Thought I'd keep a log of how it's going - you never know, someone might be interested!
So after what seemed like ages, I finally got some water mixed up and in the tank, I also got my hands on a couple of pieces of live rock from the local LFS. It doesn't look like much (because it isn't!), but I plan to use mostly dry rock...
I chose these pieces because they had plenty of coralline algae on them, which I was hoping would spread. The rock had been in the LFS tank for a good while, so it was well cured, and only had a 10 minute trip home, so no die off to speak of - a brittle star, some polyps and a few fans made it through, the brittle star was wandering around the tank for a week or so, but has since mysteriously disappeared . I did try putting tiny bit of food in the bottom of the tank so he didn't starve, but he's just vanished - no body or anything, I suspect unless we get CSI fish tank I'll never know...
The rock was just left to do it's thing for a good while as I was waiting for the dry rock, the odd thing is, that right from the start, even before the rock went in, I've had ammonia (it was RO water), not that much - 0.5ppm, but still there. No nitrates, nitrites, just ammonia... The new live rock carried on getting greener and greener (I was letting it have light to try not to kill the coralline). I thought it was the nitrate that fueled the algae, but still no nitrate to speak of.
See how green/brown the rocks are now...
This went on for weeks.. In the end I added some "cycle", I know there are a lot of people who say it's rubbish, but I thought it was worth a try for the $8 from wal-mart..
Four days later, I have 3.0ppm Nitrite, 17ppm Nitrate, and STILL 0.5ppm ammonia. So something must be generating the ammonia, beats me what, unless it's the brittle star (how much ammonia do you get from a dead brittle star, I wonder)..
The dry rock arrived (South Seas), it has plenty of structure to provide hiding places for the inmates when I can get rid of the pesky ammonia..
Some of it was a little gritty, and there were some (not many) very fine roots in some of it. It was scrubbed in warm tap water, rinsed again, then thoroughly rinsed in RO water. Incidentally, it's quite rough stuff, so don't do this in your nice new bathtub...
Then I got to try my hand at aquascaping...
You may just be able to make out a partition in the back left corner of the tank, this is something I made out of acrylic from home depot to keep livestock away from intakes and heaters. Hopefully there'll be some growth over it to hide all the hardware eventually. All I can say is that bending acrylic with a camp stove is an interesting process, and I ended up drilling over 800 holes with a battery drill..
As of today, my ammonia is still at 0.5ppm (never seems to go higher), nitrite still at 3ppm, and nitrate the far side of 20ppm. And the live rock is getting hairy... Still has live polyps and fans on it though.. What I'm wondering is should I do a big water change to get rid of some of that nitrate, or should I wait till the ammonia bottoms out (whenever that happens..)?
Any suggestions/comments?