Brand New oceanic 29 nano cube!! Help needed! Please

wow you guys are great!! Thanks all for the input So far all I have added was a cleaner crew!! And 1 green star polyp nice Frag about 4 inch!!! Ok now what about the lights how long should I keep them on all the time 12 Hr's or What Thanks again!

 

Follow up on Biocube 29 lights and other things

Greetings,

I started a Biocube 29 a month ago and so far everything seems to be OK, though I would like to here your expert opinions.
I started with about 20 lbs. of LR from a honest LFS (Uncle Bill's - I live in Columbus, IN) and other 20 lbs. of LS (5 of them from LFS tanks, rest Petsmart LS).
After about two weeks of having a small piece of shrimp decaying I never got to the point of having a spike on ammonia or anything else.
Question: Should I assume that the LR and LS were so well populated with bacteria the way that my tank cycled so fast ??

After that I added three - four days apart a small yellow tail damsel, a clown (my daughter request) and a blenny (nice creature). I also have a Haitian anemone and just added two turbo snails and three peppermint shrimps. With this load my levels are still on zero (I check twice a week). Is this normal for such a biological load ?

Last. How do you keep the lights ? I noticed that if I let the blue 460nm light on over the night everyone in the tank is happy (the anemone swallow big time especially after a small piece of shrimp ;D)
Should I have the white light on on day time and blue one on night time ?

Thank you very much,
Marian

PS. I had freshwater tanks for many years, but this is the first time to adventure on saltwater.

 

Hey, Im not expert or anything but I have the oceanic 29G and my tank is doing great. I have three timers for the different lights. I have actinics go on at 11AM and turn off at 9PM; the daylight starts at 12PM and turns off at 8PM, and the moonlights go on at 9PM until 12PM

 

Having fully cured LR stock will help speed up the cycling time, but it's hard to catch the spike at times. If you test every 3rd day (or whatnot), you could have missed the ammonia spike, that is when you test for a nitrite (NO2) spike. You probably will see a spike though, you added quite a bit of stock in a short period of time. Adding an extra creature every 3 days is fast; normally you want to give your biological system at least a month to readjust and increase, before adding a new stock.
Be careful with the Haitian anemone, especially if you are hoping that the clown will host to it. Haitians are typically not "hostable" anemones and will eat any fish that comes to close to it or is careless enough to get caught in its tentacles.
The actinic bulbs are used to help any photosynthetic animals thrive, as that is the spectrum of light the host algae within the tissues (called zooxanthellae) produce food for the coral/anemone. True actinics are in the 420nm range though. The 10000K bulbs are mainly for the fish to produce Vitamin D, as it is recreating the spectrum of daylight. So the fish will seem happier when the 10000K bulbs are on, and the anemone will seem happier with the actinics on. I hope this helps.

 

Biocube 29

Thank you Mike.

I have decided to stop adding anything for about a month. I have added last Saturday a bag with phosban and I am monitoring the GHA development. It is not a big problem just here and there on the sand and some on the glass. I would expect the phosban to remove the phos and silicates so the algae will starve.
I read about people regening the phosban in the oven. Any proven recipe ? time at temp ?

I keep running the blue light permanently and the white one from 7 am to 9 pm. Would the blue light promote the GHA ?

Marian

 

Adding in phosban will help, but you will have to "push" water through it to effectively work. If media just sits in the water, it really has a hard time absorbing the bad stuff in the water. Hang it from the return nozzle at the very least to get some water pressure through it. I know that nitrate absorbers can be recharged by soaking it in warm water with deiodized table salt for an hour. As far as baking phosban, that I wouldn't know. It wouldn't make much sense to me since there is nowhere for the chemicals to leave. It it bakes and evaporates, I wouldn't want it in the same thing that I cook food with. The actinic lighting shouldn't promote GHA since it is less close to the spectrum they need to grow. I can say that how long you are running the 10000K bulb, that will definitely contribute. Most people will run the actinics 12 hours per day and the 10000K for 8-9 hours. Remember, your fish need sleep time too and they are sensitive to the blue spectrum lighting. It would be like us being exposed to bright sunlight when we are trying to sleep. Besides that, your bulbs will need to be changed in about 4 months running them so much. I hope this helps.