$52 Question

there is no such thing as cycled water. The bacteria that breaks down ammonia into nitrites...nitrates and so forth doesn't live in the water at all. If this stuff lived in the water, then there would be no need for live rock or any other type of bio media and you would have a small cycle every time you did a water change. The water in an established tank is no different than the water in my mixing barrel other than it has a little poop and some nitrates in it.

 

Put the filter medium into your main tank for a week or two and it should accumilate the bacteria on to it - should work in my opinoin

 

you're still gonna have to cycle. i'd give it a month and watch water params and let them tell you when your ready to start adding. i'd wait at least until i started to see some nitrates.

 

the LR i put in there along with about 10lbs of ls from my other tank should give it a jump start but and maybe speed things up some....maybe...might i'll let yall know how it goes. i tested today (day 4) and its starting to cycle... ammonia is up to .50ppm so we'll see!

 

Good luck... A couple week cycle at max...

 

in September or 07 I put set up a 10 gallon tank. I used 15 LBS of live rock and 10 lbs of sand, 8 gallons of water change water from a friends tank in my 10 gallon. Put coral in it as soon as the water cleared and added a clean up crew that consisted of 6 crabs, 8 snails and a nickle sized emerald crab. 2 days latter I added a yellow Clown goby.

This is what it looked like then



this is what it looked like in April and it is still going strong..



But I had live rock, Sand and the many creatures that came with them so there really wasn't a cycle as such, maybe a mini one. If you had used live sand you might have gotten away with it. But I would wait at least a week or two.