Water changes are important, as stuff leaches from the decaying things in the rock, it needs to be removed. You'll still get the necessary bacteria but you remove phosphates that would jump start the algae when the lights come back on

Where do you find your ammonia/trite/trate spikes when you're doing weekly changes in the cycle, you are always going to be removing them and have fluctuating test reading.

If worried about phosphates leaching, there is always the option to run a Phosban reactor during the cycle.

When you mention cycle, are you referring to curing of the rock?? If so, I didnt do any water changes for the 2 months I cured my rock...It would depend on the size of the tank as well...I read somewhere that "the solution to pollution is dilution"...My pounds of live rock to gallons of water was about 0.85:1...

Just make sure you have a kick butt skimmer to get rid of the garbage...

I did water changes twice a day for 2 weeks when I started my rock...but then I was more interested in keeping the critters that make the the rock "live rock" alive then getting ammonia readings.

When you buy "live rock" all the bacteria necessary to complete the nitrate cycle are already in place. Our job is to wait for all the dead stuff inside the rock to finish decaying and polluting the water, then we need to remove the pollution before algae takes over.


It worked for me anyways, I've cured 4 batches of live rock and the nitrates have always reached 0 in about 3 weeks


*edit* Here's an interesting read http://forum.marinedepot.com/Topic23945-9-1.aspx

After the first batch of rock that I cured I never bothered testing for ammonia or nitites, I just assumed they were there and my goal was to lower them as quickly as possible. At the 2 week mark I started testing for nitrates


Oh and I had the lights on the tank...the better to see the worms,pods and snails crawling around

just take your time and wait. If the hair alage is getting bad and the levels arent of wack too back look at getting a turbo snail or 2 it will MOW through all of it in a couple or so. The hair algae could be from Dye off orrrr... your water. If you using tap water your going to have algae from my personal experince, This is due to phospates.

Normally I do my first water change 10 to 14 days after I start cycling. Then I do another one 2 weeks later. The reason behind it being that I always use LR and try to get rid of as much die off as possible in order to keep nutrient levels as low as possible. Also taking into consideration that you mentioned that you've already got algae blooms emerging, the water change after cleaning off as much algae as possible will help.

Currently, I am a week into my cycle. I have now covered the tank with blankets and shut the lights off, so that it is a lightless cycle. I am also running my skimmer with full filtration.

I'll wait another week and do a 20% water change, as well as trim and siphon off as much of the hair algae as I can. My water is 0 TDS so the die off from the LR would be the only reason that nutrients are in the tank.