cycling precured LR

[twintrades]

Our tank is on its 2nd day with LR in it. We bought foster/smith LR.
29 gallon
My Water paramiters are with a APi kit

Amonia is 8.0 ppm
Nitrite 5.0 ppm
Nitrate 10 ppm
Ph 7.8 Should i raise the ph ? If so how ?
Temp 78-79 deg F
SG 1.024

Tank has a green hue to the water.

Should i do any partial water changes ? How can i speed up the cycling prosses or just shut up and wait ?( local frag swap coming up on the 10 of april) Also some of the rock has a clear almost fuzzy look to it.

Someone tell me whats up?

[J.P.Reef]

Be patient, nothing good happens fast in salt water system.

[elmafioso52988]

When i cureed my live rock I did 50% water changed and suctioned up all the stuff that fell of the live rock.

[twintrades]

Oh ill have patient's DOnt want to scew things up.
Just was wondering if doing a water change would help or if i should leave the tank alone for a week and then do a change ?

How do i know if the tank spikes?

Oh and the tank has 20 lbs of Live sand (argonite)

[new2salt09]

was the rock shiped dry ???
if so its going to be a few weeks
I set up a secound tank 3 weeks ago using live rock thats been in a system for 8 years and the tank is still cycling

[twintrades]

Rock was shipped over night wraped with wet news paper.

It was rinsed and in my tank under an hour upon reciving.

[Shane Hoffman]

You ask "how do I know if my tank is spiked", when people refer to a spike during cycle they are generally talking about amonia. And you sir are in the midst of an amonia spike. 8ppm is VERY high. You either read the test kit wrong or are having a ton of die off.

.25ppm can be detrimental to some livestock. .50 and higher causes stress in about every living thing.

You need to wait for your amonia to return to 0 then add a week before you think about adding anything. After each addition (fish) I monitor amonia the 2 weeks after to make sure the new addition isnt causing a spike in amonia.

After week 3 if your water hasnt cleared up (green hue) I would do a water change.

[twintrades]

Im going to re-do my test. But i beleive that it was right.

[sowellj]

Don't worry about your pH reading either, your numbers will be a bit erratic in the beginning.

[br3nt]

i would retest AMM and get back to us.

[twintrades]

just retested and yea its saying 8.0 !~!

[str8leg]

give it time

[Toddrtrex]

Everyone is different....

Every time that I have cured live rock (( and the last time I did it was F&S rock that I have overnighted )), I ran my skimmer and did water changes. Since I already had 2 tanks running I just used the water from the other tanks. I never saw an ammonia spike, and the rock had lots of life on it -- even a couple encrusting SPS.

[twintrades]

So would it hurt to do a 25% change ?

[troyman]

you will only slow down the cycle if you do water change did you clean rock before putting in tank you can also add some of the bacteria products such as nitrobacter 7 from brightwell to aid in cycling

[floydie83]

What rock did you buy? I am trying to get a feeling for the difference between the some of them.

[twintrades]

When we got the rock i rinsed the pecies off in a bucket and went over each by hand looking and picking some crap off.

So then i guess ill not do a water change and ill just wait........ anyone is welcome to input.

[new2salt09]

In the future before adding rock to your system cure it in a differnt tank.
I set up a small with salt out side with a power head, let the rock soak for a day and scrub it and repete for 2-3 weeks while also doing 50% water changes every 3 days then wait tell water peramters reach 0
unless I buy from a fellow reefer and its pulled from there tank
same thing with Lfs if the rock is pulled from a large tub/tank seperate from every thing else (ask about the water peramiters) you dont want a spike with live stock
FYI silicone puts off ammonia when curing and takes 72 hours to cure.
I found out the had way last summer. just so thing to keep in mind should you build anything and use silicone

(YES at this point all you can do is wait for the cycle to finish)

[Frick-n-Frags]

i thought silicone put out acetic acid fumes when it cures. can anyone corroborate that it releases ammonia too? (never heard that before)

[wooden_reefer]

If your ammonia really is 8 ppm, it may be too late to save any lives on the rock.

You can simply allow the LR to cycle, forget about saving any lives.

After this batch of LR has been cycled, you can buy another much smaller batch of LR for the lives on it. When you put this new batch of LR in, you would see very little ammonia.

If you had started with died rock, you could have used an ammonia source to cycle, the same eventually.

[twintrades]

My water parameters are

ammonia .25 ppm
ph 7.8 ppm
nitrite 1.0 ppm
nitrate 15 ppm
SG 1.024
temp 78

I still see a coral on the rock mabye a shroom ?

Does this still sound good? Am i on track? when should i do a water change ?

[sowellj]

Looks good to me. As far as the waterchange, I would wait until my ammonia and nitrite were 0.

[twintrades]

THanks the water is greenish also. With a waterchange will that go away ?

[sowellj]

After time, I would think so. You can go ahead and do a water change if you want. You would have to make a concerted effort to mess things up, so don't worry too much about it.

[Raggamuffin]

Personal rule of thumb, not all will agree with it but we all do things diffrently eh? When I start a tank and use rock other than something I KNOW is already cured (out of a fellow reefers tank or my LFS rock that has been there a month) I let the rock sit and test nothing but ammonia, I test twice a day and try to hold it as close to .50 as I can. This leaves enough in the tank to get the bacteria off to a good start without losing a bunch of life on the rock.

Example: the last tank I started was a 20g, testing twice a day it once got to 1ppm so I immediately did a 10g change which lowered it to .5, hit .75 a couple times and a 5g change got it to my personal "safe" zone. After I hit 0ppm I added a full CUC without having even a twitch in my ammonia. 2 weeks later I added my first 2 fish... yet again not even a twitch. I got this system from Richard at TBS and I will never go back to another. It still takes a good month but at the end you have a tank ready to go for most everything that doesn't required a very established tank (1yr or older).