Photos of our New H. whitei

[Beverly]

Originally Posted by Carpentersreef

The way I read your site is that you set the tank up on Monday, you put the seahorses in on Wednesday and that once the tank cycles, you're going to do a 1/2 gallon water change...Mitch

Mitch, Oops! I cut and pasted info for the 14 gal page from the 2.5 gal tank's page and didn't properly edit. Sorry for the confusion. Will edit that page later today. Thanks for pointing out my error

In reality, the rock, sandbed and macroalgae all came from well established tanks. So I don't expect the tank to need to cycle, as the cycling has already been done long ago when the rock and sandbed first went into the various tanks they were taken from.

If I was using uncured rock, I'd have waited 4-6 weeks for the cycle to be complete. After cycling, I would do a 30- 50% water change, then test again for ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. I aim to keep all of these params at 0 ppm, which they were the last week when I tested the 2.5, 7 and 42 gal tanks.

The day after setting up the 14 I tested all params. There was .25 ppm ammonia, 0 ppm nitirite, 0 ppm nitrate. However, I attribute the ammonia reading to all the new water put into the tank. Our RO unit does not remove much ammonia from our tapwater which has 1+ ppm. So the .25 ppm ammonia is just the remnants of ammonia from the new water that the tank has already consumed.

Now that the horses are in the tank, I will be testing every few days to see if the rock, sandbed and macroalgae are taking care of the extra bioload.

Hope that clarifies your query. And thanks again for pointing out my error.