Bought tank off craigslist, setup/cycling ?

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Jetsetter57

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Mar 31, 2014
Messages
10
Location
chino hills, CA
First of all hello and I definitely have the salty bug now as I've always had freshwater in the past. I'll try to keep this brief.

I bought this tank on a whim for myself and my 2yr old son. It was purchased off Craigslist and it had about 20gals of water with 4 damsels. It was pretty dirty but the fish looked healthy and the pumps were all running fine. I put the fish in a 5 gal bucket and saved an additional 5 gal bucket of water and left about 2" of water with the sand still in the tank itself.

I removed the sand into a bucket and scrubbed the tank and components, including the pump with hose water to remove algae. Everything cleaned up great and I replaced fish and sand and put in a few dead rocks. I purchased the rest of the saltwater from a tropical fish store to top off tank and added "colony marine, liquid nitrifying bacteria" that treats a 50gal tank.

Will I have cycling issues? Anything else I can do except change the water a lot if the ammonia and other tests start climbing? Anything I could have done different in transferring the tank? Thanks to everyone for any advice, also the lighting gets really hot and warms up the tank 18" deep, will LED allow me to leave lights on all day?(tank looks awesome when lit)
 
What size tank are we speaking of? What kind of filtration?
 
Beautiful. I also got my tank off of CL. With fish. I did not have a problem with the cycle. I bought new sand and cleaned up the live rock they had. All fish

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Opps. All fish and shrimp are doing fine. I have the tank now for 3 months. The only problem was they didn't take good care of the tank, it had green hair alge every where. I got it all cleaned up but my phosphates are high 1.70. Water changes went helping. I purchased a phosphate reactor and everything is doing good. I'm new to the saltwater hobby and I'm learning as I go.

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