reccomended algae scrubber cycle procedure?

[Gigaah]

I understand the oppinions and methods or normal cycleing. Do you guys think starting with a scrubber changes things? Do you want to introduce nutrients to the tank to grow the algae and beef up the scrubbing capacity prior to adding fish to reduce or eliminate the chemistry spike you can get when adding live stock to a new tank? I was just mulling the concept over...wanted to. Know what everyone thought about it.

[SantaMonica]

First, many folks are not familiar with the differences between cycling live and dead rock, so here is how you can know what to do, regardless:

If the rock was dry (meaning "dead") when you got it, then there is nothing in the rock that you need to keep alive. So dry or "dead" rock will not benefit from a scrubber (or a skimmer either). Preparing dry rock is easy because you WANT the ammonia to build up to high levels, so that the proper bacteria will build up in and on the rock. This bacteria will then remove ammonia when you put the rock in your tank.

"Wet" rock, meaning rock from the ocean or an established tank, is different. It DOES have live stuff in it, which is why it's called "live rock". You want this stuff to stay alive because it filters and feeds your tank, and because the little animals can grow into bigger animals in your tank. However, much of it died on the way from the ocean to you, and if you put a lot of this rock directly into your tank, you may get too much ammonia from it. So for larger amounts of live rock, you want to cycle it in a separate container. But here is where the super, gigantic difference between skimmers and scrubbers really shows: The living things in the rock are kept alive by food particles, but are killed by ammonia. So if you only have a skimmer on the container (which removes food, but not ammonia), you take away the food that the little animals need to live, but you let the ammonia stay, which further hurts the animals.

A scrubber, however, leaves all the food in the water, even if the "food" is dead and decaying stuff. This "stuff" is not harmful at all; it's the ammonia that is harmful. The "stuff" is actually food for the critters that came with the rock. Scrubbers remove the ammonia (that's what algae eats), so the critters in the rock will still have food to eat, without being killed by the ammonia. A skimmer, however, removes the food that the critters need to eat, but does not remove the ammonia. Thus the critters are starved and killed at the same time, when using a skimmer. So if the rock is "wet" and is supposed to be "live rock", then using a scrubber instead of a skimmer will allow the rock to keep the most life possible, and in many cases will eliminate a "cycle" altogether.

So if you are curing live "wet" rock, you don't need or want to add anything to get a cycle going. But if you are cycling dry rock, then you will need to add some food to get things rotting.

All this being said, a scrubber will not grow much during cycling; just a light brown film. But this will be enough to keep ammonia down in the water, and keep nuisance algae off of the rocks. This will allow, however, the screen to get started, and once you start feeding the tank it will grow much faster.