Ayi
Aquarium Advice FINatic
After the cycle is over how high should they stay? Also, what are we looking at cost-wise?
You want to keep nitrates close to zero after the cycle. Add fish slowly so the your BB can keep up as the bio load increases.
Oh if it's the 29g I think you may be pushing it with the stock. Dottybacks are aggressive little fish so not sure if more than one is going to be ok. Chromis are hilarious, I have heard odd numbers work better 3 or 5
The only reason I wanted crushed coral was to raise the ph. I was planning on filling the tank with store bought water and do pwc with tap water. And I don't have any equipment as I am still trying to convince my mom of it. She says it's because of the water bill as it has gone up in recent months (not by much though).
OK, a bit of a correction. Distilled water should be at 0 TDS, and is not only as effective as RO/DI, it should be better. RO/DI units needs to have filters changed as TDS start to climb. A low temp distiller should have no maintenance issues requiring changing. Water evaps, and then condenses in a cooler clean collector. Theoretically. Of course, at the large scale production side, both methods are probably not kept clean enough and run some level of TDS.