When I have cycled my tanks I have let the ammonia run it course until it turned to nitrite and then nitrate and then did a 25-50% water change. I know there are different schools of thought on this but my way of thinking is that the purpose of letting it cycle is to allow the build up of benificial bacteria and this occurs during this cycle. I realize that you may lose more of the stuff living on your rock that cannot take a large ammonia spike so this is just what I have done with my systems and still have lots of stuff growing on my live rock. And the ammonia spike also appears to make those pesty red eyed crabs grow! I got a whole whack of them on the live rock I bought for my 190 and I'm still trapping the SOB's.
Why are you using ARM calcium reactor media in your sump. It is my understanding that this needs to react with CO2 in order to be of any benifit to your tanks as far as keeping your calcium and Alk/DKH in balance. I've never heard of this before so perhaps there is a reason and I can learn something.
When my large systems were cyling I also skimmed very wet and did a lot of turkey basting of the rock to get the crap into the water column and let the skimmer pull it out.
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