The original idea for this project came from an out-of-print book I have titled, "The Living Aquarium," by Peter Hunnam, Annabel Milne, and Peter Stebbing. I originally bought the book for the table they have for finding the correct glass thickness necessary for different sizes of DIY tanks, but I found their section on hiding the mechanics in concrete background castings, and began searching the web for some examples. Here's a link to a really nice one I found, by the way:
http://cichlidinspiration.net3services.com/show_articles2.asp?id=13
In my book, the authors state that allowing it to sit a month before adding water should cure it deep enough to prevent alkalinity problems. After that, I'm going to run the tank for a month with no fish, using a Penguin Bio-wheel 330 only (I'm working on a DIY trickle filter as well for it), and I'll be monitoring the before/after ph level weekly before doing 25% water changes. If everything looks okay up to that point, I'm going to drop to 10% water changes for 2 weeks, still monitoring the ph. If it appears that I'm going to have problems with maintaining the ph, then I will apply a clear resin coating to the background, although this will not look as good as leaving it alone.
With the rather thin layer of cement (thanks to the styrofoam foundation), any seepage I do have should be minimal, but I'll always monitor it even after the fish have been added, mainly to help me to decide whether I want to use this method for my next big project, a DIY tank.
The tank is going to hold rift lake species of cichlids, so a slight raise (within reason) of alkalinity each week can be tolerated, but I'm not going to put the fish through undo stress if it causes wild fluctuations. I'll let you know what the numbers are as I test. I'll try to snap a pic of the tank and post it tomorrow. My wife wants me to take a night off from working on the fish stuff. ;D