ULM Tank Cycle

bknapp · May 4, 2018

I'm in the stages of starting a new tank and the manner in which you cycled the ULM trial tanks caught my attention.

If you were to redo the cycle what would you do differently? Do you like the way those tanks are progressing?

Thanks for any insight, love what y'all are doing.

clark griswold · May 4, 2018

I'm obsessed with the ULM series. I'm curious about this too. Great great job on this series BRS, thank you! I don't have a tank yet but I'm going to follow much of their set-up with the Triton method most likely.

pluikens · May 7, 2018

bknapp said:
I'm in the stages of starting a new tank and the manner in which you cycled the ULM trial tanks caught my attention.

If you were to redo the cycle what would you do differently? Do you like the way those tanks are progressing?

Thanks for any insight, love what y'all are doing.

Ryan covers this in the week 16 ULM update video on YouTube. I didn't catch many differences in the video so Ryan may have more to add but he did call out not adding chaeto to the system until fish are added and starting at just 1 hour a day, adding an hour each week until the full reverse schedule is achieved.

bknapp · May 7, 2018

Thanks for the heads up, guess I haven't watched that video yet.

randyBRS · May 10, 2018

bknapp said:
I'm in the stages of starting a new tank and the manner in which you cycled the ULM trial tanks caught my attention.
If you were to redo the cycle what would you do differently? Do you like the way those tanks are progressing?
Thanks for any insight, love what y'all are doing.

I'd say, so far, we're pretty happy with the way the cycle went. Perhaps we didn't have as many nutrients as we had expected (which could have been a factor in the Chaeto not taking off initially), but all-in-all it went as expected.

OriginalUserName · May 10, 2018

I will be upgrading to a much larger tank in a few months and so far my plan is to follow their "ULM cycle" method. It is definitely overkill, but I want to force myself to go slow with the new tank and avoid the really annoying parts of a new tank (algae, pests, etc.) I want to start over with a totally different scape so I won't be able to leverage any of my existing rock.

pluikens · May 10, 2018

randyBRS said:
I'd say, so far, we're pretty happy with the way the cycle went. Perhaps we didn't have as many nutrients as we had expected (which could have been a factor in the Chaeto not taking off initially), but all-in-all it went as expected.

Hey Randy,

I don't recall if it was mentioned in the videos, when was your CUC added? Was it during month 1 while feeding was occurring with no fish? Was any skimmer or GFO running during this time or was the chaeto the only nutrient export method? Thanks!

randyBRS · May 10, 2018

pluikens said:
Hey Randy, I don't recall if it was mentioned in the videos, when was your CUC added? Was it during month 1 while feeding was occurring with no fish? Was any skimmer or GFO running during this time or was the chaeto the only nutrient export method? Thanks!

There never really was any CUC added to the tank, especially during the tank cycle. Ryan did add a couple of Emerald Crabs and the Tang/Blenny, but that was as far as the CUC got. Along with that, we only used the refugiums for nutrient control and only after the cycle did we consider a skimmer on the tank. Now the Softy/SPS both use a skimmer. We have not used any other sort of media except a small bag of carbon for each tank.

Personally, I would have added a couple of snails to each tank after the cycle, but Ryan's approach does seem to be working fine.