astroboy

Redid the move from SW to FW, pH monitor was off by 2, perhaps it's just my probe or meter but I thought I'd mention it.

Is it just me? I calibrated my pinpoint pH meter two days ago, read 8.2 in the reef tank which is within .1 of what it had read before (for weeks). I moved it to a 60 gallon barrel in which I mixed RODI water (ppm=0) with Equilibrium (3dkH) and seachem acid & alkalinity buffer to get a pH of 7.1, as measured by the pinpoint monitor. Left it there for a day, moved it to the reef tank, and now it measures 9.5. I had added some BRS soda ash to up alkalinity a bit, and that has raised pH from about 8 to 8.5, but 9.5?? Since this has happened twice, and since everything the reef tank looks fine, I'm guessing the monitor is at fault. I'm wondering if this a 'normal' occurrence in switching for SW to FW and back, or perhaps my probe is bad, or some other problem specific to my monitor.... Some online comments say you can do the switch, others say there's a chance there could be issues but no reasonable explanation why. Anyway, has someone else experienced this? Second point, this is more of a FW observation, about three years ago Fairfax county starting putting chloramine in the water. I figured that like chlorine it would evaporate but it seems like it hangs around more or less forever. I would top off my FW tanks with tap water and it never did any harm, I thought, but then I started losing fish here and there. Hence the move to RODI with Equilibrium. I also lost two elegances I had for years when my RODI went to 7ppm (undetected). I think now that was due to chloramine slipping thru the RODI process as opposed to a less than optimal RODI itself. BRS has a discussion on this. I did use Prime last year for a water change on my daphnia colony which was wiped out the next day. Prime is supposed to remove chloramines but I suspect that's not entirely true, even though my el cheapo test kits claimed no chlorine/chloramine. Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone is not aware of the switch to chloramine.

Thanks! I'm just wonder if someone could say "I've had 100 cherubs and never had any problems". I've had a few dwarf angels that are supposed to be 50-50 but they've all been good citizens. Anyway, if I do get a cherub I'll keep it in QT for a month with some expendables and see if they end up as lunch.

Thanks. I moved it a few days ago, hopefully that will work.

I've got two fox corals I've had for six or eight months. Recently, a hammer coral has grown enough that it's sometimes in contact with one of them which is looking pretty bad: the whole coral is dying off, not just the side near the hammer. The other, which is out of range of anything is, is more or less OK. I've had problems with alkalinity which I'm fixing which perhaps contributes. Anyway, does anyone know anything about hammer vs. fox allelopathy? Thanx! Mark

I'm thinking about getting a cherub angel (again) had one 15 years ago, stunning fish, and it never picked at corals (LPS) at all. I'm wondering if anyone in the club has any first hand experience about it *really* being reef safe or not... I'm not sure I trust everything I read on the internet but I've always gotten good information from WAMAS members! Just in passing, around that time my house lost power for four days during winter and aquarium temps got down to 49 degrees for 24 hours. I was able to move all the corals to a warm house when the tank started to cool but I couldn't snag the cherub. But it lived for at least six months afterwards with no ill effects that I could tell until a brittle star had half of it for lunch (unpleasant surprise). So, apparently at least some tropical marine fish will tolerate those temps for a short time, FWIW. Thanks to WAMAS I've since built a back up power system which has worked great. Thanks, Mark

Thanks. I hadn't seen anything online one way or the other....

Anyone have experience with this? I have a 90 gallon, the present lemon peel is quite peaceable and has no taste for corals. I'd like to add another...

This is excellent information, thanks!

I'm wondering if chloramine might be causing problems I've had over the past 2-3 years and am wondering if anyone has any insights. On the Vienna town website it says they, and Fairfax county, normally use chloramine in their water as opposed to chlorine. Not sure when this happened but I found out about it only a few weeks ago, prior to that I assumed they used chlorine. As we all know you can evaporate chlorine out easily the reading I've done says that the only ways to deal with chloramine are RO/DI or tap water conditioners that will take it out specifically. It seems unlikely to me that chloramine would last more than a week or two in circulated water but I can't find any reliable information. Does anyone know? I keep daphnia for food, which are extremely sensitive to chemicals. The one time I used tap water conditioner (and let it sit for two days) the entire colony died within hours. Just to avoid hassle I'd prefer to use water exposed to air and circulated for a few days, but my daphnia colonies have never done well and other than possible overfeeding I wonder if remaining chloramines are a problem. I often use used aquarium water which seems OK, but the colonies still don't seem to do that great. I have a 90 gallon freshwater tank planted mainly with amazon swords. Despite root tabs and CO2 and good lighting they decline over time. I do frequent water changes. Chloramines? I also can't keep angelfish alive although everything else does fine. I have good filtration, sump and all that. As regards saltwater, two years ago I slowly lost alot of corals I'd had for years. I think the MH lighting I had had become defective and things did do a bit better with the the LED replacement but some corals have still done badly. Water parameters are OK. I had elegance corals for five years (they were part of the die-off, but did great before that) and the newest one I got, tank raised, after two months is now showing strain. Long story short, I put in new 1 mm carbon blocks, 5 mm sediment filter, RO/DI media, made few hundred gallons of RODI, and my in line TDS meter shows 2 ppm now. Input TDS is about 175. Seems like things should last alot longer than that. Sediment filter looks almost brand new.I have been using just well-packed cat ion resin which I now understand is less than optimal and perhaps explains the bad TDS even though only a tiny amount has changed color. Could it be that chloramines are getting thru? This weekend I'll be switching to cation-anion-mixed bed deionization resin which is supposed to be superior. Anyone have any experience with it?

I'd like to buy a few handfuls of cheato, is anyone going to bring any to the meeting?

Hi Dave, I'd like to sell a skimmer and a sump. Are there any steps to take before hand, or do I just show up with price tag, so to speak?

Well, I soaked the whole thing in CLR for 16 hours after which it worked just fine. I'm sort of surprised since it looked clean before the first soak (1 hour) and even cleaner, if that was possible afterwards. Very strange. There must have been some buildup of something that was hard to see with the naked eye.

I've had it for seven months worked fine until this evening. The impeller and interior of the pump are clean, impeller turns nicely, this still happened after a soak in bleach and then CLR. Same thing happens when the float switch is turned off, or when it's turned on and the float is in the "keep pumping" position. I hooked it up to a different Octo controller and the same thing happens. This second controller came with a VarioS-2S skimmer pump. Does anyone know if the different VarioS pumps use the same controller? They look the same but on the back they have a number: C 066404 for the VarioS 6, and C069200 for the VarioS-2S. Not sure if this is a model number or just some sort of serial number.... I also switched out all the cables from the two controllers/pumps. No difference, a few turnovers and that's it. One thing. It turns over (and then stops) when I plug the power cable into the controller. If I turn on the on/off button nothing happens regardless of the cables & controllers I'm using. I do see a spark when I plug the power cable into the controller and offhand I would think that was a problem but the pump still fails with the second controller, with no spark. Perhaps the jack on the first isn't working so well. All this seems to indicate the pump itself is at fault but I can't think of what kind of hardware (solenoid & rotor?) would turn over a few times and then stop, when everything is clean. Sometimes it turns over a few times more than others but for never more than a second or two. Any ideas of what the problem could be? I'm really puzzled here.

I got a backup power supply used for computers and replaced the battery it came with with two 12V marine batteries in series so that 24V is being fed to the power source. I expect some power sources run on 12V but I think that's rather rare. Car batteries work OK also but marine batteries are supposed to be less liable to a shortened life span if you run them all the way down. Power supplies cost next to nothing on craiglist, or on eBay if one is listed close enough to pick up. I calculate that my powerheads and return pump for my 90 will run for about 3.5 days on such a backup. There are instructions on how to do this on the WAMAS site and youtube, easy to do. I paid about $275 for the entire setup, batteries are not cheap, but cheaper than replacing fish and corals. FWIW, in 2007 power went out for four days in Bowie, temps were about freezing the whole time. Didn't have a backup at the time, temps got down to 50 degrees in the tank for two days. Everything survived (LPS and a few fish), surprisingly. I'd prefer not to repeat that experiment again, though.

I've had a mirror up for a couple of days. In fact, put one at the other end of the tank two days ago. The second one seems to have encouraged or prodded the brown to come out of its nook. Seems to be working quite well so far.

I'll give that a try. I let the blue out of the net cage a few days ago and it bickers with the brown but not extremely badly. I had hoped the brown would have decided after two weeks it owned the tank but it's staying out of sight in a corner. The blue comes by every once in a while to give him a dirty look. But the less stress on the brown the better, of course.

Thanks Tom. I've had the original fish in a net cage in the tank for a couple of weeks now; I was hoping scent might be a factor....FWIW, neither fish is trying to attack each other thru the netting, or even paying any attention to each other. Years ago I had a powder blue and powder brown in a 75 and they got along fine, so as I said, I gave into temptation. If things go bad one of them will be up for sale.....

I'm in Vienna; have a trap that worked well on a PBT. Should be fine for a purple tang. Send me a note and you can borrow it as long as you like. (Vienna)

I'll keep that in mind, although I'm hoping I can release the blue and it wasn't give the brown (the landlord) much trouble. Are there drugs you can give fish to mellow them out, take the edge off reality for a while? Seriously. I'll probably throw a blanket over the whole tank and keep it dark for a few days but I wonder if anyone has has a 'better living though chemistry' experience.

I had a closer look, both tangs' bodies are a hair over three inches. Big difference than 5" with fins! So I guess they're OK for a year or two yet in the 90 and so is my marriage. Well, if worse comes to worse I bought a nice fish trap on amazon and I can sell one of them, or return it to the store I bought it from which is run by a WAMAS member I've known for years. But I'd like to keep them both. The powder blue would school with a hippo and yellow tang I had, which makes me slightly optimistic it will peacefully co-exist with the brown, maybe.. The hippo and yellow slowly wasted away, I think now it was because my RODI setup combined with bad test kits was producing much worse water than I had though. I also lost a couple nice long-lived corals I'd had at the same time. I had MH lighting (new good quality bulbs) but with ballasts I think now were was going bad in strange ways (in retrospect, nothing evident to the naked eye). The light looked OK but I wonder now if it wasn't putting out more yellow or UV or something not easily seen by the naked eye that put stress on both the fish and corals. Anyway, new RODI filter, more new test kits than you can shake a stick at, new DC powerhead pumps, new skimmer, and new LEDs that are reviewed highly. Everything looks much better, I'm hoping I'm at the point where I'll know just what to do to keep this tank at optimum. As long as the fish will make an attempt to chill slightly. I hope they do, they're really pets to me.

Yeah.... since the blue was so mellow I gave into temptation. And, 90 gallons is not too big for those fish, I agree. I figure in a year or two I'll have to sell them, or, get a new wife and a bigger tank. Or vice versa. Same result either way.

I've had a powder blue tang for a few years, always a pretty reasonable fish. A few weeks ago I took a chance and got a powder brown tang. Both fish are 4-5" long including fins, in a long established 90 gallon with a lot of nooks and crannies. The powder blue almost immediately started to harass the power brown. I would guess it was more like marking territory as opposed to a mano a mano fight since as soon as the powder brown swam into a corner or other nook the blue left it alone. I put the blue into a net cage, the sort of thing where you keep pregnant guppies, about 6x4 inches, on the hope that the brown would stake out the tank as its own territory and the blue would mellow out. It's been in there two weeks. Aside from the tangs I have two small (docile) clowns, a blue chromis which keeps entirely to itself, and a lemon peel tang I bought a month ago, so overcrowding doesn't seem to be an issue.... Does anyone have any idea of when it might be worthwhile to release the blue and see how things go?

The probe is only a few weeks old. The meter itself where the probe connects to is very slightly corroded. I'll see if I can clean that up and it if makes a difference. I recalibrated with some brand new solution, it seems to be working OK for now....