The Seed & The Cycle - Phase 2

 Continued with filling the tank is filled with RO/DI water. Fast forward to a filled tank, I will leave it to run for a day. This helps to kill off any bacteria using the concept of hyposalinity. In layman terms, anything that lives in a saltwater environment will suffer adverse effects should they experience a liquid environment with lesser salinity or just freshwater.

A day went by rather quickly, and soon Bing came by to place my rockscape in and deliver the other items that I purchased as well. Looking great. I started adding salt into the tank. I decided to stick with the Tropic Marin line of salt, since I had great success with it before and by far it mixes cleanly and faster compared to other brands. However, I did decide to take a leap of faith and try out the Bio-Actif bucket.

The cool thing is that it already has a few carbon dosing components mixed in with the salt, which will help in creating a low nutrient environment. It too contains natural bio-active marine substances with protective and growth-promoting effect. But aside those, what I'm looking for too is that it has an alkalinity of 8-9dKh. I needed something higher compared to the Pro-Reef salt I used previously, it was difficult to maintain PH with a low alkalinity of 7-7.5dKh. 

Took me a good 45min to add in about 3/4 of the salt which technically, according to the instructions on the bucket, is sufficient for mixing with 150 gallons. I let the mixing go wild for a couple of hours before I tested salinity with a refractometer. 35ppm. Perfect.

Next, I tore at the 2 sacks of sand and dumped them directly into the tank, making sure that I took out the packet of magnetic clarifier substance that came with every bag of Caribsea sand. Using a turkey baster to blast off the sand that landed on my rockwork. Using my coral tweezer to spread the sand out evenly, and then a gentle slope downwards front. Very cloudy. I mixed the 2 clarifiers with a small container filled with tank water, stir it nicely and added it in. To be honest, it did clear up maybe 40% after 3-4 hours but it's still cloudy, my guess is the salt, it did say that it might get cloudy due to the bio substances contained within.

Kickstarting the cycle with a small scoop of pure ammonia crystals as the base food source for the bacteria. I used Microbe Lift's Special Blend and Nite-Out 2 as the bacteria source, dumped half a bottle each into the tank.