Caleb's first reef tank

[Impunitus]

I'm not proud to say that I haven't really been testing my water and have just been eyeballing the tank health for a while. Baby has been down for a bit so tested Nitrate/Phos/Alk and got am honestly shocking result.

I expected Nitrate and Phosphate to be all out of wack primarily because of the hair algae, Alk I expected to be somewhat in line because of water changes and dosing AFR, on top of corals not looking absolutely freaked out.

Nitrate: 0.0 on the Hanna. I'm going to pull out a Salifert test and see if that was a fluke
Phosphate: 0.09 on the Hanna. Ran this twice and got the same result. Again going to pull out the Salifert and see, but I have been letting the auto feeder handle things to maybe me leaving the tank alone has been a good thing.
Alk: 10.7 on Salifert

Going to do a Calcium test to make sure that is in line, but expect it to be OK given history of testing my Alk being good has meant my Calcium is also ok.

All in, shocked to see undetectable nitrates, and phosphates as low as they are. Good surprise, but a surprise none the less. Maybe this is why my hair algae problem is finally subsiding, alongside the army of turbos and my manual removal once a week

 

[Impunitus]

Confirmed with Salifert that nitrates are basically undetectable. Calc is at 450.

@tbrown thoughts on bringing up nitrates without also making my phosphates go crazy? I figured adding an extra feeding cycle on the avast and increasing feeding by 5s is a good start. So a total of an extra 30s of the feeder running a day.

Also worth mentioning that I'll be getting my wrasse from Dr Reefs assuming all goes well. So extra bioload will help!

I just started doing 10ml of Red Sea AB+ daily given the higher amount of corals in the tank now. Some people say it's snake oil, others say it bring out color. We'll see how things are going after a bottle.

 

[Impunitus]

Also fleshing out my dashboard :) Looking better day by day.

I used Claude to write a simple webapp to record tank params since Hydros does not expose Static Value entries (IE my Phos, Nitrate, Alk, Salinity, and Calcium) over the API. If I was testing Alk and Salinity with the iV Pro then that would be exposed over the API, but as it stands I'm not. Will likely just continue to use this even if Hydros makes this change in the future.

 

[tbrown]

I run my Plank for a minute but I have it loaded with flake, Reef Jerky, and pellets. I forget but I think I also have some coral feed in there as well.

For nitrates I dose Ammonium bicarbonate and for Phosphates I dose Trisodium phosphate.

 

[tbrown]

I also have 3 additional auto feeders on the tank. The two on the DT feed twice per day each - one with flake, one with pellets. The one in the sump feeds once.

 

[Impunitus]

I run my Plank for a minute but I have it loaded with flake, Reef Jerky, and pellets. I forget but I think I also have some coral feed in there as well.

For nitrates I dose Ammonium bicarbonate and for Phosphates I dose Trisodium phosphate.

You run the plank for a minute at a time or for a minute total? I only have reef jerky in mine but sometimes manually drop in some LRS as well as spot feeding corals with sinking coral pellets. Also drop in algae wafers periodically for CUC.

 

[tbrown]

I run the Plank once daily for 1 minute. The circulation pump runs continuously though.

I feed the tank a total of 5 times daily in the display and once or twice daily in the sump (I can't really remember how that one's set).

 

[Impunitus]

Tried grabbing some pictures for the photo contest. Didn't get any of the crab facing the camera like I would prefer, but did like the result of this one. Have more time to get him facing the direction I want still.