Anthony’s Red Sea XL 300 build - Mixed Reef

anthonymckay · Sep 2, 2022

Some updated growth log photos today

Strawberry Shortcake

TSA Bill Murray

Starting to think this is probably a Bill Murray acro too...

The Pink Floyd is still pretty new so not really any outward growth yet. But I found it interesting that it appears to be encrusting and growing OVER the small bit of green Monti that was attached to it. I thought for sure the Monti would start encrusting over the Acro.

anthonymckay · Sep 22, 2022

Time for another update. Lost my green Juicy Fruit torch, no idea why. All the others are doing great and have been growing strong. My Juicy Fruit started looking a bit "off" so I moved it to a different spot next to my NYKnick torch. The next morning both heads had evacuated. C'est la vie...

I also had a minor hiccup with my alkalinity/ph stability (*after* I'd already lost the torch). Turns out, when the Red Sea doser "notifies" you that a dosing container is getting low, it doesn't actually "notify" you in any meaningful way... No Lock Screen alert on the iPhone, no push notification. Just a message in the "Notifications" tab of the RedSea ReefBeat app, which you'll only see if you explicitly open the app and go check that tab. As a result, I didn't notice that my Kalkwasser reservoir was empty. Thankfully my alkatronic tests every 4 hours and I noticed the next day that the graph was just plummeting.

Then I managed to accidentally set my refilled RO reservoir on top of the silicon kalk dosing line and pinch it off... I was really scratching my head trying to figure out why my parameters weren't going up despite full dosing containers and the log showing that it had dosed the desired amount. Finally noticed the dosing line near the head was sucked together and flat.... I thought maybe the end of it had clogged up, but no, just my own stupidity. Whoops!

No new corals for a while, as I've been patiently waiting for the Silicon Valley Coral Farmers Market that will be going on this weekend. Can't wait! Nothing in particular in mind that I'm looking for, but will probably come home with a few new frags.

Here's a few new macro shots I took this week:

TSA Strawberry Shortcake

TSA Bill Murry

RR Pink Floyd engulfing the last little bit of green montipora cap that was attached to it.

RTA Taste The Rainbow

anthonymckay · Sep 24, 2022

Made it to the Coral Farmers Market last night. Not as much stuff as I was hoping to get excited about, was a lot of the same things over and over from each vender. I did manage to pickup a couple higher end zoa polyps, a new chalice, and a couple sps frags. Haven't taken any photos of the sps yet, as I'll probably let those settle in for a few weeks before I snap some shots.

In love with this one! Speckled Krak zoa

This one is also cool, but I can't for the life of me remember what the guy told me it was called.

Watermelon Chalice

anthonymckay · Sep 28, 2022

Haven't posted a full tank shot in a minute, snapped a quick one on my phone this week.

anthonymckay · Oct 2, 2022

Picked up a couple new pieces yesterday. A couple Goni's and a new Acro.

They are still a bit closed up, but the one on the left has a gorgeous pastel light green at the base of the poly's stem. Acclimating them on the sanded in low light for a week or two before I move it next to my other Goni for it's final mounting spot. I'll get some better pics then.

Red planet acro

anthonymckay · Oct 6, 2022

This week marks the 5 month mark for my tank. It's really been humming along nicely. All my corals have been looking great and growing really well! Some things that had been quite slow to show any growth have finally started to take off. Particularly my Strawberry Shortcake acro. It completely encrusted over the disc it was glued to, and regained all it's color, but the frag itself hadn't grown at all. Then in the past week I noticed it started shooting out a new branch. Looking forward to see more growth from that frag!

I gave up on trying to address my dino outbreak on the sand, Silicate dosing just wasn't working for me. After I started just ignoring it, it seems in the past month it's really diminished quite a bit on its own! Not fully gone, but light enough dusting on the sand that I don't really notice it.

I've been thinking a lot about the next steps I want to take with my tank. I'm really wanting to add on some reactors for both carbon and GFO. I'm also most likely going to add on a Coralvue Hydros controller as well. I'm still on the fence about adding a manifold to my return line to plumb the reactors to the return pump, or add small separate pumps to power the reactors. I really like the idea of being able to activate the GFO reactor on demand based on test results from my alkatronic. ie: po4 > 0.08 turn on GFO reactor pump, po4 < 0.04 turn off GFO pump. The downside of individual pumps for the reactors is just space.

I'd also like to switch fully to kalkwasser, and I'm heavily leaning towards using a kalk reactor as well. Either way, I need a dedicated dosing head that is capable of delivering the required amount of kalkwasser per day to meet my tanks demand. Currently I'm only able to dose 1000ml per day with the RedSea doser head, I supplement the rest of my tanks alk uptake with 2-part. The other option for me currently would be to have 2 heads feeding into my limewater reservoir and then I'd be able to dose up to 2000ml per day.

I've also been in a bit of a losing battle against dense thick green turf algae that was on one of the big rocks that came from my old tank. I spent about an hour on manual removal (It's extremely difficult to pull off the rocks). Then tried scrubbing the leftover bits with a toothbrush to no avail. I ordered some small stainless steel wire brushes to see if that'll help get it off. I'm also looking around my area for a tuxedo urchin and some female emerald crabs. I've been really reluctant to go the emerald crab route as they have a reputation for eating zoas. I am starting to amass a nice little colorful zoa collection, so I'd rather not have something eat them. I bought a bunch of fluconazole, but I've been really reluctant to use that bullet, as I don't like the idea of wiping out anything algae related and possibly starving out some of my cleanup crew.

Anyway, that's the current state of my tank. Here's a top down shot of my Red Planet acro I took last night while target feeding some corals with all the powerheads turned off.

anthonymckay · Oct 23, 2022

Woke up this morning to a couple SPS frags losing tissue at the base.

A couple others look like they're starting lose color at the base as well. A few things I suspect might be related, but unsure which.

I had been procrastinating the scheduled hose replacement/recalibration of my Alkatronic (It had been reminding me to do this for the past month). Finally got around to doing this, and my test results went from 8.45 dKH right before the maintenance, to 7.89 right after. Turns out the Alkatronic had been off and was reading high. I had sent off an ICP test a week or so prior, and got them back around the same time. They confirmed this and reported ~7.5, and my Hanna checker reported 7.8. I increased my alkalinity back to ~8.5 where I had been targeting.
My kessil app started failing to detect my lights, so I had to go through setup all over again and lost my previous light settings/schedule. I set them up to what I thought was the prior settings, but not 100% sure. I don't think this issue is as likely of a culprit, but still something of note that happened a two days prior to the SPS issues.
I had missed a water change 2 weeks in a row due a particularly busy schedule the past few weeks. I did a water change last night, but my Nitrates were reporting ~20ppm on my Mastertronic before the water change. Confirmed with my Hanna nitrate test which reported 20.7ppm. Usually I'm in the 8-10 range. 20 isn't insane and I dont think would cause issues, but again, another thing that I noticed outside the norm prior to the SPS issue.

Monday 10/17 - New encrusting growth on this Jelly Shot (left) and Mille (right) is bright green at the edges. Jelly shot had been beginning to encrust over the glue since it was fragged. Mille has been slow and steadily encrusting over it's disc for many months

10/23 - 6 days later, Mille (right) encrusted edges have faded and started bleaching at the top. Jello Shot (middle) is missing a patch of tissue in the middle of the base. My Red Planet that wasn't visible in the first photo from a week ago is also fading at the base. It was previously bright green all over the base along the new encrusting growth.

Parameters as of today (pH is always lower in the mornings, peaks around 8.28 or so before lights out). Nothing seems insane to me? Not really sure if there's much I can do other than just monitor and try and keep everything stable and hope it can recover...

anthonymckay · Oct 27, 2022

Small update. Lost my snicklefritz acro (just realized I never posted a photo of that one). But the others frags that started losing tissue seemed to have stabilized and haven't lost any additional tissue for the past couple days. I'll be monitoring them closely to see if the tissue starts to regrow.

I still think my alkalinity drop was the culprit. But another theory crept into my head... I now remember while doing some glass scraping, I had a few torch tips tear off and start floating around. I thought I had sucked them all up, but it may be possible that some of those tips floated around and landed on a few of my acro frags. I've had that kind of thing happen once before where I found a piece of torch stuck to the skin of an acro and caused a little damage where it landed. So maybe that's what happened here as well? I dunno. Anyway, sucks to lose frags, but it's simply a part of the hobby that we have to accept from time to time.

Here is the last photo of the snicklefritz acro I took a couple weeks ago. Dunno why I never posted it before.
(small pink acro in the center)

anthonymckay · Oct 30, 2022

Pro TIp: If you host a children's halloween party, keep an eye on your magnetic frag racks. Walked into the room and saw a child had pulled off all the magnets on my racks and all the frags were strewn across the tops of the corals below. Most are fine, but my splatter hammer is looking in quite poor shape. Magnets were never recovered and had to order new racks from amazon.

I'm generally pretty good at risk assessment for things around that house that children might be able to damage, but didn't see this one coming, haha.

anthonymckay · Nov 2, 2022

When it rains it pours!

My titanium heater took a dump yesterday. I threw on a smaller 100w backup I use for heating up my mixed water. It's working overtime to keep the temp up. Last night was particularly cold for my area, and at one point my wife woke up with "Your aquarium is beeping" at 2:30am. Temp was down to 77.3 and the InkBird wasn't happy about that.

I ordered two new replacements from BRS last night. Got the notification that they shipped today, and then to my surprise notice I also had a new Versa dosing pump, Hydros Controller, and IceCap Kalk Reactor ship as well... oops. Apparently those were all in my cart on BRS still from recently just pricing out stuff for some future plans. I didn't notice the price total when I did a quick checkout. So I guess I'm upgrading all those items sooner than I anticipated...

Anyway, this is why you should run dual heaters (I knew I should have been but was lazy about it), and always keep a backup replacement. Luckily I was working from home yesterday and was able to quickly swap it out when the InkBird controller started beeping to alert that the temp had dropped to 77. Hopefully the smaller 100w heater will get the job done till the new ones arrive in a week. If it can't keep it up above 78 tonight though I'll need to run and grab something from the store tomorrow.

anthonymckay · Nov 6, 2022

New equipment arrived today! Spent most of that day setting up and installing everything. Took far longer than I anticipated, but gave me a chance to clean up my rats nest of wiring a bit in the process. Really happy with the new kalk reactor setup! Will monitor levels the next few days and get it dialed in.
The Hydros controllers are quite nice as well. Fairly intuitive, though I’ve discovered a couple limitations so far that I wish I could find solutions for. Overall, happy so far with everything.

anthonymckay · Nov 7, 2022

I think I found the culprit responsible for the SPS tissue loss I experienced 2 weeks ago... The previous time it happened, a couple sps lost tissue for 1 night and they were regrowing nicely after that. This morning I woke up and glanced in the tank and saw my big Halloween Hermit crab at the base another sps going to town on it happily eating away. Another acro near it also had a big chuck of flesh removed from the base as well. Both of those acros were 100% fine the night before with great polpy extension and healthy thick flesh at the base. Looks like he'll be getting a new home shortly!

These two photos are 1 day apart. This is the sps I found him eating away at the base of it this morning.

anthonymckay · Nov 8, 2022

Confirmed. After I discovered the halloween hermit eating my sps the other night, I had only pulled him off and dropped him down on the sandbed where he hung out all day. Last night, about and hour or two after lights out I went downstairs and flipped the light on in the room. There he was back up at the top of the rock work just getting started on the base of my Bill Murry acro. Luckily I intercepted him before he did too much damage. Dropped him in the sump till I can sell him to someone local or trade him back into my LFS.

In other new, really loving the Hydros controllers! Main reason I went with Hydros was the direct support for Focustronic hardware. Was able to add my Alkatronic and Mastertronic test results as inputs for the Hydros, super easy to setup as well.

anthonymckay · Nov 9, 2022

Today was Alkatronic/Mastertronic maintenance day. After setting up the Hydros controller I noticed the Alkatronic was reporting 0.2 lower pH than what the hydros was reporting. Ordered some calibration fluids and re-calibrated my Alkatronic probe for the first time since I bought it. I also took this opportunity to recalibrate all the pumps in both machines. My Alk reading went from 8.34 to 7.6 after calibrating... yikes! I ran two more tests and then tested with my Hanna checker to confirm this value. All were showing 7.6. Surprised it's so far off to be honest, because a couple weeks ago I'd replaced pump hoses in the Alkatronic and recalibrated the pumps and verified readings with the Hannah checker. Maybe the new hoses were breaking in and causing incorrect high readings? Either way, I'll be bringing this value back up to 8.5 over the next 24 hrs.

I'm now wondering if the low Alk (and as a result bigger pH swings) are why my purple hornet zoas have been looking bad lately. Hoping that's the issue. I've been trying for the past year to figure out why they cycle every month or two form looking good to looking bad to recovering and then looking bad again in another month. My blue eyed blonde zoas have been losing color on their tentacles as well. So hopefully this is all related.

anthonymckay · Nov 21, 2022

In the ups and downs of a newer tank, things have been on a heavy downswing lately…

I had done lots of reading on fluconazole and its effects. Particularly the 3-4x dosage treatments for bubble algae. I decided to try the 4x dose in hopes it might kill off some of the turf algae I’ve been battling. Most corals were fine, but it very clearly stressed some others out pretty badly. My purple monster and pink diamond zoas all shrank and closed up within a day. My alveopora shrank and stopped fully inflating its long tentacles. My Pink Floyd acros withdrew all its polyps and has browned a bit. I did the treatment for a week and decided to pull the plug on it. It had zero affect on the turf algae but did knock out some bubble algae.

I did a 25% water change, followed by another 10% two days later. Of course I had to start messing with other stuff during this… I pulled the rock that my jester torch was glued to, as it had a thick mat of turf algae that had been taking over and tentacles were beginning to get stuck in it. I manually removed as much of the algae as I could but accidentally knocked the torch off that rock. It fell down to the sand, so I spent a bit of time repositioning the rock and gluing it back on. Within a couple days I notice one of the heads is showing signs of brown jelly disease. Noooo!

I pulled the torch from the rock again and decided to drag it up in hopes I’ll be able to save portions of it. The head that was most affected I suspect is a goner. Another branch with two heads already had some upward receding flesh bands. The third branch with a couple heads looks healthy for now. Called up a friend that runs a coral store near my house and he’s gonna get me some ingredients for a KFC dip this evening, so hopefully that will help.

After fragging…

So far this month I’ve lost a splatter wall hammer, a rainbow goni, and now this torch (the hammer and Goni died before I did the fluconazole treatment, no idea why). I won’t be surprised if I end up losing the Pink Floyd acro as well. Not a great month for reefing so far, hope things turn around.
Water parameters have all been looking good, but I sent off an ICP test today to make sure everything else is within a desirable range.

anthonymckay · Nov 22, 2022

KFC treatment begins today. I expect to lose one of these frags, and possible two, but hoping for the best! I scaled the treatment down to 1 gallon, so should be able to do daily treatments for the next week. Fingers crossed. I also took the chance to remove the rock with turf algae that the torch was originally attached to and threw it in the sump. A few weeks in the dark should kill off the remaining algae

anthonymckay · Nov 23, 2022

Seriously regretting having done that 4x fluconazole treatment. Many corals are showing signs of browning out and looking stressed. All of them were absolute thriving, bright, and fluffy prior to the day I started treatment. Such is the life of reefing... mistakes will be made, live and learn! Hoping that things will start recovering over the next few weeks/months...

anthonymckay · Nov 24, 2022

Just documenting the failure of my 4x fluconazole treatment so that others can learn from it.

anthonymckay · Dec 14, 2022

Been a few weeks since my big fluconazole disaster. Things have been slowly recovering and getting back to good health. The SPS have been regaining color and should be back to looking like their former selves within a couple more weeks. All the negatively affected zoas are all fully open again, though the size of my purple monster polyps are still about half the size they were prior to the fluconazole overdose.

Unfortunately I did end up losing 4 of the 6 jester torch heads I had. I was able to save two of them at least, and I suspect if I’d done the KFC dip longer I might have had a higher success rate. I ordered the supplies for that to keep on hand for the future.

A week ago I started using the Reef Moonshiners method of trace element dosing. It’s of course. But early to report on any positive impact, but in general I like this approach. I tend to get hung up on the minutia of the hobby, so being able to target specific levels for each element suits me well.

The Kalk reactor has been a fantastic addition as well. I couldn’t recommend this kind of setup enough for people wanting to dose kalkwasser but might be restricted on space for a large limewater dosing container. Hydros controller + kalk reactor + Alkatronic tester has really been a beautiful combination of gadgets!

Here’s some updated photos of the recovering corals.

This strawberry shortcake acro actually got much worse looking than the last photo I posted on Nov 24th. It had turned entirely brown and had zero color anywhere. It’s been looking better every day this past week.