I have my final shopping list for turning Tibet on, and I'm hoping I can pick everything up before the holidays so that while I am at home I can be working on the tank, or at least watching her fill up with water.

- HRV (arrived, but requires install)
- Rock - I need another 100lbs, my cooking process is taking forever.
- Sand - need more course aragonite and some crushed coral
- Bulbs - T5 and/or MH
- 1.5" valves (out of stock)
- A celebratory cigar

The question I've been playing around with in my head is how am I going to cycle Tibet. Do I want to help it along, dose, or do nothing?

I went with mostly dry rock and some cooked rock in my tank and went with the Zeovit 14-day tank cycle. If memory serves my nitrites took a hair longer than the actual 14 advertised days to hit zero, but it was only a day or two later. I was skeptical but it worked and I started transferring livestock over and there were no nitrite bumps for any of the transfers (I waited up to a week in between transfers for some of the bigger fish.)

Only problem at 280g for me, it was a costly purchase of zeovit products (in my case I didn't mind TOO much as I had intended for the tank to be zeo anyhow) and it will only be that much worse for your tank's volume. But hey it was a 2 week cycle from 0% to 100%. It is a given of course that given more time it will cycle on its own so it comes down to how patient you are in that phase..

My original intent was to cook my old LR and then use it through the display, and sump, supplimenting with new dry rock. Unfortunately the cooking process on my old LR is taking WAY longer then anticipated, like months longer. I'm at the point now of deciding if I should a) buy more dry rock or b) just keep waiting. It could mean Tibet would start up with only about 150lbs of rock, which while I love the minimalist look, I'm not sure my otherhalf will take to it.

If I did Zeostart 3 I'd be looking at dosing about 8mL/day.

Did you do the whole Zeo line Tony or just a few?

you are so out of it Kien.................

PM'd

Do you mean for the 14-day cycle thing that I did, or the day-to-day permanent tank routine?

I ended up picking up most of Lobsterboy's zeo bottles so I ended up with more or less a full set. As some have emptied I've replaced a few things but I'm at the point where I find I don't dose any of them anymore except for sporatic bursts of this or that. I figure I'll just let them run empty at this point and see what happens. For the time being however I am still running the zeolites in a reactor.

For the 14 day cycle routine I think you only need zeostart, zeobak and sponge power. But the amounts are measured in terms of several ml per 25 gallon so you end up pretty much dumping the bottle contents in, or even several bottles worth depending on what size you get ... which kind of hurts when you take into account the retail on those things, but at least it did cycle in 14 (ish) days .. I dunno what the best call is.

Getting some more rock in now might not be a bad idea either ... easier now than later if you don't have to rescape anything..

I'm curious about the hrv unit. How expensive is it to buy and have installed? Could you pm me?

The unit itself was $950+tax. Install will be done ourselves with the help of a friend and our good buddies Beer.

I'm sure there will be some more parts we need to buy but that was just the unit itself. I also bought the one with advanced filtration because I have a lot of shedding pets. The regular unit without the pet add ons was between 800 and 850.

Which HRV unit did you end up getting?

The build is coming along nicely...I'm just around the corner from catching up with you though. :)

Just as I was about to hit the submit button on a lighting order I had an epiphany; why am I buying MHs and T5s if I have intentions to take my tank to LEDs.

So now what? Do I just buy 3 MH bulbs for "basic" lighting and heat and go with that while I finalize my LED decisions? I have all the parts for MH and T5 lighting already, all I need is new/replacement bulbs.