Newbie SW tank dad here

cmoore806 · Apr 12, 2020

My 9 year old wants to be a marine biologist. Five years ago I was interested in starting a SW aquarium but we had a newborn and I have plenty of “hobbies”. Now my youngest of three kids is five and it’s a little easier to keep kids from destroying a tank.

five years ago we kept a small FW tank but my middle (2 at the time) was prone to dump a jar of food into a 3 gallon tank so yeah. Wasn’t going to take the risk.

so I have my RODI system up and making 0TDS water. I’ve setup my DT so I can start cycling it this week sometime. Once I get a metal shelving unit setup in our utility room I’ll have a 10gallon QT tank which I should be able to add our first fish or two to. About two months from now I figureI’ll be a semi-pro at keeping the empty DT stable and will transfer some living things to it.
Sound like a solid plan?

pics for attention. Fluval 13.5 nano reef coming soon.

SPR1968 · Apr 12, 2020

Great pictures and Welcome to R2R!!!

Fourstars · Apr 12, 2020

Welcome!

Cwentz758 · Apr 12, 2020

Sounds like a good start. Did you add any live bacteria as a starter? Biospira, turbo start, etc. luckily once this is cycled you should be able to keep everything in check with careful feeding and good weekly maintenance.

Chrisfish · Apr 12, 2020

Welcome to R2R, nice tank

Jaebster · Apr 12, 2020

Awesome! Welcome to R2R!

Gernader · Apr 12, 2020

Welcome to R2R!!

X-37B · Apr 12, 2020

KrisReef · Apr 12, 2020

The University of Australia sounds like an excellent plan! They have a reef you can visit during the education.

Welcome to Reef2Reef!

cmoore806 · Apr 12, 2020

Cwentz758 said:
Sounds like a good start. Did you add any live bacteria as a starter? Biospira, turbo start, etc. luckily once this is cycled you should be able to keep everything in check with careful feeding and good weekly maintenance.

I have some dr Tim’s one and only and the ammonium chloride. The one and only comes in the mail hopefully tomorrow. I figure a couple weeks or so is the time to take for the cycle. But I won’t have fish ready in the QT tank yet. So I may just wait to cycle the DT and first cycle my QT to get the hang of it first.