Jim

There are a lot of great wrasses, but I was thinking a year or two down the road when the tank has matured. Most of your reef related expenses at that point will be maintenance so the cost might be more palatable. You spent a lot of money on equipment and are investing a lot of time and money growing corals so the right pair of fish would have the perfect showcase in a year or two. Also, your original list had 26 fish and your new list has 14; a nice fish or two would just make up the difference :-) .

I'd consider adding something "special" down the line to have something to set your tank apart and brag about just a bit. Maybe something like a pair of rhomboid wrasses. They'd look great in your tank.

Also in 22307, Belle Haven/Belle View area just south of Old Town.

Be quiet, meow.

Fords are better than Chevies.

BRS offers all of the popular reef bulbs and has group buy pricing. That's where I buy my T5's and they pack them very well.

In a 4 bulb setup for your tank I'd recommend 3 ATI Blue Plus and 1 ATI Purple Plus. Try either Dobie pads or the original Magic Eraser to clean your acrylic tank. They both work very well and will not scratch.

If you want to try it, I'd replace the Aquablue.

From front to back in my 6 bulb fixture I have: Blue + Purple + Blue + Blue + Coral + Blue + Seems like a nice crisp white light with a blue tint to me. I like the look of the Coral + better than the Aquablue Special. I'm fairly new to T5 lighting, but I experimented a bit with the mix of bulbs and this combo looked the best to me.

Leopards are my favorite fish, but they are difficult to get on prepared food. Be prepared to give them a lot of attention or to kill a bunch of them. Reef Nutrition Arctipods were a big help.

Any leopard wrasses are safe together, ime.

You can definitely reuse the cans. I did not do the acid bath. I've done that once before and it worked well, but there was a noticeable change to the rock when it was done. I didn't want to change the structure of the Pukani, so I didn't do the acid wash. The acid is not needed, but it would probably lessen the amount of phosphate that is leached. I wasn't worried about time, because I was cycling the rock anyway.

I bought 60 pounds of Pukani, scrubbed and rinsed it thoroughly in my sink and divided it between two 32G Brute trash cans. i did a few large water changes on my tank and used the old water for the rock. I used a couple of power heads to keep the water moving and let them sit for a week. When I tested for phosphate they both tested between 2.5 and 3 on my Hanna phosphate tester. I bought the Sea Klear brand of lanthanum chloride and dosed about 50 ml, which brought phosphates down to around .02. After that I tested every few days and if the reading was any higher than .02 I dosed 50 ml of LC. The results are instantaneous and obvious, because the LC and phosphate form a milky white precipitate. I left them in the the cans to cycle for about a month and a half and fed each container fish food daily to make sure the rock cycled. After a couple of weeks the phosphate never climbed above .01 - .02 so any further LC treatment was unnecessary. During this entire process I also switched out a live rock from my tank every week or so and when I trimmed my chaeto I "swished" it in each container. Before i used the rock i vigorously swirled them in old tank water to remove the lc precipitate and any old organics. Do not skip that step! The water was absolutely filthy wevery finished rinsing everything. When I setup the new tank the rock already had a fair bit of amphipods and copepods and one month in I still haven't seen any diatoms or hair algae blooms. All-in-all it sounds like a lot of work, but stretched over a month and a half it was maybe 5 minutes per day. I have about 95% of the one liter bottle of LC that I purchased, so if any club members want to use it you can have it. All I ask is that you pay it forward. Any other questions, let me know.

SPS, that way you can really crank the flow and stop waste from settling on the drop off side. Plus, more room!

Are the scratches on the inside or outside?

I have a tank from Jeff with the acrylic rim, better known as a splash guard. I like it, but it adds absolutely no structural integrity. I could pull it off by hand if I wanted to.

I actually have most of a 32 oz bottle left if I can get it to you. The brand name is Sea Klear phosphate remover. It takes very, very little LC to precipitate phosphate. This thread from reefcentral is pretty similar to my method: http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2145395&highlight=lanthanum I did not use a skimmer, but I don't think it would hurt. I did rinse the rock and clean it pretty thoroughly with a brush before I started the process.

I "cooked" my Pukani rock from BRS for about a month in a Brute and used a lanthanum chloride product to reduce phosphate. I'm very happy I did.

I'd recommend two MP40's instead of one MP60. It'll give you more options and more random flow.

I've bought a couple of fish from Pristine and have had pretty good luck. Pristine keeps their salinity pretty low so a very slow drip acclimation or some time in QT to raise it is necessary.

Sounds like some sort of immunodeficiency to me.

Make sure you put the tabs on to prevent another mishap!

I bought the Ebay replacements. The results were decent, but I'm sure they would have been better with the correct tools. I had to improvise a splitter and a press. That said the dry side was intolerably loud and the bearing replacement saved a lot of money by quieting it down.

$20 - $30 per bearing or per set? Also, what manufacturer? What kind of bearing?

I dose vinegar with saturated kalk (45 ml vinegar and 3 tablespoons kalk per gallon of ro/di) through my ATO at about 1 gallon of top off per day in a 120 gallon system. I feed as much food as my fish will eat and my nitrates and phosphates are undetectable on test kits. I originally started using vinegar to make the kalk more potent, but have enjoyed the other benefits. Two things I have noticed is that my chaeto stopped growing and my ph runs about .2 points lower. Also, I recently purchased some pukani rock from BRS and it definitely leaches phosphate. I have been curing it in a couple of 32 gallon brutes and the phosphate reading was 2.5 on a Hanna checker after about 24 hours. I dosed ~100 ml of lanthanum chloride over a 5 day period and the phosphate has lowered to around .02 - .03 for the last month in the barrels. I think Pukani rock is the nicest rock available to us, but it definitely has some issues that need to be dealt with. Since you don't have any fish in your tank I'd recommend setting up the small refugium with chaeto and see what happens over a month or so. Everything I've read and my personal experience suggests that carbon dosing is most effective when the tank is fed pretty heavily.