* Crystal & James 55gal w/ 20gal upgrade *

Just came UPS :). We should have no problems w flow now!

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Made 60 gal of water and mixed salt in 50 because that's what was made up and it was enough! Just filled it up and turned it on about 45 min ago! 50 lbs of rock (agrocrete) and 70 lbs of sand (40 is live). Finally feel accomplished.. now a few lbs of live rock and some chaeto and hopefully a short cycle. We'll start with some chromis
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Sorry picture is so big, was just excited to upload lol
 
Awesome build! You seem to quite the DIY'er. I'll be following for sure. As for coral,I recommend buying frags. It may not fill your tank quite as fast but I've enjoyed watching and nurturing my frags. It's amazing how fad they'll grow.
 
Awesome build! You seem to quite the DIY'er. I'll be following for sure. As for coral,I recommend buying frags. It may not fill your tank quite as fast but I've enjoyed watching and nurturing my frags. It's amazing how fad they'll grow.

Thank you! We like to DIY everything lol. Thanks for the advice too ;)
 
5:30pm
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Some testing.. hopefully soon we can add live rock and chaeto.......
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*salinity the same, forgot to jot it down*
 
Found a guy on Craigslist Tues night who had live rock for $2/lb so we bought 20 lbs last night :) We put it in a rubbermaid, sitting in 10 gal of saltwater w/ a powerhead and a heater.
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I was cleaning the glass in our tank the other day and bumped the sand, it made some dust float up. Then, we stirred it up and had a nice white tank. The bags of sand said no rinsing..so we didn't rinse it. :( After that we removed all the sand from the water and rinsed it all for 2 hours, then put it back in. After removing all the sand our tank got milky white.. it's about 60-75% clear now. So, we're waiting for it to be clear before putting the live rock in.

We noticed the rock has some dead stuff on it. There's some little skinny white worm things and some like small grub worm looking things on it. Also, there's a part on the small rock that sorta looks like brown worms or hairs sticking straight out of it.. not sure what any of this is or if it's bad or anything.

QUESTIONS: Do we need to do some scrubbing? How long do we need to let it sit in the rubbermaid? Can we put the water from the rubbermaid w/ the rock in our tank? Can we put it in our tank and let it cycle w/o adding a piece of shrimp?
 
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So, we drained our tank yesterday and rinsed white residue from everything. Put all rock including our live rock back in tank. Made a whole new batch of saltwater and at 11:40pm we were back up and running with a little cloudiness. Now it's perfectly clear and we're just waiting for it to cycle. Such a relief!
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It's been a while! Our tank has been up and running good since 4/19 :D We bought 2 Chromis, 2 Red Legged Hermits & 2 Astrea Snails on 4/24. This past Monday one of our Chromis died! :( On 5/4 we bought a Turbo Snail, 4 Astreas, 4 Hermits, 1lb of live rock rubble and a handful of chaeto. Friday we bought another Chromis (he's getting along with our first Chromis pretty good), we also bought a Diamond Watchman Goby, 2 Red Legged Hermits & 4 Nassarius Snails. We also bought a wide variety of fish food too!

Phew that was alot of catching up! We're so happy with our tank.. all levels are perfect, we did have ALOT of brown algae but fortunately all of our CUC got it under control. I love our goby.. he's the most awesome fish! He picked up a snail today and moved him onto a rock.. it was so cool! We were planning on getting 2 clowns, BUT decided to get our goby first. :)

We have no plans to buy anymore livestock in the next month or so, other than maybe 1 more Turbo Snail MAYBE. Hopefully, sometime this year a couple corals..but that's not anytime soon.. we still need all of our fish!
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Kinda bright..but see, PROOF!! :D
 
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Looks great! But you should add at least one more chormis, otherwise their naturally bullying tendency will constantly keep you with one one chromis.
 
Thanks you two ;)

little_fish, I'm not sure what happened to our other Chromis.. he had a few scales missing on his side, then the next day his pink flesh was showing and he died that afternoon.
 
I dont think you lost your first chromis to bullying, but you will lose others to bullying. That was what I was trying to say, im sorry if it wasnt very clear :)
 
I dont think you lost your first chromis to bullying, but you will lose others to bullying. That was what I was trying to say, im sorry if it wasnt very clear :)

I understand :) We were just thinking about picking up 2 the other day too.. but got 1 and our Goby, dangit! :frustrat:
 
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