Anyone Use Red Sea Care Program??

[Luke Schnabel]

I'm going to start using the whole Red Sea Reef Care Program soon. I've heard of great reviews and thought I might give it a try. If you are currently using the program please give me some input on what your doing to make it simple and how its effected your reef. Any tips or tricks would be great!!!

I think in order for me to start Ill need to figure out how to set up dosing pumps with the Red Sea Energy A and B. They say to keep the bottles refrigerated. I was going to add a small compact refrigerator beside my tank and keep the bottles inside, run my dosing tubing inside while hooked up to a dosing pump outside. If I don't get it automated I'm afraid I will not keep it up on a daily basis and I'm trying to go for as steady as possible.

I have two big questions for using a dosing pump with Reef Energy A and B....

1. Will the liquid of Reef Energy A and B in the dosing lines that will be outside of the refrigerator turn bad?? I would assume it would be a few days for the liquid to sit in the line outside of the refrigerator before it is actually dosed to the tank. I'm looking to be dosing 25ml of each per day.
2. Will both Reef Energy A and B need to be shook prior to dosing every time or could a shake every so often work?

 

[Luke Schnabel]

;Yawn;Yawn

 

[AdamNC]

I used the 100ml bottles, but only dosed 6ml/day. I never refrigerated them and they never appeared to go bad. I would however recommend shaking them at least once a day, stuff does tend to settle.

 

[Damien Buckley]

I'm using more or less the whole Red Sea program so fire away. I just add Reef Energy A/B manually when I feed the fish each night so I can't help with that. I thought about dosing it automatically too but the advice seems to be not to. It does go off too - I had one bottle that stank. It was rank.

 

[greenhorn reefer]

I use all Red Sea products, salt, abc, colors, a+b, but don't always follow the instructions. However, I manually add all of them. Abc goes in the filter sock, a+b when the lights are dimming(led break down the product, and I use colors twice a week. I refrigerate the a+b but Di not for my first box and it was fine. Question, if you set up a dosing, how will you shake?

 

[Luke Schnabel]

@Damien Buckley @greenhorn reefer How has your Coral reacted to the whole program? Have you seen better color and growth?

If I can't find a better way I may have to shake it whenever I think about it. Or...
I'm trying to find a way to possibly hook the Reef Energy A and B to a stirrer that will stir the solution up 5 min prior to the dose.

 

[greenhorn reefer]

@Damien Buckley @greenhorn reefer How has your Coral reacted to the whole program? Have you seen better color and growth?

If I can't find a better way I may have to shake it whenever I think about it. Or...
I'm trying to find a way to possibly hook the Reef Energy A and B to a stirrer that will stir the solution up 5 min prior to the dose.

So, I am guessing you are totally apposed to manually adding it, correct?

 

[greenhorn reefer]

@Damien Buckley @greenhorn reefer How has your Coral reacted to the whole program? Have you seen better color and growth?

If I can't find a better way I may have to shake it whenever I think about it. Or...
I'm trying to find a way to possibly hook the Reef Energy A and B to a stirrer that will stir the solution up 5 min prior to the dose.

I honestly can't tell. I have always used it since I started reefing and don't have anything to compare it to.

 

[Luke Schnabel]

Yea I want to try to get EVERYTHING automated. The more consistent I can be the better I'll be able to fine tune it I would think.

 

[Damien Buckley]

@Damien Buckley @greenhorn reefer How has your Coral reacted to the whole program? Have you seen better color and growth?

If I can't find a better way I may have to shake it whenever I think about it. Or...
I'm trying to find a way to possibly hook the Reef Energy A and B to a stirrer that will stir the solution up 5 min prior to the dose.

I don't really have anything to compare to to be honest. I have a Red Sea a Reefer 250 and have used Red Sea products since I bought it 2 years ago. My last tank was over 10 years ago and totally different (Calcium reactor, halides etc) and all softies.

I'm pretty pleased with the results so far. I'm struggling with phosphate however - I think nopox is great for nitrate reduction but not so much for phosphate. If you check out my tank thread I just posted a video of the tank & setup so you can see how mine is going.

 

[Damien Buckley]

Yea I want to try to get EVERYTHING automated. The more consistent I can be the better I'll be able to fine tune it I would think.

I totally understand this and wanted to do the same. It just didn't work out 100%.

Reef Energy is a food though. It's not like calcium, alk or nopox where you must keep solid, stable conditions. If you drop Reef Energy for a week while on holiday you're unlikely to have anything bad happen and I dont think your corals will care too much when and how they get it - it's a bonus, not an essential. The other thing is, if you don't kick your pumps into feed mode and/or remove filter socks while you feed it, you're likely wasting it anyway. If you had an Apex or something you could automate it all but it seems like a lot of work for minimal return to me.

I started out with an Arka doser for the inbuilt stirrer but it was useless - it was really loud & leaked. I replaced with a Kamoer. I should perhaps have gone with the Pacific Sun Kore which you can get a separate stirrer for - so there's an option for you if you need to do that.

I've heard of others who dose Reef Energy automatically without issue but I just haven't been that bothered to try it. I'm keen to see how you go if you do decide to go that route.

I just tossed out one of those small drinks-can size USB fridges. Perhaps I should have butchered that for a couple small Reef Energy bottles? Duh

I'm also experimenting currently with whether I need Coral Colors at all. I use Coral Pro salt and stopped dosing Coral Colors a while ago to deal with a GHA outbreak. My tests show that my trace elements are fine but I just sent a test to a Triton to see for sure. I'll post results on my thread. I think Coral Pro has enough but we'll see. It will certainly make things easier.

Important tip from me - I only keep one week supply of nopox (50ml for me) in the dosing container. At one stage I had a doser malfunction and dump 280ml of nopox into the tank. That was fun… Now I try to keep the container reserves to a minimum.

 

[Luke Schnabel]

Thanks for the input. I can't find any of your threads on this site BTW.

I'm going to try to figure it all out soon and implement it after my honeymoon in sept. I'll keep you guys posted.

 

[Damien Buckley]

Thanks for the input. I can't find any of your threads on this site BTW.

I'm going to try to figure it all out soon and implement it after my honeymoon in sept. I'll keep you guys posted.

Ah, sorry, it's on Ultimate Reef - Damien's Reefer 250

https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink?sh...eads/Damien's-Reefer-250.798696/&share_type=t

I use Tapatalk so it's all just listed in together from all different forums.

 

[Jongalt26]

I abandoned the red sea program some time ago, i didnt use nopox but did use coral colors, salt and the amino acids. It honestly caused me nothing but problems and i've been more successful after abandoning it.

To start with, i used RSCP salt. This salt has a very high alk and when combined with GFO and Kalkwasser can cause alk burns since the GFO and KW pull out phosphates to undetectable levels.
be sure to have phosphates in your tank when using a very high alk. If phosphates are below .03ppm then alk needs to remain below 9 dkh.

The next issue was nitrates in the newly mixed salt. I was getting about 2-3ppm of nitrates after mixing the salt up. This could have been an errant batch of salt. I used the nyos nitrate test kit.

Lastly, dosing the amino's caused me cyano outbreaks. Nothing major, just another headache to deal with. Per lots of research i highly recommend starting with a maximum of 1/4 of the recommended dose and ramp up slowly over many weeks to the recommended dose and dialing it back should you see anything negative.

I'm currently using Fritz salt since i use an automatic water change system, was using Salinity prior to Fritz (and AWC) and think that salt is great too.

I dose with a pac sun kore 5th.

 

[Greybeard]

I used the Red Sea 'Reef Mature' kit(s) to establish the bio filter on my new tank... worked better than I expected, really. I am quite happy with it.

I'm not using Red Sea beyond this, though I strongly considered it... it came in 2nd place, but I'm going with Triton, now that the system is up and running.

 

[SlvrZ]

i used to use almost the whole red sea system minus the colors part. i didnt really think it offset the cost of everything to maintain a mixed tank. i now just use the nopox but am slowly getting away from that as well. i now just feed a lot to the fishes and the water from thawing out the food i mist over the SPS so that they too eat. i use GFO and nopox right now but have my new ATS being seeded in the spare tank, once that's done i'll be completely off of the red sea stuff. salt and elements used to be Fritz and 2 part, but now i'm switching to triton.
the amino stuff, i just left in the fridge and shook once a day when i'd grab some milk or something, i manually dosed once a week. took all but 20 seconds from pouring to cleaning the little cups.

 

[Luke Schnabel]

I'm going to implement everything once I get back from my honeymoon. I might have found a super cheap magnetic stirrer to place in the fridge to automatically stir it 5-10 min before the dose.

I have yet to hear anything back from @Red Sea about the Reef Energy A and B going bad in the dosing lines once it leaves the fridge. I have a post on their page.

Does anyone use a dosing pump for Reef Energy A and B ???

 

[HolisticBear]

@GoVols has been running the Red Sea program for awhile with good success. You can check out his build thread.

The ABC+ power with trace C+D is a nice three product solution that provides the major three plus all trace elements (7 products separately Alk - Ca -Mg - ClrA - ClrB - ClrC - ClrD). Automated dosing is a challenge because it would require 7 dosing heads for full trace, where TM/AF would be 3, and Triton would be 4.

NoPox is carbon dosing and is separate.

Reef Energy is amino acids + sugar, needs to be refrigerated, so dosing is a challenge.

I suspect the majority of people overdose NoPox + Reef Energy at first. I'm currently using Reef Energy 2x a week, I think @GoVols has worked up to 15-20ml daily (but it took some time)

 

[Damien Buckley]

I dose 5ml each Reef Energy A/B daily in a 250l Reefer if that helps

 

[GoVols]

Does anyone use a dosing pump for Reef Energy A and B ???

Some people do dose it with pumps but in tiny bottles filled with RE in separate bottles. (one bottle per both parts)
They use tiny bottles so that both parts stay mixed.

If you read the labels of RE it says to mix well before use.

The challenge it not so much of keeping the dosing bottles cold, as much as is to keep the products mixed and not settled at the bottom.

RedSeaKev says: To leave your skimmer off for at least 30mins, after you dose.
If you don't, the RE will go straight up and into your skimmers collection cup.

Lol!!!
Thanks for this thread.
I dosed RE tonight and forgot to turn the skimmer back on.