Live Aquaria vs. Premium Aquatics vs. ? for live rock?

[Burns11]

I'm no expert, but to me it's all pretty nice looking rock. It looks better in real life, the camera sapped quite a bit of color out of the image, likely a bad reaction to the funny lighting. There weren't a lot of little critters on the rock, but it's only been in the water for four days so at least none yet. Sure it's nice to get some "good" guys with the rock, but it's just as nice to not deal with getting rid of the "bad" or unattractive.

The rock is doing it's job too, I put the raw shrimp in on friday and today all of the levels (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate) were at 0. 24g aquapod, 24 lbs LR, 2lbs LR rubble in the filter, 40lbs nature's ocean bio-active sand.

 

[BigAl07]

Burns11 careful to not jump the gun there. I don't think 4 days is near enough time for a "cycle" on your tank. I have had one almost NOT cycle with some premium LR but it still took over 1 1/2 weeks for the levels to get to ZERO even though they never really "spiked" like we expect to see. If you test again and they are truly at ZERO I'd at least take a sample of the H2O to your LFS and let them check it as well. Is the raw shrimp completely gone/decayed? I suspect you still have some cyling going on there but I could be wrong.

good luck and congrats on the LR score.

Allen

 

[Burns11]

I actually bought the wrong test kit, so I wasn't able to test ammonia and nitirite right away, but I did see levels of ammonia and nitrite at about 3 once I did get the right one. The shrimp wasn't completely gone, but it is decayed pretty good, it fell to peices when I touched it.


I'm not assuming it's cycled and just going to throw a bunch of stuff in there, if my levels stay at 0, I was going to maybe look at a hardy fish this weekend to keep the tank going but I'm definitely in no hurry to (over) stock the tank.