So it's been a good while since I updated this, mainly because until recently not a lot's been happening - I've been deliberately going slowly, especially as I've started off with very little live rock.
Oh, and the computer kind of temporarily died too...
After talking to the people at the LFS, I bought a couple of Mollys to give the biological filter a bit of a kick (the tank had cycled at this point, I just wanted to get the bacteria colonies growing a bit). In hindsight this might not have been the best idea, but they have been eating some of that darn algae, though feeding them has probably been fuelling it too.
Thinking about it I also should've had a clean up crew before any fish, but hadn't found a source of these that didn't involve a lot of money for shipping a few snails.. I have now found somewhere that has them, so not a mistake I'll be making again!
The nitrates have bottomed out, though I think that may have something to do with the hair algae eating them all, ditto phosphates..
A while back I had an outbreak of cyanobacteria which was unpleasant to say the least. I think that basically I water changed my way out of trouble on this one - sucking off as much of it as possible each time and then running some phosphate media in an effort to mop up the phosphate before the cyanobacteria got to it. I now have some still, but much, much less than before..
I also now have a skimmer which is helping to keep things a little more under control too.
Having got that sorted I felt confident enough to get my first real saltwater fish, a tomato clown. He's a bit of a character, and gave the Mollys a bit of a run for their money in the beginning (both got small chunks taken out of their tails), but after a couple of days peace broke out and tails are almost back to normal.. The clown is quite a character, but does have one odd habit that I've no explanation for. He'll put his nose against a rock (usually the one in the corner of the tank below his lurking/sleeping spot and swim really hard for a second or so, sending sand just about everywhere and digging himself a hole in the process. There's now a heap of sand you may be able to see on the bottom right of the tank which is the result of his excavations. Any ideas what on earth he's up to??
I also managed to get my hands on some critters for a clean up crew. I now have a couple of bumblebee snails, three zebra turbo snails and two blue legged hermits, though on closer inspection one turns out not to have blue legs. Oh well! I can see why hermits can be a problem if you get too many, they are just plain crazy. Entertaining, but crazy.
The turbo snails are putting in some hard work eating all that algae - it's going to take them a while to catch up as there are only three, but I prefer that than to have more of them and them run out of food and starve. In any case I'm pretty impressed with their work, all those clean patches on the rocks are the result of just under a weeks work.. I think given a few more weeks they'll be pretty near caught up.. Hopefully without that hair algae the corralline which is just starting to colonise will get a bit more light and make some more progress..
I'll try to update this a little more often in future..