Building A Budget Reef Aquarium: Cycling & Testing

In Part #9 of our 30-episode series on Building A Budget REEF Aquarium, I cover what to expect when cycling a tank and how to test to be sure your tank is ready for fish.

In the last video, we aquascaped this tank. We put the rock in. We had some live rock and some dry rock. We put the sand in and we filled everything up with water. This episode discusses cycling the tank and your initial water testing.

With a new reef tank you will need a way to measure your salinity and for that we will use the MarineAndReef.com Refractometer. We showed you guys how to use this in a previous video on Making Saltwater (#7). At least once a month, you should check the salinity of your tank when you fill the tank with water. It really shouldn't shift unless you drain out a little bit more than you put in, or put in a little more top-off water than you should. About once a month you can just double-check check make sure the salinity is right.

The next thing to test is the temperature. In theory, if you're in a room below the ideal reef tank temperature of 76° to 82°, and you have a heater, the tank should be at the right temperature because the heater is set at that correct temperature. But it's always good to double-check and you really want a thermometer just in case. We're using this MarineAndReef.com Thermometer. It's just going to stick to the side of the tank. I can still see it from my desk and I'll be able to easily see if the aquarium is out of range.

Next up is cycling the aquarium and testing to make sure the tank is cycled properly. Cycling refers to the natural filtration in an aquarium done with living bacteria in the water that turns ammonia into nitrite and then nitrite into nitrate. When you first put your fish in they're going to start eating and pooping and making waste and initially there will not be any bacteria to process that waste. There will be no bacteria to take care of the ammonia. This can be unsafe for fish. We want to make sure the bacteria is established before we put fish in this tank. The bacteria will process the waste so there are no toxic ammonia levels that poison our fish.

Typically, cycling is done by adding some kind of waste to the tank. In our video, the waste is from the live rock we purchased. The live rock we added was shipped standard ground which is the cheaper but slower option. We did this to save on the budget and some animals died off in the process. There was still a lot of life on it, but it wasn't all alive so the live rock that we have does have some die-off. When the animals die they produce ammonia.

If you didn't add live rock, and you did dry rock instead, you're going to need to add your own source of ammonia. Typically what we recommend is what's called ghost feeding, which is putting some fish food in the tank even though there's no fish. The food will rot and that's going to produce some ammonia. It's an easy way to put some waste in the tank.

The bacteria will start processing that ammonia and that ammonia is going to turn into a compound called nitrite with an "I". Then it'll turn into a compound called nitrate with an "A". And once we see all the ammonia has spiked up and gone to zero, and all the nitrite has spiked up and gone to zero, we call the tank cycled.

That last compound nitrate is what's left over and there are some ways of getting rid of that in nature that we'll talk about in a different video. We're just going to say that in most aquariums the way to get rid of the nitrate is with water changes. Once we see those levels spike up and go down we're going to be left with some nitrate with an "A". We'll do our first water change to drop those levels down a little bit, and then we're going to pick up some fish.

So, where does the bacteria come from in the first place? In general, bacteria are everywhere in nature. But some places have more than others. In this case, the live rock from the ocean that we used has some living bacteria on it. If you don't use live rock, or decaying fish food, you're going to want to add some bacteria. For this we recommend Brightwell Aquatics MicroBacter StartXLM. It's bacteria specifically designed to start a tank. If you don't add this the tank still will cycle, but it could take months. Adding products like this tend to really speed it up to get it to get the tank cycled in a week or less.

For testing ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels I use the Lifegard Aquatics 6 Way Test Strips. It's actually a 5 Way bottle plus the ammonia strip bottle. The first thing I'm going to do is the ammonia strip. Just put it in the tank for about 5 seconds, and then lay it down flat for one minute. Then I'm going to take the other test strip which is the 5 Way one, and swirl it around twice. This one we can read right away. On the back of this test strip container, there's a color chart. By comparing the test strip to the color chart, we can find out the results for the nitrites and nitrates.

After a minute I check the ammonia test. And this has its own color chart and we're seeing probably just over 3 PPM of ammonia which is the danger level. This is why we don't want to add fish because if we added fish at this point it could burn their gills and really hurt them. We'll keep testing the tank every couple of days. These ammonia levels should naturally drop down. The nitrite should spike up. Then those will drop down and the nitrate levels will rise up. Once that happens the tank is cycled. Usually, this takes about a week, maybe two weeks. And if you want to speed it up and have it take less time adding a product like that Brightwell Aquatics MicroBacter StartXLM 250 ml will make it go even faster.

SEARCH

SEARCH

Sale & Coupons >>

New Products >>

Reward Points >>

Site Reviews >>

Articles & Videos >>

Building A Budget Reef Aquarium: Cycling & Testing

Please contact us with any questions you have.

[email protected]

(480) 491-5283

Company

My Account

Shopping