MrFolgers' new 75 gallon

Awesome, good looking so far. The problem with crushed coral is that it is very porous with many caves and crevices. If you look at it under a microscope it looks like a giant underground cave network. Anyway the point is that nitrifying bacteria will build up in these caves and even when you clean the gravel the bacteria will remain.

The good thing for you is that fish don't mind a low level of detectable nitrate.

Edit: I just remembered that I used to have a Picasso Triggerfish that would constantly suck up a mouthful of gravel and clean it off then spit out the clean gravel. I don't think any textbook will tell you this, it's just my own observation.

Keep at it!
Doratus

 

Well my water finally cleared up today. I set up my CPR bak pak skimmer (which i had to mod a little bit) and this is what my tank looks like so far

 

Great! the cloudy water is always so discouraging glad it cleared up quick

 

Well i bought 15 lbs of live rock and 30 lbs of dry rock from reefcleaners. Cant wait for them to come so i can start aquascaping

 

So i looked behind my tank today and saw a puddle on the wood i set my tank on. I found out that there was a crack on my HOB skimmer. Luckily i had some silicone so i fixed the leak.

This is what it looked like

 

Glad to see the progress. and glad to see you didn't let the leak discourage you. It will inevitably happen in this hobby.

 

Thanks. The bad thing is that the water warped the wood so now my tank is a little off level

 

My order of 40 lbs of base rock from reefcleaners came today. I rinsed, scrubbed, and rinsed it all again and put it in my tank. I went for the 2 island look.

 

Always exciting to watch someone putting a tank together.

It looks awesome right now, but I think you'd benefit from adding quite a bit more rock, in my opinion.

Good luck, and please keep posting pics of your progress!

 

Thanks . My live rock should be here tomorrow. Its also going to be a predator tank so i dont want a whole lot of rock in there