Extremely good info, i want a light sand bed so i will just order 80 pounds from that site and get 100lbs of dry base rock for starters, now i know how to read salinity within the water however during cycling i have questions.
1. I have brand new 3 aquaclear 110's so what media should i put in all three, I have to aquaclear 901 powerheads that i will use, and I will get a reef octupus skimmer. Do I run the skimmer during cycle or not?
do I run the aquaclears too during cycle or just the Powerheads?
Ok, I will try to answer your questions as best as I can. First, for salinity, use a refractometer instead of a hydrometer. The hydrometers are usually off by quite a bit. Your salinity is going to depend on what you want to do, for fish anywhere between 1.024-1.026 is going to be just fine, but if you ever decide go full reef you should keep the salinity as close to 1.026 as possible. Some people keep their reef at slightly higher salinity than that, but I don't see the difference.
Second, as far as your aquaclears, is this all your going to use for filtration? Ideally for a sw tank you want to use a sump/refuge to allow maximum biological filtration vs. using mechanical filtration from canisters and HOB setups. If you are going to use only HOB/canisters for filtration than use rock rubble as the media to give yourself more bio-filtration.
Third, the powerheads aren't going to do anything to affect the cycle one way or the other. The only reason to run them would be to get an idea of where your high and low flow areas are and tweak as you see fit, but being that your doing an aggressive FOWLR the powerheads aren't really all that important. You may consider not using them at all.
Fourth, you can run the skimmer if you like, but your not going to get much in the collection cup. But running it will at least let it start breaking in.
If you have any more questions feel free to ask!