40 Breeder Magic- A Reefer's Journey Into The Abyss

Oregon Grown Reef · Sep 18, 2022

Okay, so as you guessed it I installed an Apex on the system yesterday. I've actually had it for nearly 3 years, but it was supposed to go on a different tank. Well, it never did so I finally put it to use. pH monitoring is actually the main reason I hooked it up, but the pH probe dried out completely and won't calibrate even after soaking... I guess that happens after 3 years. A new one from BRS is on the way. The other probes are working still! I have the probes placed near a baffle, so it gets plenty of water flow to help get those more stable readings.

Bonus video of copepods on the glass.

Oregon Grown Reef · Sep 23, 2022

I got the new pH probe in. I'm not impressed so far. It's the BRS brand. It reads ~0.2pH low. I calibrated it twice; once when I first got it and then after a day of it being in the tank. I don't understand why the Apex accepts a low reading when it clearly states that you're using 7.0 and 10.0 fluids. I'll keep tinkering with it for a little while before contacting BRS.

On another note, I got a Battlebox from @Battlecorals a couple of days ago. Awesome pieces! One of these days I'll have to get a good camera so I can get those sexy shots you're all looking for. For now, here are my phone pics.

Oregon Grown Reef · Sep 23, 2022

Today I learned something incredibly valuable! I apologize to BRS for smack talking the probe. Calibrating a pH probe should be done locally. For some reason when using Fusion and the automatic calibration option, it doesn't allow the probe to actually stabilize before forcing you to move forward. After doing it manually, the pH probe still reads the solution a little lower at 9.99, but this was the closest it's been. I'm a happy camper now! The pH probe was the biggest reason I even set it up.

Oregon Grown Reef · Oct 1, 2022

The corals took a turn for the worse this week. A couple of them started losing color as well as tissue at the tips and base. I lowered the light, flow, and stopped carbon dosing altogether since I was also getting cloudy water from what I can only assume was from a bacterial bloom. I lost the BC Houdini in one day. I tried to frag it before losing all of it, but it was already a goner. The others have since stopped losing tissue and are rebounding. I also got the Neptune DOS hooked up to do a 1.25% daily auto water change. I'm exciting to see how that works out long term.

Tonycass12 · Oct 2, 2022

Oregon Grown Reef said:
The corals took a turn for the worse this week. A couple of them started losing color as well as tissue at the tips and base. I lowered the light, flow, and stopped carbon dosing altogether since I was also getting cloudy water from what I can only assume was from a bacterial bloom. I lost the BC Houdini in one day. I tried to frag it before losing all of it, but it was already a goner. The others have since stopped losing tissue and are rebounding. I also got the Neptune DOS hooked up to do a 1.25% daily auto water change. I'm exciting to see how that works out long term.

Did your alk get a little high?

Oregon Grown Reef · Oct 2, 2022

Tonycass12 said:
Did your alk get a little high?

Funny you say that. No. All of the parameters I measure were stable. Alk was still at 8.4-8.5. I did actually lower alk after the event closer to NSW levels (7.4-7.5). I'd read over and over that alk even in the mid 8s could cause "burnt" tips while carbon dosing, so the plan was already to let it fall to the mid 7s. It took so long to drop the alk though that I don't think that was it. The way I see it is the acros were damaged, so lower flow and lower light would help them recover regardless of the issue. After lowering the light and flow the corals stopped losing flesh immediately. I'm guessing one of these or both were the culprit.

acananoreefer · Oct 2, 2022

Following along from the grow-out thread. My 40breeder has been torturing me for almost a year now hopefully yours doesn't do the same!

Oregon Grown Reef · Oct 2, 2022

acananoreefer said:
Following along from the grow-out thread. My 40breeder has been torturing me for almost a year now hopefully yours doesn't do the same!

Thanks for the follow! This has definitely been the most difficult tank for me. I'm going to be transparent with everything I do so I have a record of what works and what doesn't.

Sebastiancrab · Oct 2, 2022

I too have a 40 breeder and was studying your list of things for a possible new fish. Are you planning on rehoming the tang? My understanding is a minimum tank size is 70 gallons and it gets to 7 inches when mature.

Oregon Grown Reef · Oct 2, 2022

Sebastiancrab said:
I too have a 40 breeder and was studying your list of things for a possible new fish. Are you planning on rehoming the tang? My understanding is a minimum tank size is 70 gallons and it gets to 7 inches when mature.

No need to rehome it. I have a 150 gallon tank as well.

V A R I A N T · Oct 5, 2022

White board - what a great idea!

Oregon Grown Reef · Oct 5, 2022

V A R I A N T said:
White board - what a great idea!

I actually ditched the whiteboard. I can log my measurements into Fusion, so I can see longer trends now. It did work really well before that though and I would recommend it. Feels more sciencey. Lol

Oregon Grown Reef · Oct 23, 2022

Just a couple of small updates.

I'm going to be slowly increasing the light intensity until I'm closer to 400 par at the top again. I had one piece lower down that rtn'd, save 1 branch. I moved it up a bit, but I want to increase the overall par of the tank anyhow.

I upped the auto water change amount to 2% per day (1 gallon). The tank seems to be running really well. The parts of the acros that I snipped off due to algae growth are healing nicely. You can see tissue starting to grow. I tested my nitrate, phosphate, and alk today. I've been doing it a lot more sparingly because the auto water changes are proving to increase stability by a ton for me. My nitrate and phosphate were the same today as they were 10 days ago. Alk is at 7.8. Polyps extension is getting much better as well.

Lastly, I got my first order from @SBB Corals this last week. I'm very impressed with the quality of the frags and I feel like I got them for a steal because of the sale.

Mschmidt · Oct 23, 2022

Sbb has some amazing coral! Nice thread too.

Oregon Grown Reef · Oct 23, 2022

Mschmidt said:
Sbb has some amazing coral! Nice thread too.

Thank you! Same back to you.

Oregon Grown Reef · Dec 18, 2022

It's been a little while since I've posted an update, so this is going to be a bit of a long one. There's always trouble in paradise (or what we conceive to be such). I've been losing pieces on a somewhat regular basis. A lot of the acros were doing well and growing, but some also receded/lost color or straight up died. I know this can be how some acros are after shipping, but it has been a regular thing and I know that isn't normal. I sent in an icp test and didn't find anything alarming. I was depleted in some minor/trace elements, so I made some corrections. I bought a new acro and it died within a week. It was very healthy before I got it from a lfs (2.5hr away still). Since I couldn't put my finger on it, I left things along until I happened across a video from BRS that said peak lighting for 10+ hours could stunt growth or kill corals. I checked my schedule and saw it was for 10 hours of sps level par (250-350). I know some people run peak lighting for longer, so I thought that couldn't be it. I did some research on here and saw that most people lit their tanks with peak lighting for a much shorter period, so I thought I might as well give it a shot with 7 hours. After just a short amount of time, my acros stopped receding and I'm actually seeing faster growth now than ever. There's a noticeable difference week to week now. While some may be able to light their tanks for longer periods, mine is not so. I'm wondering if this was the last piece of the puzzle to sps success. I'll be sure to continue to update the thread. In the meantime, check out some honest photos showing good and bad. It's cool to compare the old pics after this much time. Some haven't grown at all and others are drastically different.

And this one to me has grown the most.

Oregon Grown Reef · Dec 19, 2022

One of my favorite corals to watch.

Oregon Grown Reef · Feb 21, 2023

It has been some time since I updated the thread. The tank is almost on autopilot. My duties include changing out the BRS ROX carbon once a week, dump out the waste water from auto water changes, scrape the glass, and clean the skimmer cup when it gets dirty. I just replaced the motor on my Clarisea SK5000 because I tried to modify the last one and wound up damaging it. I embarked on the journey because the drive shaft machine screw kept snapping due to the roll bunching in the middle and causing extra tension than it can't handle. I contacted BRS, the stateside contact for D-D Aquarium Solutions, and had them send me spacers for the filter roller. Since it was due to a design flaw in the earlier generations of the product, they offer them for free. It's working well now, but it's too soon to tell since the bulge doesn't present itself until the roll has advanced for a few weeks.

I lost a couple more acros after the last post and decided to make some changes.

I started changing out the carbon every time that it became clogged with detritus and bacterial growth. You can tell when this happens because the carbon is forced to the top of the reactor due to it being so compacted. My reasoning behind this is because I can see that the waste water from the auto water changes has a yellow tinge to it, despite running carbon 24/7, so DOC may be building up at a decent rate and a more consistent schedule could benefit the corals.

I downloaded and started using the David Saxby setting for the AI Hydra 32 HD's. I was seeing bleaching in corals, despite being in widely accpetable PAR ranges. The tips of several acros starting showing tissue loss as well. I was using the BRS recommended settings, but scaled down, prior to that happening. My guess was that the spectrum, though it may work for some, was not what my corals were wanting.

I reinstated the UV sterilizer that I originally purchased a couple of years ago for dinos because I was seeing dinos grow on the dead tips of the acros. There was a small amount of cyano that started growing once I started running that. This told me that the UV sterilizer is doing its job and cyano is taking over the where the dinos just occupied. This just goes to show you that dinos and cyano are dominant when it comes to the speed in which they occupy territory that isn't already covered with other types of microfauna. That being said, reef supporting bacteria must be more persistent since we often, granted anecdotally, see spaces covered in cyano disappear naturally.

I decided to add a couple more AI Nero 5s to create more random flow. This is by far the best flow setup that I've ever had. This means I now have 4 AI Nero 5s on a 40 breeder, which has closer to 30 gallons of actual water volume in the display due to displacement. I thought it was going to be overkill at first, but the corals have responded well. I put them on anti-sync 30 second pulse and have them set to 35% intensity. This means that at any given point, there's 175x turnover rate, but it's split between 4 powerheads that put out wide angles of flow.

This could all be a bunch of garbage, but it is the line of thinking that guided my decisions and completely turned the tank around. Coloration is improving in every coral, not just one or two. The growth rate is faster than I've ever seen. I'm sticking with this method until something tells me that I'm doing things wrong. I'll grab some photos to post later.