how can you tell...

[Kengaroo131]

if your cylce is over?

 

[skippy2]

When your amm. and nitrite are at 0. Then do a big water change to get your trates down. You can also add your cleanup crew now.
My 55 cycled completely at 18 days but I still waited another month to add my cleanup crew.

 

[papagimp]

When the nitrite and ammonia levels return to 0

depending upon how much LR/LS you used, you can easily miss the cycle if you are not testing often enough. But usually, if you are stating without liverock or enough of it, the cycle will last about a month or so.

Have you been testing the water? PH, Nitrite, ammonia, Nitrate, Alk, Calcium, Phosphates? (these are the minimum tests I would run, and they're more of them as well that should be tested as well, just not neccesarily as often.)

 

[Kengaroo131]

i have not been testing. i guess i should. what would happen if you miss the cycle?

 

[papagimp]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=9558875#post9558875 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by mariner908
i have not been testing. i guess i should. what would happen if you miss the cycle?

nothign at all, except the knowledge that you made your first mistake with your new saltwater tank, lol. Congradulation and welcome to the family. We all made rookie mistakes at some point.

So, to help you out a bit, let me caution you, testing your water quality is one of the most important things you can ever do for your tank. it will allow you to see problems forming long before they happen. Help to solve current problems, such as figuring out why you have so much hair algae. And more importantly than that, if your water quality is not right, your fish and corals will suffer because of it.

I highly recommned you jump over to the chemistry forum and read up a bit. Doing these types of testing can be a PITA from time to time, but it's not hard by any means. No harder than performing a water change anyways. Another important aspect to the hobby as well, do your water changes.

Heres what you should be looking into:
Ph
Nitrite
Ammonia
Nitrate
Alkalinity
Phosphate
Specific Gravity
Temperature
Magnesium
Strontium
Copper

probably a few more that I'm forgetting. The last 3 you should read up on, just so you are aware of there pressence or lack of, but the rest should be tested often, at least as often as your water changes. I check temp, S.G., daily, Nitrate and phosphate I test for weekly, the rest I do radomly, since they stay pretty stable for me. I've never tested the mag, or strontium in my system, but I have no indication that they may be bad yet.
Some of these parameters are connected, such as the PH to Alk to Calcium. If one is out of whack, the others may be as well. So it's important to have a basic knowledge of them and what they effect in your system. This is just as important as knowing the foods you feed your fish, and what type of light you need for corals.

And to wrap this all up, not all test kits are created equal. Salifert is the prefered brand that I see recommended more often, very accurate. I use AP from petsmart, not as accurate by far, but enough to give me the basic ideas.

 

[Kengaroo131]

thank you for the info i have been checking my temp and salinity. i also have 13 lsb of live rock in there idk if that would help it. i read up somwhere that it was supposed to a little.

 

[dastratt]

mariner,

I would advise you to measure the parameters considered critical in this article

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-05/rhf/index.php

additionally I measure nitrate.