1. bring your water to about 80 degrees and hold it there.
2. have at least one live rock in the tank.
3. feed the tank 1 flake per 10 gallons of ordinary marine fish food daily, which is the soul of 'cheap,' and continue until you register ammonia. Continue that, but add a few snails and crabs. If they live, add more. Let them work and start your first fish in qt for the recommended procedures. You can also add a hardy coral to the tank at this stage, but hey, if this is your first tank, don't do that yet: you're bound to make mistakes with your early water changes and such: make those with the snails and crabs---they survive most anything.
That's about it. That's about as fast as you can go. The real difference actually is the temperature. Cold slows things down, heat speeds them up (up to a point, and in a marine tank, that point is about 80 degrees.) If you have ALL live rock fresh from a move or another tank you might cycle within 5 days: but that's rock where the living bacteria have distributed themselves not only over the surface but well into the heart of the rock---which is why old tanks are stabler than new tanks. Bacteria-in-a-bottle may help, but it's NOT got a shoehorn to cram bacteria into unwilling rock clear to the heart of it, and pushing a tank past the limits of its bacterial colony is a recipe for fish loss.
(Your little crew of snails and crabs is in there tidying up and providing poo for the bacteria to go on multiplying, but the system is fragile, until that tank has really, really colonized the rock, which only happens so fast, no matter what you soak it in) So way early on, it's hardly ready for one fish, let alone multiples. Fish these days tend to arrive with parasites and problems, so toss the fish into qt and just enjoy the antics of your crabs at work...they're kind of fun.
The usual time for a tank to cycle is 4 weeks. The longest time, for a tank with 90% 'new' rock and only a small live rock, is about 12 weeks. (new dry rock should be 'tubbed' in warm, strongly circulating salt water for weeks with no light, with water changes, to soak the phosphate it contains into solution and get rid of as much as possible.)
2. have at least one live rock in the tank.
3. feed the tank 1 flake per 10 gallons of ordinary marine fish food daily, which is the soul of 'cheap,' and continue until you register ammonia. Continue that, but add a few snails and crabs. If they live, add more. Let them work and start your first fish in qt for the recommended procedures. You can also add a hardy coral to the tank at this stage, but hey, if this is your first tank, don't do that yet: you're bound to make mistakes with your early water changes and such: make those with the snails and crabs---they survive most anything.
That's about it. That's about as fast as you can go. The real difference actually is the temperature. Cold slows things down, heat speeds them up (up to a point, and in a marine tank, that point is about 80 degrees.) If you have ALL live rock fresh from a move or another tank you might cycle within 5 days: but that's rock where the living bacteria have distributed themselves not only over the surface but well into the heart of the rock---which is why old tanks are stabler than new tanks. Bacteria-in-a-bottle may help, but it's NOT got a shoehorn to cram bacteria into unwilling rock clear to the heart of it, and pushing a tank past the limits of its bacterial colony is a recipe for fish loss.
(Your little crew of snails and crabs is in there tidying up and providing poo for the bacteria to go on multiplying, but the system is fragile, until that tank has really, really colonized the rock, which only happens so fast, no matter what you soak it in) So way early on, it's hardly ready for one fish, let alone multiples. Fish these days tend to arrive with parasites and problems, so toss the fish into qt and just enjoy the antics of your crabs at work...they're kind of fun.
The usual time for a tank to cycle is 4 weeks. The longest time, for a tank with 90% 'new' rock and only a small live rock, is about 12 weeks. (new dry rock should be 'tubbed' in warm, strongly circulating salt water for weeks with no light, with water changes, to soak the phosphate it contains into solution and get rid of as much as possible.)
