Taking it very slow.

[Mozis]

Hello Everyone,

My name is Mozis. I just started my first salt water tank. I plan on taking this very slow to make sure I get everything I need and want and do it right. I am at the very start of this.

Currently here is my set up.

I have a 55g fish tank.

There is water in it with 60 pounds of Nature's Ocean sand that is all in the tank. I just put the sand in last night. My tank is still very cloudy. I hope I didn't do anything wrong because it's still very cloudy. I am assuming this will just dissipate over time. Can anyone confirm this?

I have a filter in there right now that is a 30-60 gallon Aqua-Tech filter. However, the filter was running when I put the sand in and the filter just stopped working. The filter is only about a week old. I am not sure if I clogged it with sand on accident or if it just happened to die when adding the sand. So I have to look more into that.

I have slowly put in 3 cups of salt so far over the course of 30 minutes. I have a hydrometer about halfway down into the tank so I can watch the level of salt. So far, the lever in the hydrometer has not moved yet. I know I will end up putting about half the bag of salt in there, but the fish guy at PetCo said add about a cup every 5-10 minutes- I have a 25 gallon bag of Red Sea Salt.

Other then that, there are no fish, plants, or rocks.

So, I guess at this point I will start asking for my next step, other things to buy, books to read, magazines to subscribe to, websites to visit and anything else that might help me. I am told that it will probably be about a month until I even consider putting fish in there. I am more then happy to take as much time as needed to make sure I do this right.

Thank you anyone who would be willing to give me any ideas or help me anyway.

 

[quaddity]

First read all the stickies at the top of the forum.

The filter is probably clogged that's my guess on it. You will need at least 1/2 cup of salt per gallon of water to get to a salinity of 1.022. I keep my tank at about 1.025. I would take out the filter and just put a power head in there for now. Get your salinity up and the tank temp up to 78-80. You will then want to put around 50-60 lbs of live rock in the tank. Once you do that the tank is ready to start cycling. You can do this with fish or with something like a raw piece of shrimp to start generating ammonia. Personally I always cycle my tanks with a cheap damsel fish but a lot of people go the fishless route. Read read read. There's plenty of websites full of info. You'll have to decide if you are going to use a sump, skimmer, etc.