75 gallon mixed reef medium budget build

[Drewe]

Added some random acro frags. Traded some pieces of purple stylo and 15ish heads of candy canes for them.

Water is a little cloudy from gluing frags down

Also found these growing behind a rock in the other tank...Can't remember exactly what they are. Looks like cyphastrea but one of them is sort of branching?

 

[Drewe]

couple photos of some of my LPS I grabbed today

 

[Drewe]

my guy here is officially tall enough to stick out of the water during my normal partial water change. Seems like some sort of milestone.

 

[Drewe]

we got ourselves some naughty fish. what appears to be marine Velvet has broken out. They're all now in a 20 high hospital tank with copper while the DT is fallow!

The clown overnight looked awful, she got a freshwater dip as did the chromis. 6 weeks to go ‍

The clown is also getting treatment for a bacterial infection later today with a Methylene blue dip

 

[Drewe]

Fallow shots!

 

[Drewe]

Took about 3.5 weeks to get it dialed in and it appears I finally got my AFR dosage right. Ranged from an Alk of 8.9-8.7 the past 7 days, which is better than my goal of <0.5 daily swing.

Now I'm still working on tuning the refugium. I've always had trouble keeping nitrates at 10+ppm where I'd like them to be, coral looks happier and more colorful above that number in my experience. After only running the fuge light for 60 hours this past week I've managed to get them up to 8.7 via Hanna checker. I'm going to see where they're at next week, probably some more adjustments coming.

 

[Drewe]

Quick update on this

About three weeks after these fish came out of QT we suffered a power outage that lasted around 4 days, it was sometime in November/December. We had backups for the powerheads but no matter what we did we couldn't keep the temp up with the furnace down that long. Lost every coral save for some Florida ricordea, a few heads from that basketball sized hammer and a toadstool, every fish except for the kole tang, including the clowns I had since ~2019.

I was monitoring the temperature but no matter what I did we couldn't keep it above low 60s. Used water bottles with hot water, all the tricks. When power was restored the apex pegged the temp at 54, obviously not survivable. Unsure how the tang made it.

We got a new set of clowns and held off on coral replacements until ~6 months ago.

Attached is one of the photos I took after power came back on. Didn't take many more - let them all down and didn't want to document it.

 

[Drewe]

Anyway, about 6 months ago a buddy gave me some zoanthids and I got the bug again. Bought a generator and replaced the aging kessils with some Nicrews after comparing them with some XR15s.

Picked up some frags from a friend and slowly rebuilding.

 

[Drewe]

Got busy with work and couldn't find the orange filter lens so here is some 3 month growth on that digi and stylophora with the whites turned to the max. The digi is finally doing what I want it to do, growth direction wise. Messing with the flow I think helped to achieve that.