What do YOU add first to your cycled reef tank?

[ReefStache]

There are many ways to get a reef tank going these days. Curious to hear about your process once cycled. Let’s chat…

Personally, with my current build, once the tank was cycled I added some cleanup crew (love Cerith snails) for the diatoms, Chaeto macroalgae (preparing for my first fish shipment), live copepods and some coralline algae. I have a centerpiece custom rock that’s white as can be and I need it to catchup to the artificial color of the rest of my scape. lol. I also dosed nitrates while awaiting my first fish shipment to keep the Chaeto happy.

I also started dosing live phyto daily to feed the pods and outcompete nuisance algae.

Here’s a vid documenting my progress. Fish are also in now but I’m still editing that vid. I went with captive bred fish only.

 

[ReefStache]

A week later when the fish arrived I added some captive bred ORA Pincushion urchins and ORA Peppermint shrimp. Both are great at consuming detritus and other waste. The urchins are beasts at cleaning the rock! 100!

 

[Jeffbear]

This is great content Rob! And I loved the video with the wife doing the unboxing. How is the intank refugium working out? I tried it in my Nano tank and all it did was die off on me.

 

[ReefStache]

This is great content Rob! And I loved the video with the wife doing the unboxing. How is the intank refugium working out? I tried it in my Nano tank and all it did was die off on me.

Thx bro, appreciate the support. Pretty sure you are talking about the nano in tank refugium in this vid: (in tank Refugium shown around the 4 minute mark - the description of the YouTube vid has links to what I used)


It did great for 6 months then we tore it down to move from TX to FL. Just have to make sure that it can get enough light and there are nitrates in the system for the macro to consume. I also added rigid airline to keep the macroalgae oxygenated and that seemed to help a ton. There were so many pods living in the different macros.