Back at it again 40B

[Mystical_Knight]

 

[Mystical_Knight]

Converted my dual brs reactor into a co2 scrubber, been running 5 days so far. I decided to do this as my sps frags have all been maintaining nice coloration but haven’t really been growing. The chalices are growing fine but pretty sure I could fill it with compost from the backyard and they would grow lol. The birdsnest was the first sps I put in there and at first it had an explosion of growth and then stopped. Then I realized that the growth happened during a period of time when we tend to open windows In the house. Average ph has jumped from 7.8-8.1 to 8.19-8.29. Also surprised as the stuff hasn’t started turning purple yet which I am hoping means it will last a bit. Probably helps that I have the intake of the scrubber sticking out of the stand a little. My logic was if there is a higher co2 content in the ambient air of the house then it would likely be a little higher in the stand. Media is only in second chamber, keeping a bit of water in the bottom of the first as my understanding is ensuring it is receiving moist air will prolong the life of the media. Aside from that I went to living reef Orlando for the first time and picked up a red planet acro frag, a Superman monti, and some other pretty encrusting monti frag. I have got to be honest I don’t know the specific names of most coral, even the ones I like lol

 

[Mystical_Knight]

Picked up some new frags from WWC yesterday, Tubbs stelata, jfox rainbow monti, and some non named monti that I don’t think they are actively selling yet but it’s georgous, looks kinda like a setosa with bright white or blue polyps. I think they only had frags because the pincushion in the 500 has a bunch of pieces stuck to it lol. I had earned 50$ in rewards there so I bought a little more expensive frag than I normally would. My red planet is still doing well, it is starting to go neon green which I expected. In lower light they go green and higher red, hoping that with my placement top will be red and base will be green. Polyps are slowly starting to cover the base so I am hoping that once it encrusts it will start to shoot skyward. Other than that same disclaimer: I swear my tank is lot this blue I just haven’t gotten a filter yet lol

 

[Mystical_Knight]

So something I have noticed is that my one acro in the tank (red planet) hasn’t really grown much at all, and while I still have great polyp extension the color is a very pale pastel like green. To be fair the only corals really growing are the birdsnest and my Hollywood stunner, a few new heads on the zoas too. I have very minimal algae, nothing that the snails can’t keep up with and my no3 and po4 always test at or near zero. I was talking to josh from WWC the other day and his suggestion was to dose amino and feed more to try and get some more nutrients in the water. Since I almost exclusively buy my corals from them I figure I’ll go with what he says and see where I stand in a couple of weeks.

 

[Mystical_Knight]

Yeah, so I nuked everything in my tank except for the zoas and a pavona. Have no idea what is going on, only thing out of whack was 6 ppb arsenic was showing up on an icp test. I kind of obsessed over that for a couple weeks but Im thinking that isn’t the issue. Just left it alone for about a month(clear my head of frustration). Gonna start getting back to basics now. Pull all my chaeto and miracle mud. Honestly my constant need to tinker was kicking in with that stuff and I was having success prior to adding them. Gonna go with skimmer and rubble rock in the sump for now and see where I end up. Will likely run some phosban to remove arsenic (assuming it’s actually there) and see where I am at in a month or so

 

[Mystical_Knight]

Ok so I think I figured it out, and I’m not gonna lie, it was lazy stupidity. I haven’t callibrated my refractometer the entire time I have owned it............picked up a couple dollar bottle of calibration solution and realized my hyposaline water was about 10ppt too low........ wow what a stupid move. Anyway so I stopped adding thing, brought the salinity back up slowly via the Ato, and then basically allowed the tank to cycle again. Nutrients were never much of an issue but I figure let’s give it a few months anyway because why not right? Picked up a tester monti cap and birdsnest a couple of weeks ago and dropped them in. The monti started to bleach......... I swear I almost cried...... then my oldest daughter and I were talking about what in the world may be going on. We were looking at old pictures of other tanks I had set up and we found this

Honestly I know there aren’t any crazy fragile or hard to keep corals in there and maybe some people wouldnt call this a super successful tank and that’s fine. But to me it was successful and it had the kinds of corals I like to keep. They were all from frags too. So we started talking about the possible negative variables between that setup in NY and this setup here in Florida. What we came up with was four things; 1- source water: in NY we had municipal water with tds at about 100 out of the tap, here we have well water with about 60 out of the tap. Both were close to zero post RO a and all zero post DI. Don’t think that’s the issue. 2- PH: in NY we didn’t have any sort of forced air hvac system, and here we have central air and my ph is averaging between 7.9-8.1, maybe a little low for some people’s taste but honestly I buy all my corals in person at WWC and pretty sure those are their averages too so I doubt it. It’s a pointless comparison anyway since I literally never not once checked my ph in NY. And that leads to 3- in NY I basically ignored maintenance on the tank except for regular water changes, I literally never checked any parameter ever at all. The only thing I monitored was temp and that was only because of the RKL i had controlling my heater and fan. Down here I am constantly tinkering and trying to fix issues. Definitely something to that I think and at this point I am trying to make sure my hand goes in the tank twice a week or less. 4- equipment: specifically lighting. In NY we were constantly broke (don’t get me wrong we have 3 daughters so we are typically fairly broke anyway, but it was definitely worse up there lol), and my equipment definitely reflected that. Especially my lights, and that’s when we realized. Up there I was using some junky old no name non dimmable blue box led and that was it. Here I am using a reefbreeders photon v2 with Cree LEDs, and then I added two t5s to it and never adjusted the leds to compensate for the additional light that was now in the tank. So I read the entire coral labs write up on wwc and did my best to mimic their settings on my photon, and dialed down the intensity significantly. 3 days later the bleaching portions of the cap started coloring back up.........

So that is where I am at right now, picked up some pieces at RAP this weekend and a few more hardy sps pieces today. Acclimated them and introduced them and am going to closely monitor for a bit. Once I start seeing some growth I will start taking pics again. And if I see anything going downhill I will make small changes and be patient....... must...... be........ patient........ lol