Southdown sand....

[Shadetree]

Marco,

I started my tank in this order: I first filled it with RO/DI water (all 5 days of it [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] ) then mixed in the salt and heated it to the desired temp. I filled the tank to just below the water level I wanted and left the sump and refugium empty so that the water displaced by the sand would have somewhere to go. I then simply poured all that sand directly into the tank. It was thick and milky for the first couple of days. Once it had started to show signs of improvement I turned on the skimmer, I had to empty it a couple of times. I added my live rock after the water had cleared up. I did not want to have to blast all the sediment off of the rock right after putting it in and there would have been no way to see the rock to aquascape anyway. Nobody in my area has Southdown and I do not know of anyone who is even using such a fine sand yet, so I got a bunch of coarser sand seeded from a fellow reefers tank. I gave him a couple of five gallon buckets a month or so in advance to put in his system and when I was ready, I just went back and filled the buckets back up and put in into my refugium, which contains the same grain of sand. If you use uncured rock to cycle, I would wait till the end of the cycle to put in the live sand so you can maximize the survival of all the beneficial critters and bacteria. HTH.

Scott