What if I don't have another reef? I can't imagine seneye doesn't want people to skip using their stuff if we don't have another reef at home to calibrate? Can't I use fresh mixed saltwater mixed with new RODI water? Or RODI water? You can't let slides dry out so traveling somewhere to calibrate it seems like a conundrum.
Updated cycling science trends in 2023
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What if I don't have another reef? I can't imagine seneye doesn't want people to skip using their stuff if we don't have another reef at home to calibrate? Can't I use fresh mixed saltwater mixed with new RODI water? Or RODI water? You can't let slides dry out so traveling somewhere to calibrate it seems like a conundrum.
I suspect you have a link for the "prep"? I've read everything in the world on QT, is prep different?
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the fish need to be passed through fallow by you or the trusted party you buy from
they need to be actually pre treated with meds if they're susceptible species beyond two common clownfish, they need observational quarantine 30 days minimum in a non scary quarantine system. anything you see online about two pvc pipes in a ten gallon tank with hob is scary quarantine
to find strong quarantine/observation system look up Tamberav's posts which mention Paul B's quarantine method from his book. he has several clay items, a clay brick, a terra cotta pot vs white reflective pvc, he has darkened common epoxy gravel, low subdued lighting, plastic plants, it makes fish less terrified. from the reefbeef podcast: bad quarantine is bad, Rich wrote that and I thought it was great. when we buy pre quarantined fish we are trusting them to be prepped in a way as to reduce all stress. nothing can beat the dedication required to do that at home.
you cannot have your holding tank near the display, due to aerosol transfer risks. another room...
they need to be actually pre treated with meds if they're susceptible species beyond two common clownfish, they need observational quarantine 30 days minimum in a non scary quarantine system. anything you see online about two pvc pipes in a ten gallon tank with hob is scary quarantine
to find strong quarantine/observation system look up Tamberav's posts which mention Paul B's quarantine method from his book. he has several clay items, a clay brick, a terra cotta pot vs white reflective pvc, he has darkened common epoxy gravel, low subdued lighting, plastic plants, it makes fish less terrified. from the reefbeef podcast: bad quarantine is bad, Rich wrote that and I thought it was great. when we buy pre quarantined fish we are trusting them to be prepped in a way as to reduce all stress. nothing can beat the dedication required to do that at home.
you cannot have your holding tank near the display, due to aerosol transfer risks. another room...
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I think it's solid safe and valid to verify the lowering of ammonia before proceeding. you will have the right tool for the job
if you add ammonia and fritz and nothing changes, that means active bac. if a small bump happens then ten mins later it's resolved, that's active bac.
do -not-dose ammonia to 2 ppm, use half.
@carguy4471 do you have access to a fully running reef tank to benchmark your seneye from
if you add ammonia and fritz and nothing changes, that means active bac. if a small bump happens then ten mins later it's resolved, that's active bac.
do -not-dose ammonia to 2 ppm, use half.
@carguy4471 do you have access to a fully running reef tank to benchmark your seneye from
Not at home. The best I could do is a LFS. And I'd really rather not put anything in my tank that came from one. BRS is only a 30 minute drive from home.....
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If the seneye can't be benchmarked on a running reef for a known baseline that's a huge issue in using it for cycling proofs.
buy it from a pet store, have them pre tune it for you if required, those slides have to be pre soaked in water from a display, then the unit calibrated to that display water to make it useful here. once your aquarium matures maybe it will help then, but initially it's accuracy is in question if you just set it up along with a dry start reef.
buy it from a pet store, have them pre tune it for you if required, those slides have to be pre soaked in water from a display, then the unit calibrated to that display water to make it useful here. once your aquarium matures maybe it will help then, but initially it's accuracy is in question if you just set it up along with a dry start reef.
I guess this is slightly confusing to me. Seneye doesn't have a solution for new reefer to use their product?
The seneye website says calibration is not required. It does however outline how to trim the unit to match other testing methods.
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All it means is you can't use it to make earth shattering proofs on cycling out of the gate. We need that verification step to quell any doubts in its readout as it slowly begins to disagree with non digital test kits. I for sure have seen problems getting them established in cycling reefs, for example if it says .9 ppm nh3 we wouldn't immediately accept such an outlier as fact, without benchmarking
* if you setup the tank with bottle bac, no fish, and calculated 1 ppm ammonia dosing not two ppm, and a ground up pinch of fish food pestled into powder (high surface area quick dissolution carbon known bottle bac boost due to strains involved) and merely wait ten days, then use that water for your slide soak 48hrs the seneye out of the box has a real chance of being accurate.
Don't tune it based on any non digital test kit for sure.
90% chance it works fine after this ten day aging showing as .00x reading and that's legit to begin cycle work with your new bioload.
Just delay it ten days, that makes a known functioning base control system and i bet that starting 1ppm is not there when you boot that rascal up
If that exact timing and approach reads something crazy, manually trim it to .005 in the tuning section after your 48 hour slide soak prep
that's very very on par with other posts and actually a bit high. It leaves a tendency to read high vs low to the truth level, can be used for cycling proofs then.
Once tuned, it's so accurate you can dribble in some ammonia and watch it rise then get eaten up oxidatively in 15 minutes if indeed it matches the command of a years old reef.
If that semi- tuned seneye can't resolve another test load then yes I'll be amazed and heartbroken live time lol
* if you setup the tank with bottle bac, no fish, and calculated 1 ppm ammonia dosing not two ppm, and a ground up pinch of fish food pestled into powder (high surface area quick dissolution carbon known bottle bac boost due to strains involved) and merely wait ten days, then use that water for your slide soak 48hrs the seneye out of the box has a real chance of being accurate.
Don't tune it based on any non digital test kit for sure.
90% chance it works fine after this ten day aging showing as .00x reading and that's legit to begin cycle work with your new bioload.
Just delay it ten days, that makes a known functioning base control system and i bet that starting 1ppm is not there when you boot that rascal up
If that exact timing and approach reads something crazy, manually trim it to .005 in the tuning section after your 48 hour slide soak prep
that's very very on par with other posts and actually a bit high. It leaves a tendency to read high vs low to the truth level, can be used for cycling proofs then.
Once tuned, it's so accurate you can dribble in some ammonia and watch it rise then get eaten up oxidatively in 15 minutes if indeed it matches the command of a years old reef.
If that semi- tuned seneye can't resolve another test load then yes I'll be amazed and heartbroken live time lol
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So basically the seneye is useless for a new reefer cycling a tank? Or am I not reading this correctly?
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I believe you need to create a known compliant and functioning environment for it to measure first. fritz plus ground up fish food plus a heated circulated stack of reef rocks and ten days = a known functioning biofilter you can tune it to.
you're having to manually force it to .oo5 via the trim feature if it shows wildly off that base, it's what a tuned seneye would read absolute worst case scenario on a stocked reef tank owing to hundreds of viewed logs.
from that initial tune, you then zap it with test ammonia and watch for the rise and fall, you can start playing with it then. add fish after that second up/down run. that's your preverification. there's no rush to get in quicker than ten days but I would add this, about 75% or more in my opinion are accurate out of the box IF you slide prep 48 hours correctly, and not start off with very much ammonia at all. .5 ppm total equivalent in the cycle water would be plenty. you need to bring up that meter at the start on water that isn't grossly off par from what running reefs see, it's why we don't want the normal huge blast of ammonia.
there's a very good chance it will read .001 due to no real bioload, high dilution, and active bacteria that literally made the test loading .001 rather quickly.
you're having to manually force it to .oo5 via the trim feature if it shows wildly off that base, it's what a tuned seneye would read absolute worst case scenario on a stocked reef tank owing to hundreds of viewed logs.
from that initial tune, you then zap it with test ammonia and watch for the rise and fall, you can start playing with it then. add fish after that second up/down run. that's your preverification. there's no rush to get in quicker than ten days but I would add this, about 75% or more in my opinion are accurate out of the box IF you slide prep 48 hours correctly, and not start off with very much ammonia at all. .5 ppm total equivalent in the cycle water would be plenty. you need to bring up that meter at the start on water that isn't grossly off par from what running reefs see, it's why we don't want the normal huge blast of ammonia.
there's a very good chance it will read .001 due to no real bioload, high dilution, and active bacteria that literally made the test loading .001 rather quickly.
If I can cycle in 24 hours but my seneye can't give me an accurate reading for ten days the seneye is a useless tool in my book. 90% of my ammonia concern is during cycling. If I can't use it for cycling I don't see a point in it.
You really can't mix up fresh new saltwater from RODI water and use that? I can't imagine water created 2 minutes ago would have much ammonia in it to throw off the reading.
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That's working around the calibrating process either way its sliced
People always try and prove api right by benching on distilled water, getting a bone zero yellow, then stating with side by side comparison to that green reading that a test tank must not be ready. The calibrated seneye is what balances that seemingly reinforced angle.
I would never myself pay $200 to measure a parameter we're already certain of based on the collective posts of others. If someone else wants to fund some findings by buying one that's welcomed lol but not me, not ever.
I can't state beyond 75% likelihood you'll plug in that seneye and get what a calibrated unit would show on the same water sample.
There isn't any time that fish food bottle bac and ten days wait with rocks present won't fully cycle, there isn't a time live rock pet store cycles fail to skip cycle, and i can't recall a single event I've ever seen where fish + bottle bac on day one didn't work. The key is who wants to buy a two hundred dollar meter to spot check all that again
We'll heartily take the data however it emerges that's for sure.
People always try and prove api right by benching on distilled water, getting a bone zero yellow, then stating with side by side comparison to that green reading that a test tank must not be ready. The calibrated seneye is what balances that seemingly reinforced angle.
I would never myself pay $200 to measure a parameter we're already certain of based on the collective posts of others. If someone else wants to fund some findings by buying one that's welcomed lol but not me, not ever.
I can't state beyond 75% likelihood you'll plug in that seneye and get what a calibrated unit would show on the same water sample.
There isn't any time that fish food bottle bac and ten days wait with rocks present won't fully cycle, there isn't a time live rock pet store cycles fail to skip cycle, and i can't recall a single event I've ever seen where fish + bottle bac on day one didn't work. The key is who wants to buy a two hundred dollar meter to spot check all that again
We'll heartily take the data however it emerges that's for sure.
Here is a good point. Why go get one at all if 10 days is proven to work, I can wait the 10 days and not worry about it. Solid.
But that dang seneye has a par meter!! And it's cheaper than a par meter!! And it's a gadget!! Although most redundant as I plan to use a Hydros system, lol.
I guess I need to ponder how much I want to semi-waste $200.
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you will be able to test endlessly with it to make new cycling points and you guys could be writing articles together using the data. here are things not answered in reefing, all of reefing:
how long does an unassisted marine cycle truly take (dry sand, dry rock, only normally-prepped saltwater as the bacterial vector no actual bottle bac nor feed ever provided, only open-topped common reef exchanging contaminants with a home)
-can it establish basic ammonia command in 2 months (you could bring up a five gallon test bucket of dry surfaces to easily test and write on this by 4/7/23)
or does it take six months?
(merely answering this alone means cycles can't starve, because upscaling is always occurring if exchange is permitted. you'd slay two or three old cycling tenets alone with that meter, and this test)
**if it can't move anything at all by six months, I'm wrong then. I say it can, by month 4 if the lid isn't sealing off the tank from the home contams
you could build up a bucket reef to the side, then stock it with four clownfish and track that loading and how they run over a week of common feeding and small % water changes, treat it for a week like a mini nano to baseline the bucket setup. then, at the end of a week, remove most of its rocks and report whether command remains or wanes
nobody in reefing has ever approximated via digital meter the minimum true surface area per gallon to support a decent fish load, it's 30 years of guessing.
that's only a handful of things you'll observe creatively with the meter. I'm having to collate guesses on all that from the posts of others and whether their tanks live or die after we approximate certain aspects of those untested items.
additional testing: what's the most ammonia you can track a tuned seneye showing a bucket reef to reduce in 5 hours? extrapolate that gallonage vs resolve rate vs rocks # per gallon up to large reefs, to estimate max bioload carry.
you would render the market for biobricks pretty much neutralized with a seneye tuned up, because biobricks don't fill in any actual gaps in oxidization in a reef display. they're just marketed like that.
it's benefit is endless cycle verification experiments that directly contribute to new cycling science faster than nerdgpt'ers can do.
cycle starvation experiments: take rocks from your tank once it's humming along months in. move them over to a heated, motioned bucket of sw mini setup and try and starve them out over 5 mos fallow, just draw a marker line inside on the original pour-in and keep topped off up to that mark; its salinity will stay in check now with only minimal spot checks. easy to top it off until summer.
no feed for six months, then zap it with 1 ppm and track the resolve rate...write about that. about sustenance mechanisms bacteria might use to be just fine without our offerings
and if they starve out, I have some rewriting to do/ I claim you couldnt starve them on a seven year fallow run.
I'd heartily eat up that material with reading.
how long does an unassisted marine cycle truly take (dry sand, dry rock, only normally-prepped saltwater as the bacterial vector no actual bottle bac nor feed ever provided, only open-topped common reef exchanging contaminants with a home)
-can it establish basic ammonia command in 2 months (you could bring up a five gallon test bucket of dry surfaces to easily test and write on this by 4/7/23)
or does it take six months?
(merely answering this alone means cycles can't starve, because upscaling is always occurring if exchange is permitted. you'd slay two or three old cycling tenets alone with that meter, and this test)
**if it can't move anything at all by six months, I'm wrong then. I say it can, by month 4 if the lid isn't sealing off the tank from the home contams
you could build up a bucket reef to the side, then stock it with four clownfish and track that loading and how they run over a week of common feeding and small % water changes, treat it for a week like a mini nano to baseline the bucket setup. then, at the end of a week, remove most of its rocks and report whether command remains or wanes
nobody in reefing has ever approximated via digital meter the minimum true surface area per gallon to support a decent fish load, it's 30 years of guessing.
that's only a handful of things you'll observe creatively with the meter. I'm having to collate guesses on all that from the posts of others and whether their tanks live or die after we approximate certain aspects of those untested items.
additional testing: what's the most ammonia you can track a tuned seneye showing a bucket reef to reduce in 5 hours? extrapolate that gallonage vs resolve rate vs rocks # per gallon up to large reefs, to estimate max bioload carry.
you would render the market for biobricks pretty much neutralized with a seneye tuned up, because biobricks don't fill in any actual gaps in oxidization in a reef display. they're just marketed like that.
it's benefit is endless cycle verification experiments that directly contribute to new cycling science faster than nerdgpt'ers can do.
cycle starvation experiments: take rocks from your tank once it's humming along months in. move them over to a heated, motioned bucket of sw mini setup and try and starve them out over 5 mos fallow, just draw a marker line inside on the original pour-in and keep topped off up to that mark; its salinity will stay in check now with only minimal spot checks. easy to top it off until summer.
no feed for six months, then zap it with 1 ppm and track the resolve rate...write about that. about sustenance mechanisms bacteria might use to be just fine without our offerings
and if they starve out, I have some rewriting to do/ I claim you couldnt starve them on a seven year fallow run.
I'd heartily eat up that material with reading.
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OP
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removed example due to no pics provided. will edit back in a new job later on when one arises.
and here's the new example, building now.
www.reef2reef.com
can a 6 month old, stocked and running reef have ammonia noncontrol issues is the analysis.
and here's the new example, building now.
EMERGENCY - ammonia help
im having the most random ammonia spike in my nano 10 gallon, its been setup since beginning of sept 2022, and i added a bubble tip anemone about a week and a half ago its been happy and all has been good until yesterday morning i woke up and it looked as if it had started to melt away and then...
www.reef2reef.com
can a 6 month old, stocked and running reef have ammonia noncontrol issues is the analysis.
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Suus801
New Member
This thread is intended to discuss current trends in reef tank cycling and to predict + track changes in reef tank cycling science compared to prior years of observation
Here is the predecessor
we applied those rules from 2020 to run other people's reef tanks we can look back on today.Updated Cycling Science thread 2020
Thank you for posting! That's one reason brs offers the four month cycle buildup, agreed that curing out during coral loading is mass headache
The trend since well before 2020 is that nobody has been failing their reef tank cycle, none are stuck or stalled, the animals were alive the day they posted in cycle cases where animals were present, such as fish added during the cycle with bottle bacteria.
we are saving discussion about non digital test kits for later, at the beginning here we want to simply look at groups of people who posted cycling tanks and observe the outcome: could the tanks carry fish that acted normally, swam normally, fed normally?
What we want to reflect on in pattern here is the fact uncycled tanks can't carry bioload and daily feed and handle animal waste, while cycled tanks can.
We think that fish are sensitive enough to display when they're ammonia burned, the disease forum diagnoses it off opercular rates and flashing behavior, aerotaxis, and we know in updated cycling science those same diagnostic tools apply to reef tank troubleshoots
we can no longer claim fish in cycles are burning fish until we see posts of those fish exhibiting burn symptoms, that's the trend I'm observing today.
I think readers are going to find a lot of arguments in cycling posts about what a non digital test kit says, this is why we haven't been using the kits in our work threads these last several years.
Testless reef tank cycling is fully developed now, and running, it's not experimental. Any one of several active threads will process a reef tank to-be-built and state the date the system can carry fish, before it's cycled, without using test kits. 2023 is evolution in reef tank cycling, it's not about stammering around with non digital kits any longer
it's not about an arbitrary open-ended wait for ammonia control to establish, the ways we copy one another lend ammonia control usually the same day the reef tank is built. it's how reef tank conventions handle all those costly displays with fifty grand or more in animals. full reefs, on the showfloor, without waiting 30 days for the ramp up.
consider this chemistry forum post below, how many confounds to you see that affect nondigital ammonia test kits? what has this done to cycling, before 2020? why didn't cycle umpires who worked cycle troubleshoots in 2015 tell us these factors?
Reef tank cycling, purchase expenditures all paid a price literally and for a long time when cycling was solely factored off what a non digital test kit says.
what has been the impact to bottle bac sales by millions of people believing their cycle was stuck>?
Can this bacterial phenomenon be explained?
As part of a experiment on the effects of decomposition of organics I’ve added a defrost shrimp (5g) to a vessel with 100ml of tank water containing a very small amount of carbohydrates. The goal of the experiment was to analyse the ammonia rise from the shrimp and the slow decomposition...
Seneye and digital nh3/nh4 ammonia test kits are shaping the view on cycling science and evolving it. any reef cycle umpire on boards must be able to reference digital studies of ammonia control or provide their own findings as they troubleshoots a tank's readiness to carry bioload, the old ways of solely using a non digital kit are dialup internet in a world of fiber
it should be noted that reef tank cycling is a niche subset of our hobby not allowed to evolve, we're still told by peers to expect 2-4 weeks for ammonia control
the truth is, that's not true, and to rush disease preps is the true crime. The fish disease forum here shows the real concern in reef tank cycling, it's not ammonia or nitrite issues:
Fish Disease Treatment and Diagnosis
A forum for discussing treatment and diagnosing saltwater reef fish.
Disease preps for soon to be stocked fish are the real focus in cycling for 2023 and beyond.
-Try and find any study ever made showing a reef tank, stacked in rocks, failing to cycle on a calibrated digital ammonia kit by day ten and post that link. (calibrated means it reads within spec on a running reef tank, before it's used to make inferences about cycling)
use google scholar if needed, search, try and find examples of a reef aquarium display that isn't able to carry fish on day ten, let's see if they're using one of the main methods. *please don't grab a study from scholar that is not specifically a reef tank display failing to cycle and try and link the two. I'm using actual reef tanks to hone the science, I expect for counter proofs to use actual reef tanks just the same, plus digital calibrated ammonia testers like Hanna or Seneye.
-Any of Dr. Reef's bottle bac study threads using seneye cover fish in cycling, using updated measures, there isn't a burn in effect for fish noted.
-any seneye owner who calibrated their device and put it in a reef tank, during any phase, can state how fast ammonia control happens and whether it wanes during running of the tank
-the fact all the fish are alive when posting cycles-to-come, or present cycles. there aren't any tanks failing to carry bioload means something in 2023 and beyond
hi Brandon,
I have found your posts and this forums while trying to figure out what the heck was going on with our tank cycle. I am sick of Facebook groups where it seems to be the blind leading the blind and anyone who says any different from a 4 week to 6 month cycle gets shot down no matter
How qualified they might be..
anyway, I must admit we are not the patient kind and have acted probably too proactive.
we are on day 12 of our cycle with the last dose of ammonia added 2 days ago. We have followed the dr tims method but dosed with ATM colony.
the ammonia has been dosed 3 times now, to 2ppm (only just realised atm colony advises 0.5ppm for ammonia
) after getting impatient on day 6 we added a dose of Fritz turbostart 900 as well.
Ammonia is currently sat at 0.25, nitrite of the scale at 5ppm+ nitrate 20. Ph is 7.8
we have done a few water changes to get the nitrite down, and then realised our RO needed a clean cycle as the RO water was reading nitrite.
after reading more from you as well as atm colony, we have decided we should add fish but would like to do 100% water change first for a couple of reasons; nitrite, nitrate. Second reason our LFS wants to see a water sample before selling us the fish. I don’t think nitrite isn’t poisonous to saltwater fish will fly with him
after 100% water change should I dose some more atm colony? Then add fish?
thanks for your time
tank pic attached I know you will want to see these
Attachments
OP
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thank you so much for posting, truly, welcome to our site!
I don't even see a need to change the water that cycle is done. if you add fish, please update here so we can watch them work completely normally without a hitch. you have really really set that cycle in place.
*ATM colony and fritz were both studied for adherence time in Dr. Reef's thread, you've used both and saw more than one ammonia drop it's simply compound cycled.
side note: any chance that rock was wet when you bought it and brought it home or was that dry painted caribsea liferock (curiously shopping to see if we also have a third ready confirmation: a skip cycle of cured pet store live rock)
we all truly welcome you here, our goal is to simply hone down a reliable a repeatable practice for reef tank cycling and then educate all of facebook thereafter heh
once you have fish in there, you should post this link to the FB page who doubted you might be ready. fish disease preps, fallow and quarantine, are the real hidden challenge.
I don't even see a need to change the water that cycle is done. if you add fish, please update here so we can watch them work completely normally without a hitch. you have really really set that cycle in place.
*ATM colony and fritz were both studied for adherence time in Dr. Reef's thread, you've used both and saw more than one ammonia drop it's simply compound cycled.
side note: any chance that rock was wet when you bought it and brought it home or was that dry painted caribsea liferock (curiously shopping to see if we also have a third ready confirmation: a skip cycle of cured pet store live rock)
we all truly welcome you here, our goal is to simply hone down a reliable a repeatable practice for reef tank cycling and then educate all of facebook thereafter heh
once you have fish in there, you should post this link to the FB page who doubted you might be ready. fish disease preps, fallow and quarantine, are the real hidden challenge.
Suus801
New Member
Thank you Brandon for the kind welcome.
Yes it is caribsea dry rock, like mentioned we will have to do a big water change because the LFS wants to see a sample. I assume as long as we don’t disturb the sand the bacteria will be fine stuck to the rock.
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whatever the LFS thinks doesn't apply, they're not using seneye. You are doing a water change based on a nitrate approximation, using a non digital test kit, and that level may not even be correct. NItrite doesn't factor in marine display cycles: it's a neutral parameter no longer factored ( a major tenet in our thread here is what to factor in cycling and what has changed from the old rules, nitrite is changed fully: it's not factored in display tank reef cycling )
*I am aware of LFS's that won't release fish until you comply with their rules, if that's the case, buy fish from another place. They mean well in that venture, but they're about to apply old cycling science and likely try and sell you more bottle bac.
Your nitrate is just going to climb right back or even higher once you begin daily feeding/animal carry. This cycle is done, 100%, no looking back but I'm sure you won't hear that anywhere but here. email this thread to your LFS and have them remark upon it when you check out fish with them, if they have any debates have 'em post we accept all alternate takes here (and then we double check them against the big work threads already in place)
your nitrate test kit can't be accurate this fast anyway, but the LFS isn't telling you that. there's chemistry reasons you need about 2 months of running for a nitrate test to be accurate, it has to do with nitrite interference even though nitrite can't harm animals. I'm saving all the confusing details by simply saying this cycle is 100% done meaning you can't make the tank any safer for fish by waiting longer, adding anything, or factoring ammonia nitrite or nitrate.
*I am aware of LFS's that won't release fish until you comply with their rules, if that's the case, buy fish from another place. They mean well in that venture, but they're about to apply old cycling science and likely try and sell you more bottle bac.
Your nitrate is just going to climb right back or even higher once you begin daily feeding/animal carry. This cycle is done, 100%, no looking back but I'm sure you won't hear that anywhere but here. email this thread to your LFS and have them remark upon it when you check out fish with them, if they have any debates have 'em post we accept all alternate takes here (and then we double check them against the big work threads already in place)
your nitrate test kit can't be accurate this fast anyway, but the LFS isn't telling you that. there's chemistry reasons you need about 2 months of running for a nitrate test to be accurate, it has to do with nitrite interference even though nitrite can't harm animals. I'm saving all the confusing details by simply saying this cycle is 100% done meaning you can't make the tank any safer for fish by waiting longer, adding anything, or factoring ammonia nitrite or nitrate.
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**take your salinity tester to the pet shop and test their holding water for fish/clownfish. if its .017 that shop is ripping you off by selling diseased fish and trying to suppress that with low salinity. only buy reef fish from a shop that holds them at your approximate salinity, on your meter not theirs. acclimation losses happen when pet stores sell you fish at .017~ and you add them into reefs at .025
don't bag float any fish, that's a harmful 1987 way of acclimating marine fish and it hurts them in more than one way
buy from nearly same salinity you run, and just net them from the bag into your tank. if you can only get fish held at .017~ then you need a receiving tank already cycled, not this display above, to introduce the fish to and slowly bring them up to reef salinity before adding them right over here. that receiving tank could/should be an observational quarantine tank ideally.
your issue now is beyond cycling, no more tests are needed (for us anyway) and you're into acclimation planning and disease planning. if you skip disease preps, fallow and quarantine, expect to post here about losses within 6 mos:
www.reef2reef.com
if your pet store is keeping reef fish at low salinity, and not telling people, you should fully expect disease outbreaks sooner than 6 mos.
don't bag float any fish, that's a harmful 1987 way of acclimating marine fish and it hurts them in more than one way
buy from nearly same salinity you run, and just net them from the bag into your tank. if you can only get fish held at .017~ then you need a receiving tank already cycled, not this display above, to introduce the fish to and slowly bring them up to reef salinity before adding them right over here. that receiving tank could/should be an observational quarantine tank ideally.
your issue now is beyond cycling, no more tests are needed (for us anyway) and you're into acclimation planning and disease planning. if you skip disease preps, fallow and quarantine, expect to post here about losses within 6 mos:
Fish Disease Treatment and Diagnosis
A forum for discussing treatment and diagnosing saltwater reef fish.
www.reef2reef.com
if your pet store is keeping reef fish at low salinity, and not telling people, you should fully expect disease outbreaks sooner than 6 mos.
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