wonderland
Member
I just bought a well-established 150 gallon tank. I have had a 55 gallon FOWLR tank in the past, but hubby decided he wanted a reef tank this time and I figured we'd go bigger than before.......
The seller kept the rock and coral, but left everything else. I saved the water in the sump and refugium but chose to scrape and clean the tank itself and put down a new bed of aragonite sand. The previous owner had crushed coral in it, which I threw away because I am going to have several wrasses and they need sand to bed-down in.....
I did change around the system underneath the tank. The tank had a 10 gallon refugium draining into a 20 gallon sump with a trickle filter in it (2 drain pipes from tank, one went to refugium and the other to the sump)............ I moved the refugium into the 20 gallon tank (installed extra walls), and put the trickle filter in the 10 gallon (former refugium) and filled the 10 gallon tank with live rock. So now both drain lines go to the 10 gallon tank with the rock ( 1 line feeds through the trickle filter ) and the water goes through the live rock and then drains into the refugium, and then gets pumped back up..........
My first question is this: Even though I put new sand in the tank itself, I kept the substrate and plants in the refugium (just moved them to the 20 gallon) and did not scrub out the the refugium, sump, or trickle filter....... Am I still looking at a 6 week cycling process before adding fish?? Or are the biologicals from the sump and refugium going to speed things along??
Second question: I have a Phosban reactor with the bio-pellets that I will install when I start feeding fish in the tank. With that reactor, along with the planted refugium and rock in the sump, do I need to run the skimmer? A few articles I read said that the skimmer will remove food (and other stuff produced by the bio-pellets), in the water column that the corals would like to eat.....
The seller kept the rock and coral, but left everything else. I saved the water in the sump and refugium but chose to scrape and clean the tank itself and put down a new bed of aragonite sand. The previous owner had crushed coral in it, which I threw away because I am going to have several wrasses and they need sand to bed-down in.....
I did change around the system underneath the tank. The tank had a 10 gallon refugium draining into a 20 gallon sump with a trickle filter in it (2 drain pipes from tank, one went to refugium and the other to the sump)............ I moved the refugium into the 20 gallon tank (installed extra walls), and put the trickle filter in the 10 gallon (former refugium) and filled the 10 gallon tank with live rock. So now both drain lines go to the 10 gallon tank with the rock ( 1 line feeds through the trickle filter ) and the water goes through the live rock and then drains into the refugium, and then gets pumped back up..........
My first question is this: Even though I put new sand in the tank itself, I kept the substrate and plants in the refugium (just moved them to the 20 gallon) and did not scrub out the the refugium, sump, or trickle filter....... Am I still looking at a 6 week cycling process before adding fish?? Or are the biologicals from the sump and refugium going to speed things along??
Second question: I have a Phosban reactor with the bio-pellets that I will install when I start feeding fish in the tank. With that reactor, along with the planted refugium and rock in the sump, do I need to run the skimmer? A few articles I read said that the skimmer will remove food (and other stuff produced by the bio-pellets), in the water column that the corals would like to eat.....
