The bag of sand had a lot of water in it and I didn't know the salinity of that water. I didn't want to dump the sand in the 10 ppt water I had made on Friday because I didn't want the salinity to spike. So I put some sand in a quart container of plain tap water that had been treated for chlorides. The salinity was about 20. Ah! Good thing I didn't just dump the sand in the tank without checking. I drained maybe 2 pounds of the sand using coffee filters in a sieve. I added the drained sand to the bucket with plain water and found that the salinity was maybe 2 ppt. This led to adding about 1/2 cup of ocean salt to the bucket of plain water. After stirring it (it was very cloudy), I checked the salinity and it was fine. Yay!
The water is really cloudy - see photo - so I resurrected the water filter. I had wanted to change the foam filter but there weren't any at the aquarium store so this will have to do. The filter should remove the silt by tomorrow. I'll add the Biospira tomorrow and the eggs!
The top show how cloudy the water is. You can kind of see the aerator stone but that's it. The bottom photo is a side view and you can see the big blob that is the water filer. Here's hoping this looks clean tomorrow!
(4 hours: finding aquarium sand, testing for salinity of water and water from sand, mixing water, setting up aquarium, cleaning filer)
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