Reefer 250 build with veneered stand

[Sactoreefer]

The cycle is coming along, on the 24th I dosed another ~35 ml of ammonia, and the reading was too high for my checker. So I diluted the sample (1 ml tank water and 9 ml SW) for a dilution factor of 10. This resulted in a reading of 0.39, so multiply that by 10 for a reading of 3.9. I just tested and ammonia is only 0.12 today! Nitrites are maybe a bit lower, but still between 2 and 4 on the salifert color card. Nitrates are now off the scale of my checker (>75).

Should I do a WC tomorrow, or keep dosing a little bit of ammonia every couple of days until all of my nitrites are also being converted and then address the high nitrates when the cycle is done? Thanks for any advice.

 

[Sactoreefer]

Cycle seems to be mostly completed as of a couple of weeks ago. Any ammonia added to the tank would be gone within 24h, nitrites were a bit slower but come down to zero within a couple of days. Last week I did a 50% WC and then picked up a bunch of corals and some inverts. Thanks to John @YourReef for walking around your store with me for about an hour talking about corals and helping pick things out with me that would be good for my level (lack of) experience. I ended up with 18 frags, which were buy 6 get 3 free. Nice clean tanks, good looking corals, and good prices. Glad to have this shop 30 mins from my house!

Corals added: 2 Favia, 1 Blastomussa, 2 Cyphastrea, 2 Acan, 1 Jack-O-Lantern Leptoseris, 1 Banana Star Polyp (GSP but more yellow, the colony in one of his DT's looked awesome). 9 different Zoa frags. I also picked up 2 skunk cleaner shrimps, 1 turbo snail, a few Ceriths, 2 hermits, and a Tiger Conch. He was almost out of snails otherwise I would have bought some more.

A few days after turning on the adding frags/turning on the lights, brown spots started to appear everywhere. Seems to be dinoflagellates. I'll avoid feeding as much as possible, maybe a tiny algae wafer here and there for the inverts, though everything seems to be munching on the dino so this may not be necessary. No coral feeding for a while.

Current water parameters are salinity 1.026, temp 78, Alk 6.0, Nitrates 13.2, Phos 0.03. Will be continuing 10-20% weekly WC for the foreseeable future. Lights are pretty low. I bought an Apogee SQ-520 PAR meter with wand off Ebay for a good price, which should be here sometime next week.

I set up my skimmer a few days ago, not too happy with this thing at the moment (Reef Octopus Classic 110). It is very loud, by far the loudest part of my tank. A lot of that is from the air intake (which I will route into my garage at some point) but the pump itself seems to have a loud hum to it. Hopefully this quiets down as it breaks in.