Thrown into saltwater! HELP!

[SilverBlaze85]

Picked up a 75 gallon, expecting it to be empty, but it’s set up for saltwater... with the live sand and all. Hubby is excited to jump into saltwater, I’m terrified. The biggest I’ve ever done is a 40 gallon fresh.

What do we do? How do we get started? What do we NEED TODAY, what should we have in the next few days, what can wait? What decisions do you need to make right away?

Please help us out! ??

 

[Sniperhank]

Well, what all did you end up with? In all honesty, it all can wait...

 

[SilverBlaze85]

Well, what all did you end up with? In all honesty, it all can wait...

We ended up with the tank, live sand, stand, and hood.

All I know about saltwater tanks is that we’ll need a heater, chiller, sump pump, filter, power head, protein skimmer, R/O system, UV sterilizer, wave maker, to figure out the salinity, the levels of protein, calcium, minerals, hardness, pH, start coral propagation, ... ?

 

[Sniperhank]

You won’t need a chiller. Won’t need a uv sterilizer, and you’ll just need the basic api test kits to cycle the system.
Rinse the sand over and over to get out as much gunk as you can. I’d personally pitch it as I don’t see it worth my time.
You’ll want 1 lbs of rock per gallon. It’ll be your biological filtration.
With the pump in your sump, you’ll need to find out how many gph the over flow is. Then you can get a pump rated higher than the overflow to plumb a ball valve after the pump to cut it back to ensure they match perfectly.

 

[melosu58]

As far as cycling the tank we have an article about it in our SW articles section.

 

[kphilly2017]

As far as testing your perimeters, I’d find out what brand of salt you are using to match up the test kit. But like mentioned earlier API test kit may work just fine.