We haven't been able to add fish to our tank again. We can't get our nitrates down to 0 and it was baffling us because there isn't anything in the tank "making" nitrates! We don't want to blow money on fish to just have them die, so we went to a new saltwater store that just opened up close to our house (finally!) and asked what we should do.
The guy said that live rock (rock with living organisms and bacteria on it) is a natural filtration and it's a good rule of thumb to have pound or pound and a half per gallon to help build the ecosystem. We have a 150 gallon tank with 150 pounds of live rock so we decided to add some more and see where that got us.
Live rock is $3.99 a pound and that really adds up so we decided to buy 15 pounds of live rock and 30 pounds of base rock (base rock is rock that has been dried out and has nothing living on it, it will become live over time if set next to live rock and at 89 cents a pound it's friendlier on the wallet). We didn't want to add all 45 pounds to the tank (also known as the display tank) so we put the 15 pounds of live rock in our sump.
There it is just chilling in the basket. Every time we do a water change we'll take out the basket and rinse the rock in clean water to get rid of any built up gunk.
We aquascaped (yes that is the technical term) our tank with the remaining base rock which took a few hours, but we're pretty pleased with how it turned out. Here's a before:
And an after:
We want to add another rock to the top left, but it felt like everything we put there looked very out of place and not natural. So we'll be on the hunt for the perfect rock in the next few weeks.
The tank will probably "cycle" through ammonia spikes, nitrites and nitrates again since we added live rock and stuff will die off of it so we have to wait another 4 to 6 weeks to see if we got our nitrates down to 0 before we add fish again. Experts tell me that the start of a saltwater tank is the hardest part and they weren't lying!
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