DAY 2

Alright, it's day two now and we've had another full day to read more conflicting information on the web, we're ready! Here is what we did today....

Step1. Wash the sand.
I emptied the bag of sand into the bucket, filled it with water, stirred it around then drained off the dirty silty water. The sand had a lot of fine silt in it so I had to add and drain water several times. The water I drained off never did become clear but I finally called it good enough.

Step 2. Place the live rock in the tank.
We only have two pieces of live rock right now so there wasn't much we could do as far as arrangement options. Big piece on the left, smaller one on the right.

Step 3. Add the sand to the tank.
Most of the websites we read recommended placing the live rock on the bare bottom of the tank then adding sand around it so creatures burrowing underneath wouldn't cause the live rock to shift so that's what we did. The websites also recommended 2-3 inches of sand, however once we got the sand in the tank we noticed there wasn't much live rock exposed.

Step 4. Reposition the live rock on top of the sand.
Since there wasn't much live rock exposed after we put the sand in we decided to pull the live rock and just place it on top the sand. We don't have stacked rock so I am not too worried about the rock shifting in the future.

Step 5. Add water.
The sea salt instructions recommended 1\2 cup of salt per gallon of water. We carefully measured the amount of water we poured in the bucket then proceeded to add salt and mix it before adding it to the tank. Our 10 gallon tank took on 8 gallons of water but we only added the recommended about of salt for 7 gallons. We decided to fine tune the salinity by adding salt directly to the tank rather than premixing it all.

Step 6. Measure salinity.
I unwrapped our new hydrometer and started taking some measurements of the salinity and specific gravity of the water in the tank. I took about 20 reading but every reading was different and some were wildly out of whack.

Step 7. Read directions on how to measure salinity.
Since my readings were all over the place I grabbed the package containing the instructions for they hydrometer. The instructions stated that I should fill the hydrometer with salty water and let it sit for 24 hours to season the needle. "Season the needle" WTF does that mean? I am hoping that's the reason my readings were all over the place. I got a few duplicate readings that said the specific gravity of the water in our tank is 1.018. That's a bit low, the recommended range is 1.020 - 1.023. I decided it would be easier to just add salt as needed than to remove water and add more freshwater to dilute the solution. For now I left the water as is and filled the hydrometer with saltwater and let it sit hoping I get more accurate measurements tomorrow.

Step 8. Add hardware.
The last thing we did for the night was to place the heater and powerhead in the tank and put the hood lighting on top.

At the end of day 2 we now have a tank filled with sand, live rock and cloudy water of unknown salinity. Its ugly but I'm excited to see how things go!