Big Country

I never had a cat go fishing but I did have one that liked to sleep on top of the aquarium because the light was nice and warm but of course that was my freshwater days.

should be fine, just don't tip it up and dump the water out of it, I've taken mine out of the tank to scrub aiptasia, majano's and algae off of their shells and never had any problems.

Welcome to the club. Overflowed my refugium twice last year, once when a RBTA got stuck in the overflow and once when I had a net over the overflow and was wiping algae off of the sides of the tank and the wife called me away from my tank work to help her. Luckily the back of my basement is tile but both times the water seeped under the wall into the carpeted section which didn't make the wife happy.

I just put a new Eheim 300w heater in my tank when the 500w finnex titanium failed for the 2nd time. I run a 300w (new eheim) and a 250w (very old ebo Jager) in about 250g volume of water, when the temp drops at night, when it's cold outside, my heaters go on and off quite often and don't stay on for much more than 30-45 minutes at a time so it's not bad. Anywhere between 2.5-5 watts per gallon is good, preferably split between 2 heaters just in case one fails things won't get too cold.

Southern states still carries Mag Flake, this time of year they probably have put it in the warehouse but will go get you a bag if you ask.

I have the AWI Typhoon III 75gpd, love it, bought it when I first joined WAMAS in 2008 from a group buy. Always produces 0 TDS water and has given me no problems. I need a booster pump with 50 PSI at my house, just haven't got one yet.

Would it be a better idea to move the calcium reactor to a position under the stand where it could still drip into the sump but would be in a lower light area? Should I clean out the reactor to get all of the algae buildup out of it now?

My calcium reactor is sitting on top of my aquarium stand behind my tank so it has all 4 of my 250w MH lamps and my refugium Par38 lamp all casting light on it. Should hair algae grow inside of the reactor? I started out seeing green on the inside of the reactor and now I'm seeing actual hair algae in there. Didn't think that algae could grow at PH 6.6-6.7

Pretty sure Aquarium One in Rockville is a marineland dealer.

The rox 0.8 is the best, but expensive. I use the large particle lignite carbon from BRS, not as efficient as the rox but alot cheaper and does what I need it to do.

I have a manifold built on a Mag12 that feeds my refugium, frag tank, MR1 Carbon Reactor and the MR5-18 biopellet reactor

I'm running one with biopellets in it, the MR5-18 love it.

Switch to the ARM coarse or extra coarse media, I don't have a problem with it and it's what geo recommends for their reactors

The newer Salifert alkalinity test kits come with a bottle of reference solution that I've checked my test kit with. I would assume it could be used to check a Hanna Checker also if you can find someone nearby that has some. I've got two bottles and could give you some if you're up my way.

It probably dried out or wasn't put away with a storage solution made for probe storage, just buy a new one, I just did the same thing with a PH probe that I had laying around. It read fine for about a week then started acting up so I recalibrated it, worked fine for a few weeks but is now bouncing around so I'm going to replace it.

I just picked up a set of four funnels from Harbor Freight Tools for .99 yesterday, all pretty small funnels but nice for my aquarium use

I have a Deltec KM500, cost $500 new, have had it for years and it is a great kalkstirrer. If I had it to do again right now I'd buy one of the Avast Marine ones. The motor went out on mine a few years ago and I had to take it to Richmond to the deltec rep to get a new motor, cost near $100 plus gas and time. Dan is right in Alexandria so if the motor goes out he's close by and a new motor for his is only $25, and you can get the K1 Kalkstirrer kit for $139

No problem man, I just set up my calcium reactor a couple of months ago and had a friend come over and get me on the right track of adjusting it. Everything was fresh in my mind of what type of media and pumps needed since I read the instructions so many times.

Not sure if that big geo has a higher flow through it, for my geo 618 I use a maxijet 1200 to feed it and I don't know exactly what the flow out is but it's 60-80ml/min if I remember correctly. I think the instructions from geo that came with mine recommended the pump to feed it.

Dosing 2 part is the easiest way. Unless you want to try and DIY the ingredients check out www.bulkreefsupply.com and get a 2 part kit.

I've ordered snails/crabs from both reefcleaners.org and reeftopia, am having much better luck with the order from reeftopia although reefcleaners did tend to put more extras into the order. Only thing I got from reeftopia that I wasn't very happy with was the nerite snails, came in small and were much more than reefcleaners price. Astrea's, larger cerith, blue leg hermits sm & med, emerald crabs, sea cucumbers, atlantic deer cowry and peppermint shrimp are all doing well after a couple months. Lost one emerald crab and my mystery wrasse had one of the peppermints for dinner the other night but everything else is crawling around.

That might explain it, I run the Sunlight Supply bluewave HQI M80 ballasts that really drive the radiums, they look very blue when brand new but once they burn in for a couple days they have a very crisp white look to them. When I had a par meter awhile back I couldn't believe the difference in par between the lumenarc I had on my frag tank and my main tank, had a very abused lumenarc but it was putting out 1/3 of the par that my main tank was getting.

What kind of ballast are you running the radiums on? What reflectors? What size tank? I'm getting much higher PAR readings on my 250w 20K radiums than what you list

They recommend the ARM coarse, I just couldn't lay my hands on any, and needed some to get my reactor started up, so I grabbed some extra coarse. The extra coarse is very large and doesn't seem to be doing much in my reactor, I'd stick with just the ARM coarse

Tom is correct, Geo recommends the ARM coarse, I have a mixture of ARM coarse and extra coarse in my reactor and it seems to be working correctly.