Cycling...Day 5

I began the Red Sea Reef Mature Starter Kit for cycling my tank on Monday of this week.  The kit includes four supplements to add to the tank on a detailed schedule, over a period of 21 days, in order to establish and feed colonies of beneficial nitrifying and de-nitrifying bacteria.

If I understand everything correctly the first supplement, called Nitro Bac, contains the initial strains of bacteria.  The second supplement, Bacto-Start, is essentially food for the bacteria that simulates excess fish food and waste that will eventually be produced in the tank.  Third is NO3:PO4-X, pronounced "nopox", which is essentially a form of carbon dosing that feeds anoxic bacteria to further break down nitrate and phosphate and reduce algae growth.  The final supplement is called KH Coralline Grow and is an alkalinity supplement to replace what is extracted by growing coralline algae.

A few caveats.  The kit is designed to be used with live rock, so I'm making a few changes.  Since I'm starting with dry rock I don't have any coralline algae to feed, so I won't be using the KH Coralline Grow supplement.  Also, I understand that the cycle will likely take longer with dry rock than it would with live rock, so I'm prepared to wait longer for my tank to be ready for occupants.  Finally, the kit suggests running lights 10 hours a day during the cycle, which I assume is to keep photosynthetic algae on the live rock alive.  Since I don't have anything photosynthetic in the tank, I'm planning on keeping my lights off throughout the cycle, and hoping to avoid the nuisance algae bloom that the kit says to expect.  More about the lights, later.

I dosed the first supplements on Tuesday--day two of the kit--and the tank was fairly cloudy on Wednesday.  That has since cleared up and things look pretty good.  I changed filter socks last night and they were surprisingly dirty given that there's been nothing in the tank but silt from the live sand (which appears to be the primary clogging culprit).  I tried rinsing the socks but it didn't seem to make much difference.  I have two pairs so I swapped in the new ones, but if my cleaning job didn't work I'll be switching to the Custom Caddy with a filter sponge very soon.  At $9 each I can't be replacing two filter socks every week.

Cloudy water from initial Red Sea Mature dosing

In order to be able to track the cycle, I'm testing every major parameter, daily, throughout the cycling period.  This means temperature, salinity, pH, Alkalinity, Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate.  I'll be putting these all into a spreadsheet so I can graph the parameters throughout the cycle in a future post.  It's been pretty fun to set up my little test kits and walk through all of the tests each evening after George goes to bed.  It reminds me why I think I probably should have been a marine biologist ( marine chemist?).

Water parameter testing setup

Red Sea Marine Care Test Kit

One other item that the Reef Mature Kit requires is that you run a skimmer, wet, throughout the process.  This is somehow related to the NO3:PO4-X supplement.  I can't say I fully understand the reason behind this, but I'm doing it for now and trying to find more information on what I'm setting myself up for (Red Sea suggests that you continue to dose the NO3:PO4-X even after the cycle has completed).

Either way, I've got my IM Ghost skimmer up and running.  Despite the many bad reviews, I'm finding the skimmer to be pretty good so far.  For the first two days it was super twitchy, overfilling the cup with completely clear skimmate every hour or less.  By moving the cup up as high as I could and turning the air intake all the way down I was able to get it under control.  Now I'm slowly adding back more air, about a half a turn per day.  This seems to be working, although I'm still getting completely clear skimmate (unsurprisingly, since I have zero bioload in the tank and everything I'm dosing is a clear liquid).  I'll keep opening the air valve on the skimmer until it's mostly open and then I'll start dropping the cup as needed to keep making skimmate.  I assume it's just "breaking in" and removing the oils and surfactants that are coating it and all of the other brand new plastic equipment that has gone into the tank over the last couple weeks.  One minor downside, for the time being the skimmer is making a froth of microbubbles in the tank, but they seem to ebb and flow as I dial it in and I'm confident they'll subside once everything is well conditioned.

Ghost protein skimmer pulling clear skimmate

Yesterday my light, the Kessil A160WE finally arrived.  I installed it using the fixed goose neck rather than the flexible mount.  Well now I understand why the mounting bracket was $65.  It is gorgeous!  All of the metal is beautifully machined and finished with a textured paint.  Everything adjusts with set screws and the cables run directly through the mounting bracket tube.  I couldn't be more pleased with the way the light fixture looks.

Now to the light it produces.  I'm really happy with the color and intensity of the light, and was able to program it with the Apex VDM Module very easily.  There are two slight issues, though.  First, as I should have known, the output of the light is circular and so a sliver of light spills over the edge of the tank onto the adjacent wall and floor.  Leah doesn't seem to mind it, but I may end up having to make black acrylic "hood" for the tank to catch this excess light if it becomes bothersome.  Second, the nice top that my tank came with has a white honeycomb screen to allow evaporation while keeping fish in.  Unfortunately, the strands are too think and too opaque, and they cast a honeycomb shadow on the sand at the bottom of the tank.  BRS sells some superfine 1/8" mesh screen for aquarium tops and I may have to pick up a roll to swap out into the existing frame of my lid.  The BRS mesh is clear and much finer and I've read it will not cast a shadow.

First photo of the setup with the new Kessil A160WE in place.  This was late in the light spectrum ramp, so it's very blue.  I'll have to break out my DSLR this weekend to see if I can get some better color-balanced photos.

Tonight's project is to do the daily testing and then install a float switch to the Apex Breakout Box so that I can shut off the ATO before its blasted loud alarm goes off and drives Leah and George nuts, and also sends me an email so that I know the optical sensor is clouded with bubbles again.

I'll try to get some good photos of the tank this weekend after I do my first water change on Sunday.