babarney
05/06/2010, 01:40 PM
Hello everyone!
I am brand new to saltwater aquarium keeping and was hooked the second I saw a reef tank at a LFS a couple months ago. Anyways, I instantly started looking on craigslist and have compiled nearly everything that I need to get started. What I have so far: a 40 gallon rectangle aquarium, a used octopus bh100 skimmer, 2 maxi jet 1200 powerheads, a coralife lunar aqualight with two 96 watt PC bulbs, 40 lbs. of marco key largo rock, 40 lbs. of argonite sand, and 1 lb. of live rock to seed the dry rock. I got the tank up and running about a week ago, mixed the salt to 1.024 and added 5 lbs of live sand (the bagged kind that I later found out may be worthless).
My question has to do with the skimmer. I put the skimmer on the tank right away and plugged it in with no powerheads in the tank at the time. I wasn't impressed with it as I had to put the collection cup all the way down and the bubbles would barely go up halfway to the collection cup. I read about some mesh mods and decided to try just wrapping fishing line all through the needle wheel (hoping to create a similar result to a mesh mod). I instantly noticed more bubbles and the skimmer started to actually skim stuff out of the water. A few days later I put the power heads in the water and turned them on and it instantly kicked up sand and dead matter into the water and the skimmer quit skimming and is basically doing what it did before I added the fishing line. Does anyone have any idea why this might be? Do skimmers produce bigger and better bubbles when the water has more of a bio load than it currently has? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, I have a test kit to check paramaters and was just wondering what is a general guide line as to how long it will take for the aquarium to cycle and be safe for fish. I obviously won't add any until the nitrite reading is 0 but was wondering how long that typically takes.
I am brand new to saltwater aquarium keeping and was hooked the second I saw a reef tank at a LFS a couple months ago. Anyways, I instantly started looking on craigslist and have compiled nearly everything that I need to get started. What I have so far: a 40 gallon rectangle aquarium, a used octopus bh100 skimmer, 2 maxi jet 1200 powerheads, a coralife lunar aqualight with two 96 watt PC bulbs, 40 lbs. of marco key largo rock, 40 lbs. of argonite sand, and 1 lb. of live rock to seed the dry rock. I got the tank up and running about a week ago, mixed the salt to 1.024 and added 5 lbs of live sand (the bagged kind that I later found out may be worthless).
My question has to do with the skimmer. I put the skimmer on the tank right away and plugged it in with no powerheads in the tank at the time. I wasn't impressed with it as I had to put the collection cup all the way down and the bubbles would barely go up halfway to the collection cup. I read about some mesh mods and decided to try just wrapping fishing line all through the needle wheel (hoping to create a similar result to a mesh mod). I instantly noticed more bubbles and the skimmer started to actually skim stuff out of the water. A few days later I put the power heads in the water and turned them on and it instantly kicked up sand and dead matter into the water and the skimmer quit skimming and is basically doing what it did before I added the fishing line. Does anyone have any idea why this might be? Do skimmers produce bigger and better bubbles when the water has more of a bio load than it currently has? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, I have a test kit to check paramaters and was just wondering what is a general guide line as to how long it will take for the aquarium to cycle and be safe for fish. I obviously won't add any until the nitrite reading is 0 but was wondering how long that typically takes.