Rascal

In my experience the CO2 regulator/needle valve is the most important component. If you can't keep a steady bubble count you will have to constantly adjust it and your Alk will fluctuate all over the place. Based on recommendations from a couple of more experienced reefers on here, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to this one: http://www.aquariumplants.com/AQUARIUMPLAN...EST_p/co2-1.htm. Going on 2 years now and it is still set & forget.

When I first started I had a fairly decent skimmer and no fuge. Then I added a small Fuge w/ DSB (2/3 of a 10G tank) and things got better. Then I increased my system volume and saw more improvement (dilution of pollution). Then I increased the size of my fuge w/ DSB (3/4 of a 55G tank) and things got better again. Then I got a much better skimmer and saw more improvement. Then I modded the skimmer a few times to make it even better and saw still more improvement. Just lately I increased the size of my fuge w/ DSB to a full 55G tub and modded my skimmer even more. IMO both are essential components to my system and I do not believe I would be able to stock my tank the way I want (and therefore feed it the way I need to) without either one. If I had a much bigger and better skimmer I could probably get by without the fuge (although I wouldn't really want to -- the little critters make my happy), but I do think the fuge exports nutrients - both macro harvesting and because of the 8-10" DSB I get nitrates turned into nitrogen gas bubbles and released to the air. I also think it recycles some nutrients - in food production for the main tank. Other nutrients get metabolized by the critters. Most successful skimmerless tanks I have seen have a relatively low bioload, esp when it comes to fish, and are mostly softie and some LPS. They can be beautiful tanks. There is one in Paletta's book "Ultimate Reef Aquariums", the one in the Marine Scene, and Zygote's tank, for a few examples. However, I have yet to see a fuge-only tank look like Copps' TOTM tank and that is the look I aspire to -- heavily stocked with lots of beautiful fish and chocked full of colorful SPS. I am not saying this is impossible to achieve with a fuge-only system, only that I haven't seen one yet. Theoretically I believe it is possible, but the fuge would have to be absolutely huge relative to the display. How big? Maybe 5-10 X to start, I would guess --- probably more. FWIW, I don't think the low nutrient conditions on coral reefs in the ocean is due to natural skimming. For sure there may be some of this due to the waves, but we've all been to ocean enough to know that the picture above is not representative of a normal day at the beach. Most of us probably send the entire volume of our systems through a chamber densely filled with microbubbles about 10X per hour, give or take. The percentage of the ocean's water that gets foamed during the crashing of a wave seems like it would be really, really small. When non-reefing people gape at all the stuff I've got plumbed together to support my tank, I point out that real 5'x2'x2' sections of coral reefs get a 100% water change every couple of seconds, along with a new dose of fresh food. The essential challenge of the this hobby is that we are trying to replicate something which can't possibly be replicated. Where does all the poop and dead stuff go in the ocean? Well, the ocean has kelp forests and grass flats and mangrove swamps and marshes and lots of other stuff including . . . just consider the size, depth and surface area of that DSB!!. A whale could die just offshore and the water quality on the reef would be unaffected. An 8" fish dies in our tank and we hasten to get it out as quickly as possible lest we suffer a nutrient spike. We are chasing the impossible, so to speak. That's part of what makes it so rewarding when we succeed, at least for me. Lastly, all other things aside, my system has looked best during those periods of time when I've been able to consistently do 10% water changes 2x week. No attempt to compare reefing methods should fail to consider this most important variable, IMO. to all and happy reefing. I'm off to pop downstairs and empty my skimmer cup and check out the critters in my fuge.

I have 2, one brown but with a cool batter and one a neon green. Both attached themselves low against the rock so they sit about even with the sand, but in a position where they don't get any shade. That puts them about 20 below the surface but I have 250W DE halides 8" above the water plus T5 and VHO, so I still think they get a lot of light. They have not moved their attachment points since I put them in the tank (> 1 year ago), just shifted a little to get more light. They have very strong stings. The "stickiest" thing I have ever come into contact with in my tank. Very strong feeding response too. A small piece of rubble with a ric attached fell into one once and I couldn't pull it out in time. It swallowed the whole rock, only to spit it out the next day. I don't feed mine much in an effort to keep their size the same, and this has worked well. One more thing - they are very hardy IME. Ph over 9.5 for 12+ hours had no effect whatsoever.

Definitely not my experience. Hippos get big, and even when small seem to really want a lot of swimming room. I agree with this. I know it's completely subjective and probably anthropomorphic, but Yellows just seem "happier" in a smaller space than other tangs. Another good choice would be a Tomini Tang, since they stay fairly small.

They also release CO2 due to respiration. In the light there is a net uptake of CO2 and release of O2 because of photosynthesis, but in the dark the reverse is true, because respiration continues but photosynthesis doesn't. This is why a heavily planted tank (or one with a lot of nuisance algae) without adequate gas exchange will experience large Ph swings, and why it is often recommended to run a refugium on a reverse light cycle to help stabilize Ph.

Aim for more surface agitation. You want the top of the water almost be rippling, at least enough so that you would have to shut the pumps off to see into your tank when looking at it from the top down. A good skimmer also helps.

Tank is looking awesome Steve!

Josh: So sorry to read about this. I definitely feel your pain. I agree with Chris, if you are losing fish it is a bad sign. On the other hand when I had my Kalk OD we had to evacuate the house within 12 hours because of the stench of rotting corals, so maybe things aren't that bad you. Any idea how high your Ph is? If you are on the fence about whether to move your corals or ride it out, you could always hedge your bets by fragging them and just removing the frags to another system. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. For what it's worth, I think Chip's advice is spot on. It would have saved my system and probably yours too.

Kind of like Ctenophore suggested, perhaps a bit of experimentation might be in order. Test your RO water but also your freshly mixed saltwater (to see if the salt mix might be the source) and the output of your GFO reactor (to see if it is actually removing the silica like it should). Rather than sending a bunch of samples to aquariumwatertesting.com, it might be cheaper to get a few hobbiest silica test kits and hopefully find one that accurately matches the 1.0 result they got on your tank water. I haven't tried the GFO from bulk reef supply yet, but my experience with Phosar's HC vs regular GFO was that there was quite a difference in quality, with the HC type being more like Rowaphos.

Nothing wrong with using DI water as far as I know as long as you keep changing out the resin. W/O an RO filter behind it the DI has to do all the work. With an RO filter the DI is only doing 1-5% of the work, so it will last a lot longer. Test the output frequently to make sure it is still coming out clean (not just for NO3 and PO4 but also use a TDS meter to test for other stuff). In the end you will probably find it is much cheaper to use a combined RO/DI filter. There's a reason most of us do and it is not because we like throwing money away. As far as acceptable levels of NO3, generally speaking most fish will tolerated it better than most corals. Your target levels will be different depending on whether your goal is simply not to kill your fish or you want to have a nice looking tank with thriving livestock. If you are having problems with nuisance algae you need to shoot for undetectable levels of NO3 and PO4, IMO. Once the levels drop that far, the algae itself becomes your test kit. If it is growing, you have excess nutrients. If it is dying off and/or not coming back, you don't. You don't necessarily have to ditch the filter sock as long as you are committed to cleaning it every day or every other day. Otherwise it will contribute to your nitrate problems. How often and how much you should feed depends on what is doing the eating, but overfeeding is a common mistake which is why cutting back on feeding is common advice. One way or another you need to make sure you are not importing significantly more nutrients than your system (including your export mechanisms) is capable of processing. Water changes, exporting macro, DSB, good skimmer, . . . . all could help.

Yikes! Let me know if you know if you need any help, or even a place to keep things if the Ph doesn't settle down soon.

Have to disagree here. If an owner, tenant, or other person with authority over the property (like a store manager or employee) tells you not go on the property and you do anyway, or you enter with permission and then they tell you to leave but you refuse to do so, you would be guilty of trespassing.

You mean like this: http://www.spartechsoftware.com/reeko/expe...nts/volcano.htm Completely unrelated but funny story: I had a client one time who thought it would be cool to pour diet coke (acidic) into a bottle of calcium hypochlorite (basic). He was just a bored teenager working at a neighborhood pool for the summer who meant no harm (and he wasn't seriously hurt), but the Fire Marshall decided to bring felony charges for bomb manufacturing! In court as he justified this charge by explaining to me that an exothermic reaction occurs any time you mix an acid and a base, I wondered what he would do to me if he saw my Kalk mixer at home with the bottle of vinegar sitting next to it. I also wondered if Toys R' Us was about to be charged as a bomb dealer for selling the above-linked "make-your-own-volcano" experiment, and finally I wondered how long it would take for the prosecutor to dump this dog of a case: about 30 seconds as it turned out.

I have my T5s and VHOs a lot closer to the water than my MH's, but I guess they are far enough apart to avoid any shading. In your case I would have two concerns. First, the overlap will cut down on the spread, but that only matters if it is doing so to an extent that it limits the amount of MH light actually hitting something in the tank. In other words, if the only impact is less light from the MH hitting the front glass, who cares? My second concern would be whether that much concentrated heat in one spot on a florescent tube would be a good thing. I don't know that it wouldn't, . . . I'm just saying I would be concerned about it.

David: My first CO2 reactor was entirely DIY with no probes or monitors whatsoever. I used a Dwyer valve I found on Ebay to control the CO2. I got it all dialed in without any problems using just Ph and Alk test kits and a couple of bottles of 2-Part. The key was to take it very, very, slowly. This was my method: 1) start it up at a fraction of what I thought I would need - I chose 15 bpm and a drip rate of 20 to start. 2) test effluent alk and ph just to make sure it was working (I think I shot for Alk at around 20 dKh and just made sure the Ph wasn't so low that my media (ARM) would turn into mush. 3) test tank ph and alk 4) As expected my tank's Alk dropped the first day. I dosed 2-Part to make up the difference and then increased the bubble count and drip rate very slightly. 5) I continued this process until I got it dialed in. I would test Alk & Ph in the tank every 12 hours just to make sure everything was OK, but not make any more than 1 change every 24 hours. I always made only 1/2 the adjustment I thought I needed to make sure I stayed on the safe side. The whole process took about a week. At the end I went over just a bit (saw a slight rise in Alk), so I made slight decrease to the CO2 rate and then took it offline overnight to allow the Alk to fall. After that it worked fine. One thing I would NOT recommend based on this experience is running a Ca reactor without a solenoid. The problem is that in a power outage I continued to dump CO2 into the sump. When the power came back on all of that low Ph water hit the main tank at once. Not good. I still use a DIY reactor but now I have a high quality regulator w/ solenoid to control the CO2 and I use my ACIII to control the whole thing. My dialing-in process is basically the same though. I test the Alk and the PH of the effluent to make sure it is working, but mostly I keep testing my tank and making adjustments until the Alk is stable at the level I want it. One mistake I have seen people make is to have the flow rate so fast that the water doesn't stay in the reactor long enough to have a drop in Ph, so even when they turn up the CO2, the media doesn't dissolve. This has the effect of just blowing CO2 right through the reactor into your tank without doing anything but dropping the tank Ph. You can tell this by measuring the Alk of the reactor. If it isn't significantly higher than your tank, there is a problem. On the other hand, if the flow rate is too low relative to the bubble count, the Ph in the reactor will drop so low that the media just turns into mush. Once you know at what point your media does this, you can avoid it by measuring the Ph of the effluent and making sure it doesn't drop too far.

I agree Highland Reefer and others on the amount of sand - the more the better for nitrate reduction. I have a 4-6" DSB in my display, but I also have a 8-10" DSB in a 55 gallon container. IMO you want a diversity of little scavenger type critters to get the most out of it. From nassarius snails to worms of all types (bristle, spaghetti, whatever), and pods of all types. My DSB doubles as a fuge so I also have some rubble and chaeto in there - lots of stuff. I find it good practice to periodically add some new live rock and/or live sand to "re-charge" the critter population. My sand beds will process nitrates down to zero (undetectable), but IME nuisance algae will out-compete the anaerobic bacteria if other conditions are right. Not sure if out-compete is the right term, but what I mean is that algae will utilize available nitrates before they can be broken down by bacteria if there is enough light and phosphate around for the algae to thrive. I think that is why for me the key to keeping nuisance algae at bay has always been to control phosphates. GFO has always been my weapon of choice but I am currently experimenting with mixed C dosing (Vodka, sugar and vinegar) with pretty dramatic results. More on that in other thread perhaps . . .

If it was just the 90 gallon tank, I would say that 8 T5s plus a 175W MH is plenty of light. For the upgrade though, I would go with the 250W MHs unless you can find away to try to pack more than 4 T5s into each section. As long as you are planning a lighting system, you might also want to consider including some VHOs for actinic supplementation. Nothing really makes the florescents "pop" quite like VHOs.

Grounded or not, it is not safe to rely on a normal circuit breaker to protect you from electric shock. They are not designed for that. They are just designed to protect the circuit from getting overloaded. A circuit breaker trips when the amount of current passing through it exceeds its rating, and not before. Even in the case of a direct hot-to-neutral short, it is not the short per se that causes the breaker to trip, it is the huge rise in current that immediately and directly follows as a result of sudden drop in resistance caused by short (Ohm's law). So, let's say you have a faulty device causing some exposure of the hot lead to saltwater (i.e. "leaking" voltage). If you have a grounding probe in the tank, you now have a ground-fault (which as you pointed out is a type of short). Some amount of current will flow from hot to ground through the tank. If you don't have a grounding probe in the tank, you will not have a ground-fault until you stick your hand in the tank (assuming you yourself are grounded of course), at which point the current will be flowing from hot to tank to you to ground. Either way, a 15A breaker will not trip unless the total current exceeds 15A, or 15,000 mA. So if you only have 10,000 mA of current flowing and you stick your hand in the tank while you are grounded, some (or all, if the tank is not grounded) of that current is going to now be passing through your body. The circuit breaker will do nothing to prevent you from getting cooked (or worse, if the current happened to be between 100-200 mA and passed through the heart). A GFCI on the other hand, would have tripped at a mere 5 mA variance. So it is not just the response time that makes a GFCI different from a circuit breaker, it is the tolerance for harmful or fatal current. I don't know whether everyone in WAMAS grounds their tanks. There is an interesting debate in the hobby about whether this is good or bad for the inhabitants. Some argue that by providing a constant path to ground you simply allow stray voltage in the tank to push current through the tank and all of its inhabitants. Others say so what, the fish are like birds on a wire and unharmed by it. Personally I choose to use a grounding probe because I figure the more alternate paths to ground (other than me) the better, and especially if I can provide one that has a lot lower resistance than my body, so if something does go wrong most of the current will choose that path rather than me.

On still another note I recently found out that on some tanks (brand unknown, got it used), the front and back panes may be tempered even though the left and right panes on the end are not. So even if you have already drilled a couple of holes in the end panes and confidently try to add a hole to the front pane, . . . the results can be quite spectacular. And on a final note, a 55 gallon rubbermaid container seems to work quite well as a sump and will not shatter no matter how many holes you drill in it.

Yeah, I used to think that way too, then I got shocked. :( I know a complete short will trip the breaker, but if only one of the leads gets exposed, there wouldn't be a short would there? Just a lot of stray voltage looking for path to ground. And that's where we come in. . . . Seriously, I may not have the expertise to adequately understand/explain the causes of stray voltage in the tank, but Martin's story is scary because with both hands in the tank the possibility that he could have had current passing directly through his heart is very real. He had a $12 power head malfunctioning, for whatever reason. He could have died because of it. A GFCI would have tripped about the same instant he realized something was wrong, as soon as he put his hand in the tank and felt the first sharp "tingle." His was not an isolated incident. In this hobby, something going wrong is a normal circumstance.

A lot of sources seem to classify them as fairly mild but IME vs favia, candy cane, zoas, and acros and montis, the discosoma usually win. They lose to anemones, acans, and rics, while the turbinaria holds its own. The damage is usually localized and slow and therefore easy to stop in time, and the same treatments that work for aiptasia are effective for controlling the spread - Kalk paste in syringe is my weapon of choice.

No, actually I do. I would not have posted otherwise. I was not trying to challenge you, and I'm sorry if you took it that way. I recognize that you have a lot more knowledge about electrical stuff than I do. If I thought otherwise I would not have wasted my time responding. I was just trying to explain why this is a method that I use precisely because it seems like the safest way to me. From this thread alone you can see that Jason, Txaggies, and Coral Hind use the same method, at least in some circumstances. So if there is something about this method that makes it bad and unsafe to advise others to follow it, I really do want to know. As for Dschflier's question, he asked whether it was unsafe not to have a GFCI somewhere in the circuit that powers most of his electrical equipment for this tank. As I understand your answer you believe it would not be unsafe as long as he used the correct gauge wire and his plugs were not going to get splashed on. Upon further reflection and perhaps a bit of research I hope you will reconsider.

I don't understand this. What is unsafe about using a GFCI to try to identify the problem? I have always used this method because I thought it was the safest way to locate the problem, at least under certain circumstances. The circumstances I am talking about are when (1) there is an electrical problem (which in this case there is) and (2) the electrical problem is something that causes a GFCI outlet to trip. If everything is run through a (working) GFCI and there is an electrical problem that doesn't cause the GFCI to trip, then obviously you have to try something else (I am guessing you would use a meter to look for stray voltage?). But if the problem does cause the GFCI to trip, then why not just unplug everything, reset the GFCI, and plug things in one by one until it trips again? When it does, you now have a situation in which (1) you have identified the piece of defective equipment, which plug you are still holding in your hand; and (2) the power is shut off, so you can safely remove the piece of equipment before powering up again. This method has worked for me many times, and I have never received even the slightest shock while doing it. Using a meter seems possibly more dangerous to me because it might require some handling of potentially defective equipment while live. What am I missing? This I do disagree with. If you have AC electrical appliances in the water they should definitely be protected by a GFCI. Using an AFCI breaker in addition is even better, but I can't think of any reason not to use a GFCI. It is not just a splash of water on the plugs that you have to be concerned with. If you get a crack in a heater or the epoxy sealing the power cord of a power head springs a leak, or a fan or light accidentally drops in the water or the sump overflows and your external pump is now partially submerged . . . . a lot can go wrong. Ask Folta: http://www.wamas.org/forums/index.php?show...28&hl=power. Or Martin: . (For those who don't know, that last part is in reference to his job with the DCPD, not another hobby of his ).

Assuming you are doing this for nutrient export, you want corals which will add to their own mass at the fastest rate. I can't think of anything that will do this as well as xenia.

I am surprised the mushroom lost this battle. They actually have a very potent sting. In my tank I have had a purple Favia killed by mushrooms. Maybe it depends on which way the current is flowing. Since Favia's weapon of choice is sweeper tentacles, the mushrooms have to attack from the direction of flow ("up water"?) to succeed. Just as likely I guess is that it depends on the particular species of mushroom and/or favia invovled in the fight, as well as such obvious factors as proper diet, training, motivation, getting enough sleep, etc. . . .