Snail question

dont do anything right now but watch the levels. this wold be a bad time to ad anything, you want to wait for your water to "mature" some more. you need to build up bacteria in the tank.
my rule of thumb is 1 and half pounds of LR per gal of water. now in this situation i am not sure when a good time would be to add it since you already have fish (its a little earily for that). if it was me and had 20 lbs of cured LR i would get another 20 of base rock, and just wait, be patient. i dont know what other would do.
and dont over feed the clowns either (it will jack up your levels)

 

i heard this once not to long ago

"if yer checking yer lvls every day it means yer looking for first opertunity to add live stock"

u need to slow right down and let yer live rock cycle the only thing i would add IMO is a small clean up crew
but u need to read up on cycling and really understand it before u loose alot of money in stock

 

I would not do water changes until your cycle is complete. If you do, you will stall that cycle and your nitrates may never go down if that happens.

 

Correct. In an established tank, water changes work well to reduce nitrates (but it's only a band-aid unless/until you figure out what's producing those nitrates)

 

Wow, thanks for all the info guys! I appreciate it.

 

Seems like this has been pretty well discussed, but I thought I would add one thing. At this point w/nitrates in 30's, algae is good as it will be what lowers the nitrates. Once your nitrates come down, some of the algae will take care of itself (thank goodness as that first cylce of algae is pretty ugly).

 

to comment on what oeb said i dont think the algae will take car of itself because the nitrates are only the starter its lights that keep it going, id wait till your numbers come down then introduce snails

 

Great! Thanks oeb and Godbert. I didn't know that algae helped lower nitrates.