Today when I ran my water tests, I wasn't expecting to see them come up all at 0. I expected another week or so of water changes before I could add fish. All said and done, it's only been 18 days with the use of bacterial additives.

As a precaution, I chose not to purchase a fish on the 19th when I went out and decided to wait (however impatiently) like a good little reef junkie. Now that I've waited, I haven't really put much thought into what kind of fish I'm going to put into the tank. I think I'll devote a few hours tonight planning the stocking of the tank. Most of the fish I like I shouldn't put into my tank because of the limited space for growth, and given my penchant for feeding fish, they would likely outgrow my tanks too quickly.

More than likely, I'll start with a fairy wrasse and a few chromis or anthias. I'm also going to consider my coral purchases. However, I don't want to manually dose Alk/Ca/Mag, nor do I want to spend money on a Kalk reactor or dosing pump, so I may hold off on coral purchases until I get a large tank and my growout system set up.

I also have plans to swap out my T5s for LEDs at the end of April, so rather than fill the tank with coral and then acclimate everything to the light, I think I would rather acclimate a small amount of coral to the light to reduce any losses I might have, and then add more after the acclimation time. I'll decide more on that over the next couple of weeks, especially since my local clubs are running swaps April 20th, 27th, and then May 11th.

For now, I'm just going to stick to adding a few fish for the month of April.

2013-03-25T19:44Z[GMT]