Hello everyone. My husband and I are new to the saltwater reef tanks. We had an established chilid tank (20 yrs), but lost everything with hurricane Isabel - so since we had to start over, decided to try saltwater. We have a 180 gal. tank, 1200 gal/hr. wet/dry trickle filter with bio-balls, magnum flow 1800/hr. pump; approximately 4 inches of marine sand and crushed coral, and 140 lbs. of live rock on top of the sand. We have been getting bad advise from out local pet store owner - who, we thought was supposed to know what he is doing!! He told us it was alright to put fish in our tank, after the live rock had been in place for a couple of weeks. We put a molly, yellow tang, queen angel, flame angel, and some damsels, a cowfish, a tomato clown - all on his advise. Well, now we know that we overstocked the tank and of course we lost all of the above except for the molly - a very expensive lesson to learn the hard way. The last water test we did, everything was okay except for the phosphate, so we have added phosguard, and I need to check that again today. Then someone else told us maybe the copper level is too high - well, what else do we need to check and where to we get all the kits we need to check everything? We have the basic testing kit that checks nitrate, ammonia, nitrite and ph, then we picked up the kit to check the phosphate. Whew - we just want to get this stuff right! Oh yes, we are wondering now if our "pet shop guy" gave us good live rock - it is supposed to be from figi and he cycled it in his shop before bringing it to us - so all we did was place it in the tank - but I can't tell if anything is growing?? Right now we have the brown/reddish algae on it. We had a cleanup crew consisting of hermit crabs and astrae snails. We still have the hermits, but all of the snails died. Sorry this is so long, but as you can see, we are getting quite frustrated and just need some "real" help from someone that knows what they are doing.
Thank you so much and again, I apologize that this is sooooo long.
Thank you so much and again, I apologize that this is sooooo long.