AlanM

it's really nice to see it coming back.

Thanks. I'm staying on top of a little bit of aiptasia with Aiptasia-X from Red Sea. I'm pretty good at getting the white goop right in their mouths. I'm also staying on top of a little bit of bubble algae (valonia) by physically removing it. If it was red valonia I'd keep it because I think it's pretty, but the green stuff has to go.

Yes, bubblegum digi on left and anacropora on the right. They don't grow much, but I figure they get some of what they need from the water changes. I had a birdsnest in there too but it croaked in the crash.

Here's this morning. Sorry for the dirty glass. 8) It's lots of zoas, a few ricordia, a little bit of SPS, and a bunch of snails and bristleworms. The fish didn't make it, the hermit crabs also die. I don't think there is enough for them to eat and the tank doesn't do well with lots of nutrient additions. I just run some floss in the filter area and sometimes a small bag of carbon. I do a half gallon water change every 2 days.

Nice! It's really nice access to the dosing containers on the side like that without needing to wrestle them out of some narrow space.

Tank is looking much better. All zoas and other corals recovered and opened up. I'll just keep a close watch on it. I may add a tiny skimmer, mostly for fun: https://premiumaquatics.com/products/reef-glass-nano-protein-skimmer.html

I think you're right about what it was. Delayed bloom after the initial crash. It has cleared up now, but the coral responses are interesting. I have one SPS in the tank, a digital, and as soon as the water improved those polyps came back out. The zoas and Xenia are still mad though. SPS are more delicate and can completely die quicky, but forgive you faster once quality improves. Softies are hardier, but hold a grudge longer.

For the last few days I've been dealing with a mystery now of cloudy water and unhappy, closed zoas and xenia. It's easy to do nearly 100% water changes on this tank, so I've been doing that each day, but it stays unhappy. It looks like maybe there's a dieoff of the algae on the back wall as well? It's definitely kind of cleaning up. I ran carbon for a couple of days and that does seem to be helping a bit, but it's a real mystery to me trying to figure out what is going on (without testing). The water is clear this morning, so fingers crossed that it's turning around.

OK. I've never seen it, and I know you're handy so I won't suggest things that seem obvious to me like taking a dremel to it to make it normal, heh. I've admired the design of the red sea tanks in the past, though, and think it's pretty short sighted of them to make something totally different from everything else for which no replacement parts can be obtained.

Can you completely swap the bulkheads for normal sized non-metric ones? Even if the glass holes aren't exactly the right size the rubber gaskets tend to be pretty wide so there's some slop in the hole size. It's possible that BRK or Capital may have some? I know Manassas isn't exactly next door to you, though. The threads on those bulkheads seem really short compared to most bulkheads I've seen. I'm surprised that red sea supplies them like that.

I also confess that I've never tested any parameters of the water in this tank. Nothing except temperature and salinity (with refractometer). I figured I knew what I was doing and wasn't putting in challenging corals, so what's the use of testing lots of stuff. I have no idea what the pH was in any situations.

Confession time: I had a crash Friday night. I don't know exactly what happened, but when I woke up Saturday morning the water was cloudy and my dragonet and sole hermit crab were dead. The corals were also all very unhappy. I've been changing 2 quarts of water per day so around a 15% daily water change. I assumed that was enough to keep the water quality good despite not having a skimmer or any mechanical filtration, but I guess it was building up in there nevertheless. The thing I changed on Friday was that I made a screen top and set that on it instead of the glass lid. My theory is that I had been building up ammonia in the tank, but the glass lid kept the pH low and the ammonia non-toxic. When I put the screen on top the pH probably went up and the ammonia started killing things. Just a theory, but that's all that changed overnight. Saturday I did a 2 gallon water change after removing the dead things, then I put in some floss and spent the day occasionally blowing off the rocks and stirring up the sand to trap a bunch in the floss to remove it. Everything looks good today. Dwarf Ceriths and nerites are looking good. It will be a lower nutrient tank if I'm not trying to keep a fish happy, so I think it will be fishless for a while. I have mostly zoas and ricordia, but have a little bit of SPS. Digitata looks fine. Birdsnest started to lose tissue. Anacropora looks fine.

did you drill it yourself and add bulkheads? How many drains does it have and how much are you putting in?

That's kind of a lot of bubble algae to try to pick off. I've always thought it looks kind of cool, but it can quickly take over a lot of real estate. For a while in a previous tank I had red bubble algae that tends to be bigger bubbles that I liked a lot. As others have said, be careful around the zoas. Wash your hands well after handling.

Pico is going well so far. I've gotten a few zoas, ricordia, and xenia for it and also put in some possibly ill-conceived SPS. So far everything is doing fine. The fish is a jumper for sure. I heard it splashing off the glass lid yesterday evening. I assume it's because it doesn't really swim. It kind of jumps from rock to rock. In the wild it may jump from pool to pool hunting. It's hard to get a photo of, but here are the corals for now and you can kind of see the fish inside the cave on the left. It's pretty cryptic.

That's terrible. I wonder if a root cause will become apparent over time. It does seem like you had some infection that took out just the LPS. For what it's worth I haven't seen any ill effects in my little tank from the stuff you sent home with me after adding it, but I don't have LPS either. I have a tiny amount of SPS, ricordia, xenia, and zoas.

Normally there's a valve at the bottom of the full siphon that lets you adjust how quickly it drains. The larger cross section of the larger bulkhead and pipe lessens the chances of that getting clogged up with stuff over time.

Why do you think the larger drain equals higher flow? The flow is determined by what the return pump is pushing out of the sump, not by the size of the drain.

In my opinion 1/2" drains are really small. Hope you don't overflow the tank when they plug.

Looks like return is on the right side with some locline going in through a bulkhead. Drains are on the left side.

Nice. Looking good! One of the longest running and nicest tanks on WAMAS was one with just bulkheads on the end like the one you have here. He's moved on now, but here's a link to when Robert Chu was ReefCentral TOTM in 2013: http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/137-tank-of-the-month

There ya go. 500mg is basically a full adult human dose, so I'm surprised that's available without a prescription for fish, but I guess it's because it isn't as dangerous as something like interceptor which they control more carefully.

sorry you're having this issue, and I really hope it doesn't do in that rainbow trachy! I don't see how it could be a nutrient problem if you're direct feeding the trachy unless the low water nutrient level is causing dinos or something to bloom, but those would kill your inverts and SPS too. The cipro idea is interesting. This is getting off topic, but I don't really understand how it would work to dose in a full tank. I've recently been on a few rounds of that and levaquin myself over the past few months and one of the things you have to avoid is calcium and magnesium. The calcium binds to it and prevents it from working somehow. I couldn't take it anytime near eating dairy or taking any multivitamins that included calcium or magnesium. Since reef tank water is full of both I'd think it would deactivate the cipro. I'm not a biologist or a chemist, so maybe it's more of a metabolic thing where it just causes your body to flush it out rather than preventing it from killing bacteria.

Saw the tank today. This trachy is like nothing I've ever seen before. The colors are more brilliant than this in person:

Everything still alive and doing well. I added two bottles of live pods from Reef Nutrition. The place looked like it was snowing tiny swimming critters. The dragonet just kind of sat there looking confused, but I assume he will start getting them eventually. 8)