you could beat a couple eggs into a bucket of water and add to the fishtank to remove allot of suspended solids - i did this, shells and all when i first fired up my system, i was sorry i left the shells, but now that the sucker is in the tank, and the cray's there aren't any pieces of shell that i can see on the bottom anymore.. anyways, the eggs (2 in a 110 gallon tank) did clear up the cloudiness in a day..
i used humonia to start my system (for the first week or so, 1 good dose a day, if aged, it's already converted to ammo) then added minnows after about a week and not seeing any readings, it was still kinda cool and i think that held me a up a little bit, i'll have to check the timeline but it took about 3 weeks before i started getting nitrite/nitrate action