avoid any more stress on the tank.

Yesterday evening, I lit up the blue light only, and scheduled the timer with a 8HR schedule of full light, with an hour of ramp up, and two hours of blue evening display light after that… Then I fed the clownfish some Hikari marine -s- food and added 2ml of redsea reef energy ab+ and went to bed.

Here's a stupid picture, maybe some of you can help me ID what's in there?

Now, I’m aware it’s probably a ****show right now by most standards but I did my best. — What should be my next steps now to make sure everything survives and thrives?

 

[Saltyreef]

Doesnt look too bad actually.
Aim for 34-35ppt. Return the coral pro salt if you can and either pickup regular red sea salt (blue bucket) or get something like reef crystals.
I would just let everything coast right now and do as much reading as you can. Since you have coral to care for, get the basic element and nutrient test kits from salifert. Alk, cal, mag, p04 and nitrate. get yourself a premixed 3 part dosing solution (b-ionic alk, cal and mag) to start dosing by hand once you get a consumption trend going.

Start testing weekly. Then daily and over the next month you can calculate your alk, cal and mag uptake.

Dont worry about water changes yet since it sounds like you did a pretty good job of cleaning everything and once you get the salinity set and your topoff going it shouldnt move much.

 

[clatwo]

Doesnt look too bad actually.
Aim for 34-35ppt. Return the coral pro salt if you can and either pickup regular red sea salt (blue bucket) or get something like reef crystals.
I would just let everything coast right now and do as much reading as you can. Since you have coral to care for, get the basic element and nutrient test kits from salifert. Alk, cal, mag, p04 and nitrate. get yourself a premixed 3 part dosing solution (b-ionic alk, cal and mag) to start dosing by hand once you get a consumption trend going.

Start testing weekly. Then daily and over the next month you can calculate your alk, cal and mag uptake.

Dont worry about water changes yet since it sounds like you did a pretty good job of cleaning everything and once you get the salinity set and your topoff going it shouldnt move much.

Hopefully my local pet store has the regular Red Sea salts.

Any suggestions for the premixed 3 part dosing solution? What about Seachem products like Reef Complete?