Saltwater tank already etablished?

[BelLoe08]

Hello

I've started to set up my new saltwater tank (118 gallons) 3-4 weeks ago.
I put also some live rocks from my other very well etablished tank (42 gallons) in the new tank. I've bought also live sand.
Last week I've started to test the water and the values were perfect!
Today, I tested them again and they were perfect again!
Do you think my tank's already etablished or should I wait longer?

 

[PBar]

Hello,
it might be possible, but I will be very careful to say establish. You will see that tanks take normally a year to be really establish.
Before that, you will go probably through many different cycles.

If your parameters are within reasonables ranges... you may indeed start to think about one fish or an extremely easy coral.

Again, go slow. If you opt to add something now... put and let the tank adapt to it. Give time before you decide to add another thing into it.

Good luck!

 

[Timfish]

Since you used established rock from another system and live sand you likely established your nitrifying bacteria immediately. This is what I typically do with maricultured live rock and live sand when I set up a system so I can add fish and corals within 24 hours. As pointed out by PBar though maturing a system takes months and you will still see various algae cycles, the severity could be minimal or could still be severe depending to a large extent on how careful you are in getting corals suited to your system and how well they do.

 

[Garf]

Should be ok if the transferred rocks have enough surface area. I’m guessing you’ve added no ammonia source so far? Ghost feeding, ammonia chloride, rotted shrimp etc.

 

[Azedenkae]

Hello

I've started to set up my new saltwater tank (118 gallons) 3-4 weeks ago.
I put also some live rocks from my other very well etablished tank (42 gallons) in the new tank. I've bought also live sand.
Last week I've started to test the water and the values were perfect!
Today, I tested them again and they were perfect again!
Do you think my tank's already etablished or should I wait longer?

My main concern is that there is not enough live rock and live sand there to handle ammonia once there is live stock. After all, this is only a portion of the live rock you got from the established tank, and it is in a much larger volume now. Unless, of course, you added additional live rock rather than dry rock. Perhaps if you add live stock slowly it is fine, but that is not my style, and either way, I would suggest testing your aquarium to see if it can handle 2ppm of ammonia in a day.

By well, dosing 2ppm ammonia and then seeing if ammonia and nitrite still reads 0 after 24 hours. 2ppm because I presume people have done the work and found that yeah, generally a full tank would produce 2ppm of ammonia a day, so that is at least how much nitrifiers should be able to handle in a fully stocked tank.

That'd be what I'd do. If you read less than 2ppm, but still more than 0 (or 0.25 if you use the API ammonia test kit), then nitrification is occurring, just not fast enough for a fully stocked tank. If it stays at 2ppm then well, that's not great, but would absolutely be good to know.

 

[Jekyl]

If you transferred established live rock then you can already handle the ammonia those rocks handled before.

 

[schuby]

If the rest of your rock was dry, then it will naturally bind phosphate and that will attract algae. It should be much less severe than a tank started with all dry rock. You have a tremendous jump-start adding live rock from your other tank. Once coraline from your live rock starts covering the dry rock, then algae will me much more controlled. CUC should help in the meantime (and after). Hopefully, you've got fish in there, supplying new ammonia to allow the bacteria to multiply. You don't mention lights, but they are needed for your new tank to mature, IME.

Preventing phosphate and nitrate from zeroing out was my primary goal when I started my tank from all dry tock 2+ years ago.