cycling (not the bike)

The time will make you happy in the end. Keep a watch out on local forums for people selling their LR cheap and take it home and clean it for your tank. Will save you tons of money you could later spend on equipment.

 

Check out my tank thread, I have a 55 and it has shown my timeline and some details as to what I have done so far. Not sure if it will help, but I'd like to think I've done an alright job so far!!

Your doing the right thing by researching as much as you can this early! Karma for that, you'll thank yourself in the long run.

 

I dumped 80lbs or live sand in mine with 30lbs of mature live rock with about 10 gallons of my mature water from my 30 into a 90 gallon along with 60 lbs of cycled live rock from lfs. I put all 6 of my fish in the tank and so far they are doing great. Ive done it this way with my 9,10,29,90, & 125 gallon tanks with no fish casualties. They even sell that bio cycle stuff by marineland thats live bacteria if u dont wanna wait forever.

 

My 55 tank has been set up now touching 4 weeks, levels are still riseing, adding a piece of l/r every week or so, so far 9kg, blue tailed yellow damsel doing great, just another 2 months to wait, before adding live stock....i hope.
When you set your tank up take it slow, do a bit of rock watching, will be well worth it in the end, good luck...

 

ahhh yea...... the one downfall. good luck with it though!

 

I put 40lb sand 50lb uncured rock into my system threw it to a quick cycle but then I can hardly wait add 8 damsels in two weeks and slowly watch them die one by one everyday until I realized that my system had finally cycled I let it sit with one damsels for a very long time until I put the next fish in

 

I try not to kill damsels like that. They are still fish.