Please help regarding how to cycle a tank

[BleachedCoral]

Hello, I am cycling my first ever reef-tank and used live rock a friend gave to do so. Unfortunately, I didn't learn about the concept of "curing" until after I noticed the rocks had aiptasia anemones on them. So I got some aiptasia-x and gonna get some peppermint shrimp sometime in the future as well. I turned the lights off in the tank to hopefully stunt their growth. Should I/do I need to add some bottled bacteria into the tank, like Dr. Tim's or something? Should I turn the lights back on (The aiptasia-x did really well and it seems nearly all the aiptasia is gone)? The rocks have been in the tank for about 3.5 weeks now, with the lights tuned on in the beginning (it seemed to promote some green algae growth on the rocks as well) I turned the lights off about a week ago. Do I need to add in a bottle of coralline algae (the live rock didn't come with any purple spots on it so I assume its barren on that end)? Lastly, how do I know my water's ready for fish (I have a test kit and and nitrates & ammonia is at 0, pH is good too)?

Thanks for any replies!

 

[Reef.]

No need for lights on if you don’t have corals in the tank.

 

[Tired]

IMO, turn the lights on. Your rock has to get past the "ugly stage" sooner or later; a lot of pest algaes are going to grow and colonize it, and will then gradually be overrun by slower-growing, beneficial algaes. That's inevitable, and can't happen without light. May as well try to get it out of the way before you get corals. Algae can't hurt anything if you have no corals for it to bother.

You may already have coraline algae spores. If not, it'll come in on frag plugs. Don't bother buying it.

"Curing" live rock is waiting for all dying life on it to finish dying and decay off. Likely not relevant here- mostly happens with fresh rock from the ocean.

What do you mean by "live rock"? I assume rock that's been in their aquarium for awhile.

Go ahead and Aiptasia-X all the aiptasia, and that should get rid of them.

When we're cycling a tank, we aren't trying to get the water ready for fish. We're trying to make it so that all the ammonia produced by the fish will be turned into nitrates quickly, which is a process done by bacteria living on the rocks. The only way to reliably test that is to add an ammonia source, or pure ammonia, and test to see if it's gone. A tank is considered fully cycled when it can cycle 2ppm of ammonia into 0 ammonia in 24 hours or less. If it can do that, you can add a fish.

Make sure to pick up a sensitive phosphate test kit. You need to have some nitrites (5-10ppm) and phosphates (0.03-0.1ppm) in your tank, to feed photosynthetic organisms like beneficial algaes and corals. Lack of nitrates stunts growth, lack of phosphates will kill things. There's a particularly nasty pest, dinoflagellates, that crops up in the absence of nutrients, and you don't want that.