chbix

diatoms only eat silicates in the water usually associated with new plastics/equipment but you don't necessarily always have a diatom bloom depending on if you rinsed the equipment very well or if it was used, also if you prefilled to check for leaks/testing to make sure stuff works you may have diluted a lot of the silicates to wear it was there but very minor and not really noticeable. algae is kind of the same way but more so for phosphates, did you use all "live" rock or dry rock? what type of rock? if it is well cycled live rock then you probably won't have a phosphate issue and I never had any real hair algae with any of my setups (I had bryopsis instead) so you may not have to worry about that either for an initial startup especially if your choeto is out competing the other potential algae for nutrients which is exactly the idea behind having choetomorpha. I personally would add a small cleanup crew when you add the first fish to the tank. I am not sure the size but on my 75 gallon restart I have only about 5 reef crabs and no snails currently with the fish that are in there and I am working up to more as demands increase, otherwise I have always felt too many too fast and you don't know what you need and then your replacing starved CuC instead of helpful ones. Remember no matter what anyone says snails will never keep glass clean so look for what they will actually eat and go from there, reef crabs and shrimp I like for their ability to find and devour uneaten pieces of food.

the majority (approx 50 lbs) was dry base rock and I added about 5 lbs of LIVE rock from the LFS. Also have 60lbs of live sand.

I added 2 clownfish, 2 camel shrimp and 3 snails... things are looking good so far. After a day they are all eating the snails are moving around the tank and all my parameters look good. going to wait about another week or 2 and get some emerald crabs since the LFS I was at did not have any.