AlanM

Can someone please volunteer to go to NY to get some of Paul's extra bucket of rocks. I'd enjoy some of his rock with bio-diversity from the stone ages of reefing! I'd put it in my tank and name it Mount Baldy!

Just thought I'd post a graph that I found interesting demonstrating the effect of inside air on pH. It's my anniversary coming up, and my mom sent me a box of Kansas City Steaks. They were packed with a pile of dry ice. I opened the box inside and dropped the dry ice in the sink at 5:30 and amused the kids by filling it with water. I let probably 2 pounds of it evaporate inside. Here was the result on my pH as measured by Apex and still dropping. My alkalinity is fairly high at 11, by the way, but pH is heading down towards 7.75.

One thing I learned. You can order Dr Tim's from Amazon, but then they ship it however and they have been storing it somewhere in unknown temps. If you order from Dr Tim he takes some care with shipping it. No idea if it makes a difference or if the whole thing is total snake oil, but my tank is cycled. I added MB7 all along too, but I'm even more suspicious that it's nothing more than an ammonia source.

Im in the same boat, but starting with nearly totally dry rock instead of live rock like yhsublime. I did add dr tims because of this. Also, I am a month ahead of yhsublime July 23. Trying to not add fish until about the same time as him, though. Got three snails and three conch, but may give two of the conch out to folks. They are cool, but seem hungry to me.

Good gravy. I have no idea how this is going to play out, but it sounds crazy and fun.

Seems like you could almost make it as porous as you wanted depending on the resolution of the printer. If you're spitting individual 1mm grains down, for instance, that's a lotta surface area.

He does great work. It's not just owning a CNC machine, it's knowing how to use it and doing nice design as well.

Cerameco. Really cool stuff and pretty unique in this country, it seems. Their website has closeups of the porosity. Other stuff used to come from Germany, aquaroche, I think, but import was tough.

Cutting that stuff is awful too. I ended up using tinsnips because everything else got dull immediately from the fiberglass in it.

I think it's really cool too. Seems like you if you're planning lots of stony coral, you're growing your own rock right there. The coral will eventually fill in the open space, and in the meantime the fish will like the extra room. This should be plenty of structure to secure frags to for growing out. If you go bare bottom, though, and have so little total volume of rock it seems like you're really limiting the surface area in your tank for the biofilm of nitrifying bacteria to grow. I know this clay is porous, and I know you're getting those sintered plates in the sump which has lots of surface area, but I don't understand how the water will keep passing through there once it fills with biofilm too. Sand would give you lots of surface area around the grains.

Just to update this. The new power adapter which is 1A rather than 0.5A does the trick. Thanks for sending it out, Avast! I should actually say, it did the trick. I tested it to see that it worked, then as I was trying to secure it to the wall on an extension cord a bit better (the cord is shorter than the old one, so it didn't reach all the way from the EB8), I dropped it in the saltwater in the sump. Doh. I pulled it out, shook it off, opened it up, sloshed it around in RO/DI, and put it in some Uncle Bens for a couple of days. I just plugged it in again, and it still seems to work, but I'm going to leave it plugged in upstairs for a while to make sure the smoke doesn't come out. I feel pretty dumb for immediately dropping it in the sump.

Hey, I hadn't thought about that when thinking about my eventual dosing. That's a good idea.

Conch is trying to escape.

Buy lots before the meeting and turn in the receipts for raffle tickets.

My favorite aquascape of all time is Steve Weast: http://www.oregonreef.com/sub_aquascaping.htm Also, the biggest bristleworm ever.

http://www.ipsf.com/sandbedclams.html Sells sandbed clams, but Im not sure that is what you wanted.

Thanks, Tom. That makes sense. It is definitely fueling food sources. Not too much, though, because I am only feeding the tank a little bit. Maybe I should dump a bunch in there and see if I can get a nice crop of fur.

Here's an article I believe is good about GFCI and ground probes and such: http://www.beananimal.com/articles/electricity-for-the-reefer.aspx

ORLY? So you turned on all the deep blues and purples and did full light cycle with that and no other colors?

Maybe those of us in Montgomery county should let the forum know when we plan to go to a salt sale and we could get a few boxes. Like my beer club in grad school did when one of us was going on a family trip to Downingtown, PA. He would always come back with a trunk full of Victory beer.

I'm going to get some chaeto from monkiboy this week. Maybe I'll sneak out some substrate from him too. 8) I may make it the three months, but it sure is boring watching the lights ramp up and down each day while the snails and conchs hunt for something on the rock, glass and sand. The glass is pretty messy, but I'm leaving it alone for now. it's full of those tiny little hydroids that will apparently go away with time. I still have 4ppm NO3 and 0.16ppm PO4. I seem to be using up alkalinity without using up calcium, which is really high at 480ppm. From an old Randy Holmes Farley article I read that is expected in a new tank without any coral because alk is used in the nitrogen cycle, but calcium isn't. One of the pieces of liverock I got from Congressional a while ago has a bunch of purple on it, which I assume is coralline algae. I may take a scraper to it to try to spread it around and get it growing on the rest of the stuff since my calcium is so high.

That's pretty awesome. Wonder how strong the material is. With one that big you could print the whole tank with rock walls on the back, left, right, including integrated overflows and returns and just silicone in a front pane of glass.

Right. When I was there a couple weeks ago they also had a ton of boxes and a sale going on.

Rob recommended full light cycle. Tony Vargas recommended no light. So there's a difference already. Also, CUC is a difference, but I think Tony was talking about live rock or lots of seeding with sand and microfauna from an established tank. In a tank with only dry rock, dry sand, and bottled bacteria it seems like you can bend Tony's rule and add some small stuff. I'd like to get some micro brittle stars, worms, and more copepods, amphipods, mysis shrimp in there somehow, but am not sure how to go about it. Does anyone have a recommendation for local stores with extra grungy live rock bins to pull some of that stuff from or should I put in an order from IPSF for some of that stuff? The lights are definitely driving growth of algae in my tank at the moment. I'm going to do the full battery of tests today, but it was good before I left on vacation. You can see the timeline of tests, if you're interested, at http://www.aquaticlog.com/showcase/dashboard?aquariumId=2732 I enter every result into there.

I've got green stuff growing now!! Little brush type structures and kind of bright green stuff on some of the rocks. The conchs and snails lived through my week of vacation and ate all of the brownish stuff that previously grew in there. I'm happy that I have another color of fur growing in there. Seems like progress. For you Apex gurus. I have the following statements on my return pump outlet: Fallback OFF Set ON If Power Apex Off 002 Then OFF If FeedA 000 Then OFF If FeedB 000 Then OFF which should turn it off if power is lost on the 12V adapter that plugs into the head unit for 2 minutes. I lost power this morning for 24 seconds. The head unit never rebooted because it was still getting power from the EB8 which is on UPS, yet it still turned off the return pump, lights, and other stuff for those 24 seconds as soon as the power went off. I also didn't get the email, but I suspect it may be because of the dodgy UPS that I have running my router. Anyone know why my return pump shut off even though the power was only down for less than 1 minute? All I can think of is that the fallback statement triggered, but that's only supposed to happen if the head unit communication goes away, which it shouldn't have done.