Greetings!

Hello GIRS, quite happy to be here. I have been looking for an active forum of saltwater enthusiasts and the fact that this is available in iowa is just fantastic. I have a friend who told me about GIRS and I used to have quite a few customers who were members working at the west des Moines petco. I have dabbled in salt with my time working for nearly a year now and started a small tank of my own.

I realize that with a small tank lots of pitfalls can arise. I am well aware of the troubles I may face but am willing to learn and be patient with culturing my small IQ3 pico reef. Its 8 liters, has about 4-5 lbs of LR with some lovely coraline algae, about 2in of Hawaiian black sand, an ultra green flower anemone, peppermint shrimp, porcelain crab, and red legged cortex hermit. Oh and there are a few ZOAs and a mush polyp that I had as small hitch hikers. I recently tried putting a small chalice coral to see if my tank could keep any hard corals yet since I have a 15k robot led on top and intend on getting another. Please let me know of anything that you suggest as far as establishing it. Things have been smooth but I feel very weary with my nitrites being off the charts.. Not sure exactly how things are thriving but I thought it might have been just the size of my tank. I'll post some photos soon.

 

Thank you very much! I try to do one after each feeding about 10% and lately 40% three times weekly. Things have been going fairly swell so far.

 

Nirites are bad nitrates are stablizing at a 0 to 20 I have been doing 40% changes like twice in a row and dosing prime for nitrite poisoning. I just did one and noticed some improvement if I recheck the nitrites again and see a difference I will do one more and my tank should be good. I was chatting with Miller time about it last night and we are wondering how my crustaceans were doing so well and though my tank was still in the middle of cycling.

 

Nitrates ended up at 10-20, but I got my nitrites down to 5.0 much better than 10.0... But what else should I do :/ this seems relentless.

 

But the thing is when I wait for the nitrites to go down they dont. I waited for my tank to cycle checking nitrate exchange religiously and I noticeda slight increase on nitrates and no decrease but an increase in nitrites. I figured a tank that's only 8 liters would cycle a lot faster than two months. I'm going to try weekly water changes of about 30% and see what happens. I guess my first problem is I'm using the api test strips but they should at least be in the ballpark. And I checked today to see if it was a pack of faulty strips, but my ro water read zero so I dunno :/

 

Thanks Joshua!
it really feels great being part of a group of saltwater enthusiasts who are so warm hearted and welcoming. I hope I don't bog people down too much with my inexperience through silly questions or something. Since I was about seven I had intentions on dabbling with saltwater. I had told my mom I wanted to be a marine biologist from watching so much on animal planet. Now I just quit my job as a "cashier" at Petco where I mostly took care of aquatics and reptiles till about three, maybe four months ago where my buddy was promoted to a management position and I worked with small animals and birds. I have had a lot of customers come into my store who majored in marine biology who said the jobs are crap sweeping lobbies in zoos and such. It made me think instead of going out to the ocean i could just bring a bit here. Its great to know there is so much saltwater support not only in the Midwest but specifically Iowa. Thanks guys!