GraffitiSpotCorals

Also that stinks the light isn’t getting correct spread. Hopefully everything does well with it turned up. The nicest led tanks I have seen using fixtures like that have always been at 100% and hung high to get good spread. How high is the fixture hung now?

I like it with more acros for sure!

And I remember telling you not to go with those darn pumps when I dropped the tank off , did you replace them with mp10 or mp40? Let me know if you want any acros.

I Always add in odd numbers although I did have two pairs in the same tank with luck. Two males and two females and got lucky they didn’t fight. I always like to add 5 if possible.

Sorry no one has responded yet. If it’s just a few sticking at the top your ok but you don’t want the pump to always be pulling in bubbles from the rocks, that’s a sign there is too much co2 going in. I used to just shake the reactor or tilt it to remove the bubbles from the top sometimes but it isn’t necessary really. Are the bubbles getting worse?

Exactly. Can’t trust just one device. I use a refractometer as a backup but calibrate it every use. Can’t use the cheap ones and gotta use 35 ppt. Now I use a Hanna digital which is good with ro water to calibrate. It’s the best thing I have bought and haven’t had to second guess it for a while. I even have a glass float as a third device to check with. All of the crashes I have seen where long time hobbiests have been stumped were from salanity issues from cheap, wrongly calibrated or broken refractometers. It’s sad but it happens to the best of us.

Has anyone used this who has very low nitrates? Does it read consistent at low levels like .1 or .2?

I have two 400w halides in my townhouse first floor with just one fan blowing across the water. The room doesn’t heat up much at all. Sounds like you need to get an ati fixture

I have had issues with every led I have tried. I am done too. I have one over our nano that I just unplug and plug back in everyday and when it’s stops working I dunno what I will do.

Yea I am colorblind with certain close colors so I have trouble with some tests too. Salifert updated the colors on them last year or so and it’s easier for me to read now.

salifert reads down to .2 nitrate levels if you look at it from the side

I have always wanted to try the zeo method but seems expensive and unnecessary unless you want that pastel look. Which I do love but I can achieve that using vodka and vinegar and some additives. Also I never found a need to add extra bacteria, I don’t really believe there is a need to introduce bacteria besides maybe some new live rock every few years which itself isn’t necessary in itself just something I have found helps. I do like their sponge power and have been waiting to get nutrients low to try to use pohls extra on a daily basis and see how things react. I have found the best way to get nice colors on acros is to use zinc and manganese, past that I haven’t found anything that really changes corals color much besides copper sulphate which I hear is the only way to get the true pastel look with zeo.

Is anyone else in the area using a carbon source to keep nutrients in check? If so I would love to hear what your using.

Love the tank and all the big colonies! I hope those acros do well for you, it would surely make the tank look great to have some branching acros in there!

This chart is good to follow for people with newer tanks or lower nutrients or that haven’t carbon dosed before. If you have an older tank and lots of nutrients then you can probably start quicker than the chart says since it takes a long time to get to a dose that works well with lots of fish. As long as your watching your corals and testing going a little faster shouldn’t hurt with the above in mind. I started going faster once the tank adjusted to the carbon. Which you will notice when the skim stinks and becomes foamy. If you have lots of fish I would suggest doing a half vodka half vinegar solution. Vinegar is 8 times weaker than vodka.

My acros have always looked best and grown faster when nutrients were close to nsw. I have never been able to keep them low without a carbon source. I tried when I switched tanks and things just went sideways. I started using a carbon source again shortly after and things rebounded once nutrients went back to normal. I added even more fish knowing it would mess things up and am finally getting numbers back to normal again. I really like how easy it is to control nutrient levels with a carbon source. If po4 roses i just add some stump remover and bump the carbon dose up if needed and it drops slowly and shaft let back to low numbers. Also if your tanks mature then you should be able to go faster than the standard table online shows for a dose, it’s very conservative.

I have been using vodka and vinegar, which is all nopox is I hear, for over 5 years at least. I love what it does for my tank. Clears the water, large bacterial population for corals (if you believe the benefit from that), explosive growth in filter feeders like sponges and feather dusters, and all of this helps you to feed a large fish population in a tank with out destroying it with excess nutrients. Sponges in my tank are covering everything under my rocks and even non photosynthetic ones are growing up into the light. I would defiantly try a carbon source if I were you just measure your nutrients. People that had issues with it were people that didn’t have nutrient issues or messed up their dosing from what I researched. Don’t let them scare you from trying it. It’s a great natural way to run a tank. The main thing is to start slow if you don’t have time to watch the tanks response and are scared of a bacterial bloom. The only long term thing that you gotta maintain is snotty bacteria that grows in pipes and low flow areas. I used to use a rock tank with low flow I could let the snot mats form in and grow. It’s just excess bacteria but it can cause small pipes to clogg as the tanks getting used to a high dose. The Matt’s don’t form in my tank now and I am still at a high dose so it must have balanced out over time. I would tell you to use vodka and vinegar though because you have more control over your dosing, some tanks respond better to more vodka and some do better with more vinegar. I would start out with a lower vodka dose and bump it up once the tanks nutrients are processed through the bacteria. When you start it may take a month to get to a dose that lowers nutrients. You will see skim darken and get very smelly just before your nutrients start dropping. I never even had to cut my dose in half. I lowered it maybe 10 percent when it got near zero and that was my dose.

That’s good! Have you let the skimmer just run for a while even though it’s jumping around inside a lot? I have made skimmers out of other skimmers and upgraded how I like and it normally takes a little while for the slim to start in the ones that have lots of action near the top but they work great once you let them get going.

Ime acropora won’t kill each other but one will just slowly win over space from the other if it’s more aggressive. Only time one should die from being touched is if it’s not really healthy or if growth is shut down. That’s why I didn’t worry much about placing some colonies close to each other in my tank.

Yea I made that account on a whim not thinking I would stay on the board. It was basically just so I could read and see all the pics and mess with a buddy if I remember right. Kinda wish I had a different name now haha

I was wondering what was going on with ya. Glad your getting a change in pace. I think a lot of us wish we could do something like that.

I love the sponge growth in that last pic.

Marco just did a group buy but I am not sure about any online stores.

This thread is where I will be keeping updates and new pics. Thanks for all the reply’s and comments everyone! https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/paul’s-rubbermaid-reef.686601/

How does the tank look with the light over it?