Overnight SW Tank

[dward254]

I had originally started a 10 gal as a Q tank for a banded eel that I bought about a month ago. I ued about 10 lbs of lr and some of the crushed coral from my 150 gal display tank. No spikes in any readings and the eel is doing great. I just don't understand why there is such a debate over the idea of using aged rock and sand in a different tank. The rock already has denitrifying bacteria and the substrate has already aged. Why would anything spike if the proportion of species to lr/ls is the same? The obvious answer is that it wouldn't and you could in fact start a sw tank overnight (if you had enough lr/ls available). Agree?

[kreblak]

In theory, yes. Provided that you had enough seeded substrate from another tank, you could jump right into the new tank without cycling. The only problem is that every ecosystem is different, and there are way too many variables too consider and account for. I would therefore recommend waiting at least a week to make sure everything is allright before adding livestock.

[Guy W]

Every tank I've setup, which is only 3, has been seeded from a mature tank with next to no wait time before adding some livestock.

I've never run into problems, well no major problems anyway, but I wouldn't suggest someone do it unless they either had a good idea of what they were doing or had a whole lot of water on hand to do emergency changes if something went wrong.

Guy