My first reef (90g)

[Murminator]

Good luck and welcome to the board

[robzilla]

welcome to canreef
keep us posted with progress

[woodcarver]

I find the details and progress of new set ups very informative and interesting ! Keep, the info. coming and if you can post some photo's even better ...............Thanks
...................Dave

[muck]

Welcome to the board Eric!!
Sounds like you are off to a good start. The Tek T5 setups are great lights.

[Rikotek]

Wow, thanks for the welcome

I have my first (albiet low quality) picture of my tank.
Still clearing out some of the murkiness and just letting the one piece of liverock start the cycle process. Will be buying more rock next month!



-Eric

[Rikotek]

Well, the tank has been cycling for about a week now, I decided to take my first batch of measurements to see how things are progressing.

Temperature: 76

Salinity: 1.025 (added some water just now, trying to get it back to 1.023)

pH: 7.5 - I am told that my pH should always be above 8.1 I don't know yet if this is something remedied by the cycling process or if there is some sort of pH adjustment chemical/proceedure I need to use. If anyone knows that would be great!

Ammonia - 0.04 - Looks safe to me. I figured there would be more Ammonia this early in the cycle process but I guess it's going along better than I thought.

Nitrite - 0.0

All in all it looks like the cycling is going well but it is going to take a while longer before I begin to introduce any livestock or anything like that. Picking up some more rock from a coworker who got out of the hobby a while back. I will work on adding that and aquascaping until all of my levels read safe.

-Eric

[BCOrchidGuy]

Wouldn't be a bad idea to measure your Calcium and your Alk, you'd have a better idea of what to do to adjust your pH. Read the chemicals sticky in the Reef section it will explain how to adjust each of your parameters safely. The staff put a lot of work into that stuff to make it easier for us so don't be afraid to use it.

Doug

[PoonTang]

Originally Posted by Rikotek

Well, the tank has been cycling for about a week now, I decided to take my first batch of measurements to see how things are progressing.

Temperature: 76

Salinity: 1.025 (added some water just now, trying to get it back to 1.023)

pH: 7.5 - I am told that my pH should always be above 8.1 I don't know yet if this is something remedied by the cycling process or if there is some sort of pH adjustment chemical/proceedure I need to use. If anyone knows that would be great!

Ammonia - 0.04 - Looks safe to me. I figured there would be more Ammonia this early in the cycle process but I guess it's going along better than I thought.

Nitrite - 0.0

All in all it looks like the cycling is going well but it is going to take a while longer before I begin to introduce any livestock or anything like that. Picking up some more rock from a coworker who got out of the hobby a while back. I will work on adding that and aquascaping until all of my levels read safe.

-Eric

Your ammonia reading will of course read really low because you have nothing that ads ammonia to your tank. You need to add ammonia to your tank to get your cycle started. Also your going to need atleast 1.5 pounds/Gal of LR for your tank. Tank will not be anywhere cycled after 1 week, this is going to take about 2 months. Dont worry about your algea outbreaks, they will come and go naturally as your tank progesses through the cycle.