Thank you Guys for your help! I successfully mixed about 10G of Salt water in the tank directly (tank volumn is 24G).I will top the rest up once I have all the sand and all the rock in.
here is another
I put in the live sand - very slowly and carefully to not cloud the water and guess what - the water is cloudy!
I had the a pump with pre-filter going for the last hour, but there is no improvement at all. The water looks "milky" and at this point I don't even know whether the pre-filter would do any good. No visible particles.
Any ideas what else I could do? or am I being too inpatient?