Lessons Learned

Not sure I believe this entirely yet, but I think my tank is completely cycled. I fully expected this to take a month or more. I barely had a spike of any kind, but ammonia and nitrites both crept up slightly and then went to zero over the course of a few days. Now nitrates appear to be climbing. Further confirmation is the sudden appearance of some green algae growing on the rocks. Green algae feeds on Nitrates, so a completed first cycle is usually accompanied by an agae bloom.

I suppose the fast cycle is due to buying what is called "fully cured" live rock in the appropriate quantity. I used 15 lbs for a 12 gallon tank, which is in the recommended range. With this rock came all the required bacteria to transform the ammonia from the shrimp into nitrates.

I also have none of the Diatom algae problems that I had with my first tank. Diatom algae is usually caused by silicates in the water. So we'll call this the first payoff from incorporating lessons I learned the hard way with my first tank.



1) if using live rock as a primary means of filtration use 1 to 1.5 lbs of rock per gallon of water. in the first tank I used about 12 lbs in a 30 gallon tank and my water never seemed to remain stable. I'm not sure if I will have better luck this time, but early indications in how fast the rock handled the raw shrimp are encouraging.



2) Use water filtered by Reverse Osmosis (RO), not distilled, not Tap water. In order to save some money when setting up my first tank a few years back I used Tap water and some declorinator. My intent was to use RO for all top offs and future water changes. I thought that eventually it would all be RO or distilled, and everything would work out. I knew chlorine was toxic to fish (hence the dechlorinator) but I had no idea about the silicates in tap water. While not harmfull, Daitom algae is very ugly and brown and will cover your tank seemingly overnight. I hope to not have the same problem in this tank due to the use of RO water.