convert to reef

Question
I have a saltwater tank, fish only, and I would like to convert it to a reef tank.  Where do I begin?  Thank you so much.

Answer
Hey Kelly

for setting up the tank. you will need the following

-tank
-lighting
-heater
-powerhead
-substrate (i like aragonite)
-hydrometer (or better yet, a refractometer)
-sea salt
-RO (reverse osmosis) water (i'll explain why RO later)
-Saltwater test kit

First, get a bucket, fill it with RO water, and mix in the salt. test it with the refractometer or hydrometer, and make sure the salinity is around 1.025. after that, get your substrate in, and get the temperature fine tuned. Put in the powerhead, aim it towards where the live rock will be, then add your live rock. To cycle the tank, the live rock will die off and produce ammonia, after the ammonia goes down your tank will be cycled and your rock will become live again.

After the cycle, you can add one or two fish. But this brings me to a important point, tank maturity. its completely different than freshwater. within a month of starting a reef, you will see brown diatom algae, its perfectly normal, and will go away. its just brown goopy/hairy algae. At around 4 months, you will get hair algae, just long green hairy algae, again its normal and it will go away. At about  6-8 months, you will get the cyano stage, basically red goop/hairy stuff allover. Feed less during this time and do water changes and it will go away, after a year your tank will be mature

Now, onto RO water. You definitely need RO water. tapwater contains phosphates and other junk that will cause massive algae blooms in saltwater, with my first reef, a 55g, i filled it with tapwater and i had 2ft long hair algae and the biggest cyano bloom ever, RO water its pure and will not cause any algaes, its best to fill the tank with RO water and do water changes/topoffs with RO water.

What size tank are you planning on?