roni

Thanks all, fingers crossed. We'll certainly see over the next couple weeks. I guess I'll be selecting for very hardy corals. Yeah, this hobby is humbling at times (at least for me). Up to 5.5 now.

Yeah, life's been busy. 1 day in May that I wasn't working or traveling. A myriad of tank issues: 1) impeller issue with my skimmer, required a pricey slow arriving order from bubble king 2) calcium reactor issues, no support from deltec so it was a figure it out yourself thing. more on that... 3) have some fish in qt that died in a system crash (at the retailer, but still sucks). So, last night after having a little time to stop and think through things, I decided to investigate the alk surge more carefully. In retrospect, I should have done this on sunday but I didn't. I had wondered why by ca/mg hadn't gone up a tone with the alk and why my ph was relatively unaffected. I had assumed that when I was purging the calcium reactor of air (per the manual), I had accidently dosed the effluent into the system and caused the alk surge. However, alk with everything off wasn't coming down like I would have expected. So last night I got out my hanna meter and ran alk with both a current reagent as well as an old reagent. 4.2 and 5 respectively, rather then 12. Alarm bells finally went off. Thanks to @Abe who is a fantastic local wamas reefer and was incredibly generous to test my water with his trident, I confirmed that the alk was below what the trident would test, which we believe is 6. So, Murphy's law beats Occams' razor. I may have overdosed the system but the trident alk also looks to have failed at the same time, so my fix of shutting down things likely dropped the alk too low. I've got a few acros that have died and/or started to stn. So super fun stuff. I dosed a little carbonate last night at about 11 before getting to sleep and hooked my kalk back up. Still need to figure out what happened with the trident and also make sure that I'm on the right track, though I imagine I'll suffer consequences regardless of if I right the ship at this point.

So, been a rough couple months. Busy at work and had a series of issues arise. The biggest recent issue has been trying to get my deltec calcium reactor to work consistently but in the course of messing with it, I made a mistake and dosed a large volume of effluent into the system, driving the dkh from 7 to 12. I turned off the reactor and also cut the kalkwasser addition to the tank but the dkh is still sitting pretty high 4 days out. I'm surprised to not see it drop but wanted to see if anyone had had something similiar and how they approached things.

hard to say you shouldn't fiddle with things but ultimately, the color and growth speak for themselves. I wouldn't mess too much with a good thing.

That's a clean fixture! Are those the aquaticlife or something else?

Looking great! it's unfortunate that they are both such slow growers. Hope yours do well. I had a PM for about a year but never was successful longterm with it. I've heard HOTO is something that has to be seen in person to appreciate how blue it is!

Man, you've made a lot of progress. Sounds like you've got your lighting set up. Will be interested to see your experience with the noopsyche. Ultimately, par is par as long as the lights are reliable.

Sorry to hear about the skimmer. I've had some hiccups with my bk recently and have heard good things about the nyos, though a bit crazy that a little ozone would damage it so much!

Looking good. Everything looks so clean! I get from a guy on R2R. I think there are some folks that also sell locally but he does a subscription and sends me a regular bill, which is probably easiest. If I wasn't lazy, I would probably culture. Mine comes about every 10 weeks or so. Shoot me a pm and I can send you his info if you want.

Stunning! Chris is the gig master. I need to come over sometime

haha, that is certainly beyond the scope of things I can probably pull off. I'll settle for enjoying yours

I will also work for cookies...Looking forward to seeing the scape and your progress!

did you already receive a prototype? Yeah, definitely interested about your experiences. My plank is fantastic but this would certainly add another facet to automating and standardizing feeding, especially on vacation.

reefbuilders' feature on them. i'll probably be a guinea pig. https://reefbuilders.com/2022/03/21/automatic-frozen-fish-food-feeder/

Looking good, definitely a clean look! I hear you on the snails. Got a few nerites from ipsf and found one on the cabinet headed towards the carpet!

Love the time lapse... How did you set it up?

If you know, might help to put the gallons and dimensions of the tank up as well as the brand of the light...looks like a great deal for someone trying to get into the hobby, best of luck with sale.

Glad you started the thread and didn't let the cracked tank stop you! Can't wait to follow along.

Yup, that's what I would do. Depending on the spot I doubt you'd even know it's there and it's the easiest and also most vetted approach. I do think glass would probably be fine but just a little more unknown and unknowns when dealing with thousands of dollars plus lots of water worry me

That's a great pic of the hammer! Looking forward to seeing how it does. Does your cristata play well with other euphyllia? It's funny you should mention the maroons. I had a pair that initially stayed together until I added an anemone. Then the female decided the anemone and the entire 24 gallon tank was hers other then a tiny spot under the return for the male. She also bit me whenever I would work on the tank, biting the proverbial hand. It made finding a new home for them easier

Yup, you got it. I bought some mesh bags on Amazon and filled them. I had actually run them in the sump of my 100 for a couple months and then moved them over when I upgraded to have a bit of an instant biological filter.

You think the sixline got injured? Glad it's eating well.

Sorry about how rough the move was but glad the wamas family stepped up to help. You can't be any worse of a plumber then me so feel free to show it off

Tank looks really clean! I assume you'll glue glass on the inside pane? I guess in a pinch you could also just cap the bulkheads?

I use pond matrix. I think it's helpful when you use the dry Marco/brs rock since it's not as porous as live rock. Pond matrix is cheaper and seems to work pretty well. As a plus it's also how I can get a biological filter up in my qt tank pretty quickly. Build looks great so far! Gl with scape!