mardi 24 mai 2016

Our new hobby!

Hello everyone! My girlfriend and I recently decided to take on ANOTHER hobby and started a saltwater tank together. We both love diving and I think that's what intrigued us so much about having a tank. We picked up a 24gal JBJ nano cube about a month ago for a great price. A week and a half ago, we finally set everything up. About 20lbs of live rock and live sand went into the tank. Our LFS suggested we take everything out of the back compartments except for the sponges (3 of them: 2 on the left side and 1 in the middle.) My first question is, is that the correct way to start a tank?

So we've been cycling the tank now for about about a week and a half. My friend suggested I add in a pinch of fish food once a day to help build up ammonia, so I've been doing that for the last 5 days. He also told me to put in 1 small shrimp, so I took one of his frozen feeder krill and put it in the tank to decompose.

Here are my current water readings. Again, this is only a week and a half in but I'm just curious if we are on the right path to creating a healthy tank. I'm using the API kit, and the readings are a bit odd to me:
pH 8.2-8.4
ammonia is slowly climbing to just over 0, but not quite 0.25ppm
Nitrites are 0ppm
Nitrates are 0ppm

In the last couple days we've experienced the expected diatom takeover on our sand and some on our rocks. This was expected, and we are under the impression that it should go away in a week or 2. We have a few feather duster worms that seem to be growing very well which was surprising. Also a couple stomatella snails, which I actually haven't seen in a little over 24 hours now.

We're excited to create our own underwater haven, but we want to be sure we are doing everything correct before we introduce any life.


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