Hi, I'm Keith

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"No Longer The Guy Without FaceBook"
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Welcome to the lagoon, Keith!
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I must say I wasn't expecting so many replies. This community is very welcoming thank you.
So I'm going on my fourth week I believe and here's what I've done:
I. I built my aquascape out of marcos, and some rock that came with the tank, I used muriatic acid and bleach before seriously rinsing in rodi water and leaving in the sun for a week and a half.
2. I filled my tank with 0 tds rodi water and added salt to 1.024. I added live sand after
that which made a huge mess in the tank, I will not add sand after water again.
3. I used bio-spira and began dosing ammonia nitrate to way past 2ppm and eventually dialed it back.
4. Nitrates built quick and ammonia was being consumed at a rapid rate as ezpected, but then I started to notice nitrates went to 0.
5. everything was at 0 as if it was fresh saltwater, and nothing was growing in the tank at week 2.
6. Thinking there's no way I lost my nitrates I added ammonia, and it was gone the next day.
7. I went to a LFS and talked to a lady who's rap sheet includes 30 years of reef keeping and she said "why not add some snails", I kinda wanted to add something and I figure she could see that, so I bought 3 snails and 3 hermit crabs.
8. After a week of having the snails they are all still alive, even though I see no real algae. I will occasionally see a hermit but they are either alive or dead and not putting out and ammonia. Alive
9. Still reading 0 ammonia, well .25 using api, and 0 nitrite and 0 nitrate I added a little bit of ammonia nitrate to the tank. I read up on the danger adding ammonia nitrate to a tank with snails and hermits and found that they are rather resilliant to ammonia, so I kept it at 1ppm.
10.
10. Today I'm seeing 0 ammonia 0 nitrite and 20ppm nitrate. I see a few speckles of what I believe are diatoms, they look almost like rust on my sand and a few small spots on my rock. I also added an algae wafer that I use for my pleco in hopes the snails will find it, but this was days ago and they haven't found it. This may have caused the diatoms.

So at this point I feel like the nitrogen cycle is complete. Do I need to encourage the diatoms to bloom, followed by the cyano I believe then the coraline algae?

I have not been running my protein skimmer BM curve 5 at all because all it did was bubble over. I was gonna wait till there was something in the water for it to skim at create the needed film to stop the overflow...? hopefully

Pictures up next
 
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