nburg

Probably the chlorine and chloramines. in my younger, freshwater days, I had so much better success when I would let my tap water set in a bucket over night before a water change to let the chorine evaporate out.

FTS while the glass is clean ?

I like the 100% trend. I say tap water is probably fine 99% of the time, but I don't want to take that change that one time there's a spike in metals or gunk it fouls my tank. Many areas of DC still have some lead pipes and say they change the pH of the water slightly, it can dissolve the scale and leach metals/lead/copper. (I think I read that's what happened in Flint, MI, they stopped treated for a high pH and the lower pH dissolved decades of scale on the pipes, exposing the now unencapsualted metal pipes.)

lol mine stayed colored and has gotten a lot more peach and orange but took a bit to start growing. Starting to grow outward now and seems like it might be a decent grower once settled.

Yeah, I have a basic Tunze power head (constant flow) pointing at my skimmer output that creates a nice random flow. Acros on the frag rack seem to do fine there. I’m going to slowly remove the sand - starting to get hard to keep up on it so out it goes - except for a bit on the right so my wrasse has a place to sleep

New pic dump! Couple pics I took today WWC Pink Passion (left) and WWC Dragonslayer (right) WWC Terra Red Colony WWC Shark Attack - hard to get the blue on camera, but this one is turning out nice! WWC King Fiji WWC Hello Kitty RMF Flavor Parade - bought a browned/greened out colony from Graham while back, but new growth looks great and the rest is starting to get more vibrant... hard to get the new growth color in pics, but very nice Oregon Blue Tort is growing fast now, but is growing into a flat blob with maybe 2 branches? eitherway, this coral is hard to get the true deep blue color. The dark parts capture much lighter blue and the light parts capture as white spots. Blue Stag - Thinking it might be a Acropora yongei? From @jhOU's massive colony Mr Pacman - also from jhou BC Flamethrower Table - starting to get the blue tips and the green is turning a purplish red Supposedly WWC Banana Peel, but looks more like a smooth skin as it grows... maybe they messed up their name? has blue tips, which don't show well here, and a minty green base. Vivid Confetti - seems like one of those acros that everyone in the area has... mine is pretty bright and growing well And finally picked up a blue A. Hoeksemai from Graham which I have been trying to find for quite a while - this one is a Copps lineage piece - hopefully the brown base will color up blue, but either way, the blue is very nice with the green inner coralites. Love it.

Yeah, I would calibrate or verify calibration every couple water changes to make sure it doesn’t deviate. Also use a consistent light to check it as some light can cause the line to be blurry or cast a weird shadow.

I’ve been considering UV to hopefully keep my sand bed cleaner and my glass cleaner, along with the benefit of reducing bacterial infection risk to fish and SPS. I’ve heard several sources say it can help prevent RTN. Water clarity sounds like a plus! Did it affect your pH at all? Thinking with less bacteria in the water, there may be less biomass using up oxygen.

Cleaning up the sand in my big tank so moved a bunch of Ricordea rocks over and they fill in nicely. Might chop some of the rocks up and glue single polyps around the bigger rocks

I started using a razor blade but it was a pain, so I ordered the Red Sea Sump Modification Kit. Basically it’s a thin razor insert into a standard box cutter. Made cutting thru the silicone much easier.

Looks awesome. Is that a coral eating variety?

Baby’s napping so time for an update. FTS I bought an Aussie snake skin torch that I couldn’t pass up. Very slick piece.purple snake skin texture tentacles with bright gold tips. I also decided that the filter sock section of my sump was a waste of space since I haven’t run mechanical filtration in a long while so I cut it out, moved my skimmer and freed up a lot of frag rack space. some closer pics of my corals. Steady growth and I’m really pleased with the colors. Nitrate bottomed out for a while so I started dosing nitrate again.

That Caribsea rock is dense. I have been able to use my larger bone cutters to slowly grind down knobs to where I can snap them off, but if the zoas are on a flatter part, that might be tricky! Someone used to make a stainless hand hack saw, but I'm not sure if they still make it.

Looks good!

I had that years ago in a tank and it grew in a little patch but didn’t really expand too much. Must Be some kind of algae that only grows these weird stalks. Not invasive in my experience.

Some of the nicer pics I took. I need to get a better all purpose lens. The Tamron 90mm is great for frags and zoas, but terrible for acros, and the Nikon lens that came with my camera is terrible. Tyree's Pink Lemonade Holy Grail Micromussa WWC Hello Kitty Milli Some of my Zoas (frozen apple on left, vamps in drag on right) Seduction Paly Rainbow Stylophora Lazy Corals Blue Zing Birds Nest Gonis Blue Stag

That’s changing in 2 months, so gotta get the clean pics in now!

Walk through vid of some of my corals:

Full tank shots from today. I also made a video that I’ll post soon.

Nice! I need to do another video update. i never liked black backgrounds so when I first received the tank, I removed the vinyl right when I came out of the crate. I had bought white vinyl to put in the back since the tank was against a stairwell railing at my old house, white looked natural black did not… but the white vinyl looked terrible and there were so many bubbles I could not get out so I left it clear and I’m glad I did. That clearance might be hard as it wasn’t super easy but you could probably do it. I think I remember the best way was to peel it back upon it self. So if you grab the left corner pull it 180* back to the right against the glass. Most came off in big sheets, but got tricky when it’ it ripped. So unless you have long, strong arms, the middle could be hard. Maybe a flat razor on a handle would work… but at the risk of scratching.

Nice pics! Way better than what I can do with my DLSR so you’re on the right path!

I buy fish from reef escape or direct from biota marine and add them to the DT right away (via acclimation box for a bit) and pray they didn’t let anything thru. I have no space for QTing due to smaller condo apartment. At my old place, I did QT fish for 6 weeks. Maybe in the future I will start again if I move to a larger home. For coral, I dip everything and set it on a mag rack and observe. again, no space to QT. If it’s acros, I either buy from sources that are trustworthy and describe their QT procedures or from locals with established tanks and are well known. Thankfully I’m at a point where I won’t be adding much of anything right now.

I only have sand for my melanurus wrasse, otherwise I’d get rid of it asap. I’ve read they can survive without it, but sounds like a lot of stress. The wrasse keeps those little snails out of my vortechs so he’s not going anywhere. Actually the method of syphoning and rinsing isn’t too bad. Sand just started getting nasty recently so hopefully it’s just short term.

Usually the longest gravel vac BRS sold, but now just a straight 3/8” tube, rinse and replace the sand by hand from the bucket after draining the nasty water

Decided to try something I used to do many years ago to keep my sand bed clean, which is suck up the top 1/4 -1/2 inch of sand and rinse it out before returning it to the tank. I do 15 gallon water changes every week so I suck up about 1/4 gallon of sand which is washed thru 15 gallons of tank water and a little RO water if it’s still dirty before returning. Swirling around allows the algae/diatoms to break off the sand and wash away, leaving me with a pearly white sand bed (at lest for a few days). Much more effective than the gravel tube that’s hard to maneuver around my sticks. I figure I’ll do this until the diatom bloom passes. I don’t see too much harm in this since none of the dirty water is returned to the tank and only about 10% of the sand actually is disturbed. Looks pretty good after a nice cleaning!