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You may or may not do WCs during cycle. If you feel like doing so, do it. Not to hasten the cycle but to make the water more favorable for the already existent life forms in your tank, like worms or pods and other beneficial hitchhikers.

Silicate is from the sand, and a bit comes from the rocks. Decaying diatoms will leach a bit of it back into the water column as well. Phosphates and nitrogen in the form of ammonia/ammonium, nitrite and nitrate come from dead stuff. Like dead microfauna and decaying algae and uneaten food. It's very very normal to have diatoms and other algae during the first months of your tank as they are just utilizing whatever nutrients are present in the tank.

You can actually minimize silicates by doing WCs if you can manage to siphon the diatoms, since a large percent of silicates are already bound in the diatoms.

Another tip for starting hobbyists, especially those who would read this: Nutrients especially nitrogen (see above forms) silicates and phosphates are just some of the few things to test for during cycling. The main reason why most experienced reefers tell beginners to wait it out is because there are other things to look out for during the first few weeks of your tank.

When you use liverocks (cured or uncured or whatever term they use nowadays), living organisms in the rocks die.

They leach back the nutrients bound inside them, and bacteria (and algae if light is present) bloom. Making the water parameters fluctuate, pH typically drops because of too much co2, oxygen drops because bacteria use it to assimilate the nutrients in the water, alkalinity drops as well and other nasty crap like antibiotics from dead sponges, toxins from dead algae and other secondary metabolites released by dead hitchhikers fill the water column. These, my friends are the most important reason why we wait for our tank to stabilize. It is not just the nitrogen and phosphorous cycle. There is more to the tank than just the parameters we usually test for.

Haba no? So the bottomline is waiting is good and water change is good. Trust me, you can never make a living tank sterile (or overclean it), but you can easily pollute it

PS

Snails and other CUCs are fine but don't overdo it. They definitely are low contributors in the overall bioload, but only when they are alive. If you have experienced smelling a dead snail you'll know what I mean.

i really appreciate all the inputs guys!

happy to report that at 4 weeks since setting up my tank and 12 hours after my last WC, my nitrates are down to 40 while ammonia and nitrites are still at 0.

tested my water this morning. nitrates did not go up and possibly went down to 20 (i'm really starting to hate the api color charts hehe)

trooped to sir florenzio's yesterday and entrusted him with my DIY LED. konti na lang i can start putting LS

got my led from sir florenzio. it was retrofitted to my hood. it has a dimmer/timer. 10% when you turn it on. 50% after an hour. 100% after that. then after 9 hours it will gradually dim as well til it turns off for the night.











ganda kahit walang laman yung tank haha. soon.

Looks like you are off to a good start. May lens ba yung Red and Green LEDs mo? Mas okay kung wala para maganda yung spread ng ilaw at hindi magdisco.

may lens. tinry ko tanggalin pero naka superglue ata hehe

tested the water yesterday. 0 ammonia. 0 nitrite. 40 nitrate.

nag waterchange ulit ako today to try to get the nitrates down. will test tonight or maybe tomorrow. planning to add CUC soon.

super FTS



so i know it's not really wise to put an aquarium near windows but the blackout shades are doing the job

just want to confirm that this would be diatom bloom? happend almost overnight.









should i do a WC? add CUC?

my tank now has CUC and corals.

please comment on coral placement. let me know if i should move stuff. i was assured that all these corals can be in close proximity with each other




gonna wait a couple of days for the toadstool leather coral to shift positions. if it doesn't, i'll move it.


i think this is too close to the glass. thoughts?






snail photobomb

my rocks look a bit dirty. should i remove some of the algae or should i just leave it like that?

clean the diatoms on the glass bro. ung corals mo layo mo muna sa LR mo baka madamay sa diatoms mamatay lng yan sayang.. may test kit kna for phosphate?

I had an algae outbreak before. I just added some turbine snails to clean up the algae and used Cheato to export nutrients from the tank. Did not have to scrub the rocks and did not have to disturb the aquascape. Few days lang, ubos algae sa tank.

Scrubbing rocks is too invasive for the animals living on the rocks. And that will not address the cause of your problem. Employ a few CUC like snails (like what Maverick suggested), do regular WCs and keep nitrates and phosphates levels in check. If you see low NO3 and PO4 readings, that is because the algae is already using up the nutrients present both in the water column and the crap that settled in your LRs.

From the pictures, the corals are not thriving. They seem stressed or overwhelmed by hair algae. You could manually remove a some algae outside the tank (so the algae won't spread). That might help a bit.

the rocks and tank are much much cleaner now. don't really have green algae cept for the coral in the lower right.

just got a phosphate test kit this morning and i'm at 0.5. gonna test the NSW tomorrow and check if that's why. what else can i do to lower phosphate aside from WC?