Lights or no lights while curing
 

Hello,

I have a 150lb of fiji curing in a 120g bare-bottom tank with 1800g/h cycling. On a few different occasions I 've read that light is not required and others has suggested blue actinic. Could someone with first-hand experience give me an opion on this matter. I am thinking of firing up my 2x96W PC (1 actinic + 1 10K) and just see what happens.

Any suggestion would be great.

Will

Personally I would fire the lights up. But it's not for the benifit of the tank Rather so you have some light to see how much is changing during the cycle.

fire them up right away as per normal for the benifit of the tank. this will give any photosynthic critters a better chance at living.

Steve

I've always given my cycling tanks a full 12 hours to start off.

People say you will get algea blooms doing so, but IMO you can't avoid them even by slowly increasing your light.

Agreed. A fair bit of what is being written by the more reputable aquarists among us (ie. those with Ph.Ds) indicates that algae blooms are absolutely a normal part of the cycle.

I agree witht eh algae blooms being normal but I also thing we are to quick to blame every algae bloom as normal tank cycling. I think the blooms should be relitivly small and if you skimm enuf and do frequent water changes you shouldent have any. don't forget thoes opinions were made up to 20 years ago when the equipment and materials we were using consisted of under ground filters and crushed gravel. I like to think that algae blooms can be prevented by watching water quality now. the problem is most of us do not have the quality of testing equipment to real know what is going on in our water.

Steve

do you mean curing or cycling?

if you are "curing" the rocks, your objective is to make all dying organisms die off. light is not required in this period. but i do agree if you are trying to salvage the left-over organisms, you might want to have some kind of light on. if you are cycling a tank, you are trying to establish serveral things: to build up bacteria populations, generate micro-organisms in the sandbed (maturing the sandbed) and also, "maturing" the water in your tank.. and to do that you need some kind of lighting, and not the 100% intensity because lighting does generate/contribute to algae problem, but it is perfectly normal to go through the algae cycle (it is a part of maturing the water and generate the micro-fauna in the water). so algae problem is normal. but intense lighting from day 1 will likely contribute to "out of control" algae bloom. so my opinion is to gradually increase the intensity/duration of lighting but keep spectrum constant or at least suitable.

cheers

Thank you all for your suggestions. That now gives me a better understanding of the curing process. I do want to savage whatever that's possible but was initally worried about the algae bloom. But like you all agreed, it's an inevitible. So I am just going to go with the flow and like things develope under the lights.
thx.
W.