Love the aquascape!2023-12-27 I mentioned hiccups earlier. The first hiccup we ran into was that the ReefWave 25 gyre pump had no power supply in the box. The box was sealed; somebody goofed. And that turned out not to be the only Red Sea goof. I mentioned earlier that the package didn't include the ATO+ setup. Well, that turns out to be wrong. It is supposed to come with it and that also was not on the pallet. My daughter already ordered one from BRS, so now we have to figure out how to straighten it out with Red Sea and BRS. Joy.
We finished up a lot of things today. We repositioned the venturi inlet on the skimmer so it isn't isolated in what is supposed to be the filter box and it all fits together much more neatly. We adjusted the water level and flow rate (like, oh I dunno, 25 times?) and I think we've got that set pretty good. We've got our salinity at 1.025 and our temperature at 79 (I see so many conflicting numbers for this I'm really not sure what to go with. Most heaters seem to come set to 77, but the Red Sea Reef Mature instructions say 26-28 C. Well, 26 C is 78.8 F, so we set ours to 79 F.
The instructions say to "prepare your salt water to 1.023-1.025 at 25 C. Then they tell you to maintain the tank at 26-28 C. So what should the salinity measure at that temperature? Is there a detectable difference? By the time we draw water and put it on the refractometer that little bit is going to equilibrate to the surface temperature anyway, right?
Our return pump is running at 25% and our skimmer pump is running at 50%. The Reef Mature instructions say the skimmer should turn over at least 3x system volume per hour with a water:air ratio of at least 3:1. I don't know how one could possible measure this.
Anyway, we started dosing our Reef Mature supplements tonight. Our starting numbers:
Temp: 79
Salinity: 1.025
pH: 7.8
KH/Alkalinity: 10
Added: Nitro Bac = 35 ml, BactoStart = 17.5 ml, NoPox = 4.5 ml