Decadence

I got a call around 3PM from Chelsea in a panic telling me that the water in the tank was cloudy and my algae turf scrubber was white. I asked her to check a few things, and it was obvious that we were dealing with a kalk stirrer issue. I just recently set this thing up and the night before, I added a bypass because it was working too well and my PH and alk levels were a little higher than I like them. The bypass T'ed off of the feed from the ATO pump and dripped into the sump from above, fastened to a PVC line to prevent syphoning. Well, my fastening job didn't work too well, the thing had some slack and dropped a few inches. After turning on, it created a syphon and pulled kalk paste from the bottom of the reactor through the feed tube. I'm not sure how much went in but I had a white tank. Lucky for me, I already run pretty high alk levels so the stuff mostly precipitated. I instructed Chelsea to cap off the feed of the stirrer and then disconnect the ATO pump. What baffles me is that my PH was a few points lower than normal rather than being high. When I got home, I made polyfiber blankets for all of my power heads and changed them out a few times after they were gunked up with kalk. The water is pretty clear now but I am baffled about my test readings which I didn't expect: PH is in the low 8s and got as low as 7.9 during the day with kalk pouring in. Alk tested at 8.5dkh. I have the stirrer hooked up again with the bypass securely fastened high up and routing about 25% of the RODI water straight into the sump. There have been no casualties as of yet but my beloved copperband butterfly is breathing rather heavy. No other fish are doing this.

Sometimes you don't know that you have stray voltage until you are reaching into the tank with a cut on your finger. Your outer layers of skin offer much greater electrical insulation than the inner layers. I recently found out that one of my three month old Hydor Koralia Evo 1400 pumps was leaking stray voltage so I traded it out with the one which mixes my saltwater. I use a grounding probe but it is all the way on the other side of the tank. I'm probably going to get another and run one in the middle of each bank of power heads.

I will chime into this thread since Omair has been talking to me about becoming the new owner of Tails, the mantis. In my experience, he has been curious but not a terror. He does not do much rearranging and is currently living with a yellow sea slug and a chocolate chip starfish until someone wish to adopt them. Tails has never come out and banged on the glass but he does dig and strikes the bottom as though it were rock. The bottom is lined with acrylic. The heater in his tank is glass and has never been struck. I have never tried putting corals in his tank, nor have I ever run lights. NPS tanks have their own challenges, mainly needing a lot of suspended organics without the inorganic nutrients polluting the water. I suggested to Omair an algae scrubber rather than using his skimmer to make the goal a little more feasible.

My new 150 has an electrical cabinet under it on the left side. I'm going to seal this cabinet and then cut out a piece of acrylic to put under the ceiling of the whole stand with about 4" walls hanging down it. This area will have all of my accessory plugs. I wanted the new set up to be as safe as possible and as easy as possible to work on so every piece of equipment will have an outlet directly above it specifically for it so that there are no loose wires. All of the plugs will run through pvc conduit into the dry cabinet where they will have heads plugged into my PC4s and battery back-ups. Doing it this way will make it so that I can easily remove any piece of equipment without have to cut any zip ties or trace down any wires.

I have a few of those cardinals and they do not like the flow required for all of my SPS. If I were to do a species tank, it would be a minimalist 24x24x18 rimless (with a net) with a pair of candy basslets and a zoa garden with very blue lights.

I do straight cuts by cutting a little too big using a table saw with a fine-tooth blade and then I get them smooth with a router and a straight edge. For making multiples of the same piece, I will make it out of MDF and then double-sided tape it to acrylic and hit it with the router. You can polish routed edges with a small butane torch and with a little practice, they look as good as buffed edges. I also like add a slight bevel to all of the exposed edges like GEO does. I do it with a tabletop sanding disk set to a 45 degree angle. Make sure to install a stop so that they are uniform.

I think most of the guys (including myself) who would be willing to buy one of these can offset the costs just by selling a few coral colonies which they bought years ago as frags. After a certain time in the hobby, it becomes much easier to warrant the purchase of something extremely rare/expensive because the hobby begins to pay for a good portion of itself.... That or life has been good to them. :-)

I think I remember copps having one or two.

I would be interested to know pricing as well.

I'm not going to argue further about wrasses and/or dipping eradicating AEFW, just know that washes alone have worked for me in the past and I am not the only one who has reported this. All you have to do to rid them for good is get all of the worms and all of the eggs. They aren't some mythical creature which can only be killed with a certain magic sword.

Fwiw, I do not have aefw but I have had them before and they don't stand a chance with certain wrasses in the tank. Not only will they control them, they will eventually irradicate them. I also stated that I don't sell or give away frags without either treating or advising of red bugs. I would treat my whole tank for red bugs but I have a lot of acro crabs which I would have to get out so I'm waiting for my 150 to go up so I can treat a few corals at a time as I move them over with interceptor and try to save the crabs. If you do get red bugs and they kill a colony, your conditions otherwise weren't good enough. No need to jump on anybody's case, I'm not hiding anything and I would be happy to not give you any corals if you don't want them.

Could see AEFW eggs in pictures of the first two corals. Flat worms are very hard to avoid but very easy to live with. I have eight wrasses in my tank and would have no issue dropping a colony full of AEFWs in without treatment. I also have red bugs... I'll get rid of them sometime soon and I never hand out frags without dipping them or warning the person that they need to be dipped. These two pests will only ruin your day if you let them. If you water conditions are otherwise perfect and you have some wrasses, you won't even notice their presence. What are you using to measure your salinity with? You calcium and alkalinity levels are both a little bit high. I would not be surprised to find that your salient is actually closer to 1.030 with those numbers. If you are checking your salinity with a swing-hydrometer, it's time to get a refractometer. If you already have one, it may be time to calibrate it. SPS are by no means hard, they just require extremely stable parameters, high light and high flow. No matter what, keeping a healthy SPS tank is going to require great investment. You are either going to invest a lot of money in equipment (controllers, heaters, chiller, calcium reactor, kalk stirrer, big skimmer, ATO, etc..), invest a lot of time in manual maintenance (water changes, dosing, testing, etc..) or some combination of the two. These two are the champions who protect my corals most actively: Draco Apollo

I personally just feed like crazy and keep perfect water conditions in a low-stress environment. I have never lost a fish to ich and have actually bought fish with ich from the store and dropped them straight into my display.

Pictures really do not do that tank justice, most likely because it looks a lot smaller than it really is with those HUGE fish. The depth was just fantastic.

I build and modify these things regularly and they are pretty simple to work with. You change the optics with four phillips screws on the front. They simply sit in place without any buckets.

I have to vote for Dell2go... amazing tank.

My money is on 2" total where I live (Laurel) and Frederick gets 52".

Save them up and I'll buy the lot of your used socks.

I circulate mine in a bucket of water and bleach for 24 hours, then full rinse it out with a high-pressure shower head on the "stream" setting. From there I soak it in vinegar for about an hour to loosen up any calcareous blockage and to dissolve away any chlorine gas which may remain in it (in the bathroom with the door shut and the vent fan on, don't breath it in). After an hour I give it another rinse and let it air dry. I've found that the most important part to getting the full life from the sock is doing both the bleach and the vinegar to free up organic and calcareous blockage. The most important part in keeping it from affecting the protein skimmer is going to be rinsing with the high-pressure hose because it pushes out any potential detergent.

Sadly, my herbavores don't eat hair algae so my scrubber has to be cleaned into the trash :-/ FWIW, I'm on day three without the skimmer/GFO right now as I'm treating with prazipro. Growth on the ATS has exploded but nothing else seams affected thus far. I will be treating for a little over two weeks with a large water change and a three day rest period between the two separate weeks of treatment.

Real tank, fake corals.

These are the type of responses which I'm used to. By these standards, if you don't take off your protein skimmer, mechanical filters, DSB or whatever else then doing water changes isn't doing what you think they are doing. Why would I remove things that are working well with a sound theory of why it works well? Each component has its part which only that one component can achieve: Skimmer - removes organics ATS - binds inorganic nutrients as organic for easy removal manually or through skimming GFO - binds inorganic phosphate independent of the Redfield ratio

This is the reply which a lot of people have given me on the other forums. The idea in my heads is that an ATS is great in that it turns the inorganic phosphate back into organic phosphate which is harmless. The problem with this is that it isn't 100% efficient in that some small amount of organic are released back into the water column to break down. The skimmer can't pick up inorganic phosphate efficiently but it can pick up the organic matter which makes the pair compliment each other well. The only drawback is that if there is more phosphate available than nitrate, the excess phosphate is still going to build as nutrients will be taken up set in the Redfield ratio. The likelihood of having a perfectly balanced amount of nitrate and phosphate to where both are brought down to the level of limitation for algae growth is extremely slim. Running a small amount of GFO gives me the ability to ensure that phosphate is the limiting factor which means it will be as low as a scrubber can possibly make it. The way I see it, the components work well together and if something goes wrong I have that much greater a buffering capacity for both organic and inorganic nutrients and a better chance of not losing more livestock. The other day I had an explosion of algae on the screen and I searched around the tank to find out the cause. I found a dead turbo snail which looked like it had died a couple days prior and was beginning to rot. This could have been catastrophic in a lot of tanks but you would never know something was wrong in mine without opening the cabinet.

Today's Pet in Columbia isn't too bad.

In my experience, discoloration only comes from waiting too long to harvest or harvesting while it is still in the system. I remove mine, scrape the algae and then spray it with the shower head. The smell is only there when you are harvesting unless you don't have enough flow. If there is enough flow, all of the algae will be coated in water and the smell will not be present under the stand. As far as chaeto goes, I had some stop growing in my tank so we took it out and put it in a bucket with three gallons of the same tank water with a huge pump and powerful light. Within a week it filled the whole bucket to the point where it was growing out of the water. This same water was growing SPS fine. I think chaeto is often under-rated simply because the limiting factors to growth aren't nitrate or phosphate but rather photosynthesis or too much dwell time.