OldReefer

That green stuff could be he start of Bryopsis which is a misery once it gets established. Take out the rocjpk and pour hydrogen peroxide from the drug store over the green stuff. That will kill the green suff but nothing else.

That itis a great idea Rob. I have always wanted to set up a tank like that with Sea grass, cardinals, long spine urchins, and maybe garden eels. Maybe even some gonipora...all of those things appear naturally together.

This an amazing hobby. I don't know anywhere else where you can pick up short courses in chemistry, biology, and electrical engineering. I seemed to have solved the voltage problem, but I don't know exactly what I did that worked. I have finnally fixed the pH probe problem that seems to have been related to induced current. I just routed the cable a different way, and tried not to let it run parallel with any power cords. Things seem to be settling down.

I am thinking he same thing Tom. I just re-routed the cable for the pH probe. I am still getting occasional spikes that shoot it up from 8.1 to about 8.5. I am going to dump the Apex log and see if I can find some sort of correlation.

Whatever was zapping me I seem to have fixed. I just have the normal residual voltage now. Now I just wish I could fix my erratic pH probe. It is all over the place lately.

I just spent a long day fishing cable from my router to the Apex in the basement, I had to go up through the attic and then down a wall to the basement. The cable is cheap and the time was worth it. My Apex is always at my fingertips any where in the world.

I do not seem to have a significant stray voltage anymore (noticeable by touch). But my pH probe is now pretty useless. It makes a couple of big excursions every day. I am trying to correlate outlet changes to the wild swings, but so far no luck.

Rob, Here is idea to hold that dry side on the bottom of the tank. This is how I hold the MP40 on the back of my tank. If it falls off, it is really hard to get back on, so I took extreme measures. I use hot glue to hold the plywood cutout to the tank. It is secure but I can easily pop it off with a putty knife if I ever take down the tank. The Velcro straps are sold at Lowes as wire organizers

Probably thought of this already, but make sure the center contact in the socket hasn't been bent back. That has made me crazy a couple times.

+1. Rob is wise... I tried going crab-less, but eventually broke down and bought a ton of those tiny blue legs. They are amazing cleaners and do not seem to wipe out the pod population like the bigger ones. The Mithrax crabs are only real cure for bubble algae, and some of that is inevitable. A couple side comments.. I would dump in a bunch of pods at this point as well. They are great to have around for fussy fish and LPS to eat. It is tough to get a big population established after you have a bunch of fish. It is easy to order a bag of them now with your CUC. You asked about starfish and urchins.... Little brittle starfish normally come with the live rock. They tend to really over populate and don't seem to do much, I am not big on buying extras. I would not go with big brittle starfish because they tend to be fish predictors. Pretty starfish like Linkias do not do a lot of cleaning and need a very stable tank. Think about them next year. Urchins are like a " nuclear option" for algae. They work extremely well, but they will uproot every frag in your tank at least once a week. They are a great choice in a fish- only tank. Make sure you seed your sand bed now. I got complacent about this on my last tank, and in two years the sand bed sey up like a stone. Your sand bed should be full of worms and critters it you want it to stay functional.

I was thinking of that leak scenario when I saw your garage setup. A little leak could easily go unnoticed when you run your sump in your garage. it reminded me of that sump shed that Dan used to run. He had a leak go unotticed there for a couple weeks. His SG went down to something like 1.010 before he figured out what was going on. When I was on one of my trips I saw my salinity was dropping by about 1 ppt per day. One of the catridges on my BRS media reactor was a little loose and was dripping behind my sump. Without the conductivity probe, I would have lost the whole system. Great setup you have by the way. Hope to see you back on NoVa again someday.

I have been using an Apex Conductivity Module PM-2. For a couple of years. I see some people on RC have had trouble with them, but mine has been great. They can be a PITA to calibrate, but I just get my SG nailed with a carefully-calibrated refractometer, and then manually adjust the probe to match. Mine stays within 0.1 ppt after it settles in. I mostly use it to flag any slow drift in my system, and it works very well for that. If I skim a little wet for a couple days, or have a slow leak anyplace in the system, it is obvious. Even a quart of water loss in my 150 gallon system is immediately apparent. I was inspired to get mine after Dan from AVAST killed his 400 gallon system with a slow leak that caused his salinity to take a dive.

I can't speak to UV, but I am pretty aggressive with ozone, and that has never had any impact on my huge bio pellet reactor. I love them. I feed a ton with Phosphate at 0.00 and nitrate at 0.2.

Copperband Butterfly. One of my favorite fish. Never seen an aptasia in my display as long as I have had one. I have hundreds of aptasia in my sump, so I know he is controlling them.

I got my tank from them 3 years ago. No problems at all. Well built tank at a cheap price. Delivered on time as well.

I did the clear resin epoxy and missed some sand into it. I spread it on the Starboard and the sprinkled more sand on it to finish. It looked really natural.

I did that back around 2004. The epoxy + sand + starboard works great. I went with just starboard on this last build.

Nice system! I am about a mile from Old Town. Let me know if you ever need anything. Always good to have neighbors.

That is one impressiv-looking RO/DI UNIT. I put 35 tickets in that box!

I had a Powder Blue that killed everything I tried to put in the tank after it. I afraid this is pretty normal behavior, and it doesn't normally end well.

OK Let me state the obvious. We should ave more young, hot, intelligent women as speakers.

+1 for Poly filter and Cuprisorb. The poly filter will indicate if you have copper and the Cuprisorb will pull a lot of it out. Polyfilters are great at removing a little copper, but if you have a bunch of copper, Cuprisorb is better.

It sounds like metal contamination. Fish will thrive but corals and inverts will perish. Could this tank or its contents have ever been exposed to copper?

I ran one for a few years. A GenX Mak4 was the ideal pump. It was all about the pressure as Chad said. However, even with the perfect pump, it skimmed so inefficiently it could not keep up with my 90 gallon SPS tank.

I keep a spare Blueline 55HD on hand for just such an occasion. Let me know if you need it.