Mike S's 120 Build

[Mike S]

Thanks the bellus angels look very nice also. From the pictures I've seen I'm partial to the females.

So far I'm very happy with the rock. I was worried about it leaching phosphates but so far the cheapo test kit is barely reading 0.25 ppm.

After two weeks of making a ton of white foam, my skimmer finally started producing a nice tea color liquid. It happened just like that. One minute it was foaming away and then it just decided to behave.

 

[Mike S]

I'm about 3 weeks into my cycle and so far so good. I had been ghost feeding occasionally since the start and added some cocktail shrimp a little over a week ago. My ammonia levels had been just a little north of 1 pom for the past two weeks and dropped off to 0 over the weekend. Nitrites had been over 5 pom and seem to be going down. I am starting to see a little bit of diatoms so Im guessing my initial cycle is getting closer to being done.

I added some rubble rock a two weeks ago. Picked a bunch of pieces that had lots of coraline algae on them and it migjt be wishful thinking but it looks like it is starting to spread to my dry rock. Two of the pieces even have some little florescent star shaped green polyps that come out when I turn my lights on. The kids even noticed a snail the must have hitch hiked on the rock. Life!

I plumbed in a five over the weekend and put in a bunch rubble rock from my dry rock order. I'm going to try to get some macro algae in there in the next week or two and pick up a few snail and/or hermits for the cleanup crew. Hopefully in a few more weeks I can start to add a few fish.

One issue that I think I might have to deal with is my phosphates are reading around 3.0 pom using a red sea test kit. Guess that is the dry rock. I'm starting to read up on using seaklear. Santa is also bringing me a brs reactor to help me with the phosphate fight.