CCOMBS FIRST REEF!

[ccombs]

Well... I did something dumb...

I have been treating my cardinal for well over a month now and have done everything from freshwater dips, ruby reef rally, therapeutic copper, metro, furan-2, kanaplex and have not been able to cure this guy. When I first got my QT set up, I knew that carbon was bad and I needed to remove all filters. I checked the HOB filter and found it was just a filter floss sort of thing, so I left that to hopefully give my bacteria a place to thrive. Today at the frag swap in Nashville, @Eagle_Steve was kind enough to offer to double check my copper level with his hanna checker, I have just been using the salifert test. Before I met up with him I took another copper measurement and found my copper to be .75 with cupramine. When a sample was put in the Hanna, however, it came back as no copper in the water. This was quite puzzling. Eagle_Steve was kind enough to discuss possibilities with me at length, and he finally pointed out something I did not realize. The filter floss type filter has carbon in the middle of it, when I checked it out before QT I 100% missed that, I apparently didn't feel the copper between the layers. The theory is that the carbon has been absorbing all of my copper. This still does not answer why the salifert test reads the amount that I expect, though. All that to say, I removed the carbon and I am resetting my QT clock. It makes me sad to know that I may have lost my other fish in QT because I missed this detail. It is frustrating to know that I should not have carbon in there, but miss that it was actually integrated into the filter.....

On a brighter note, the fragswap was fantastic!

Eagle_Steve was kind enough to donate some Chaeto to the cause (a pretty big amount) that is crawling with pods. He also helped me big time with his Hanna checker.

@dantimdad was amazing to meet in person! He gave me a frag of his frogspawn straight from his own tank to help out with the rebuild. I certainly plan to return the favor when it comes time to get his store going! His son also got the raffle ticket right before my wife and I, and won a prize in the drawing. Congrats!

Here are some pictures of the new additions.

Great Frogspawn Frag courtesy of dantimdad. He gave me a generous piece with 2 heads, a frag is an understatement. It is still opening up in the picture and has amazing color!

Unknown Zoas, if anyone can identify I would appreciate it.

Bad picture, but these are CB rockstar zoas. I got 5 heads for a grand total of $30, I am pretty happy with that.

Finally you will see that my rock is now getting color at lighting speed, I guess I am doing things better this time around!

 

[Hemmdog]

Well... I did something dumb...

I have been treating my cardinal for well over a month now and have done everything from freshwater dips, ruby reef rally, therapeutic copper, metro, furan-2, kanaplex and have not been able to cure this guy. When I first got my QT set up, I knew that carbon was bad and I needed to remove all filters. I checked the HOB filter and found it was just a filter floss sort of thing, so I left that to hopefully give my bacteria a place to thrive. Today at the frag swap in Nashville, @Eagle_Steve was kind enough to offer to double check my copper level with his hanna checker, I have just been using the salifert test. Before I met up with him I took another copper measurement and found my copper to be .75 with cupramine. When a sample was put in the Hanna, however, it came back as no copper in the water. This was quite puzzling. Eagle_Steve was kind enough to discuss possibilities with me at length, and he finally pointed out something I did not realize. The filter floss type filter has carbon in the middle of it, when I checked it out before QT I 100% missed that, I apparently didn't feel the copper between the layers. The theory is that the carbon has been absorbing all of my copper. This still does not answer why the salifert test reads the amount that I expect, though. All that to say, I removed the carbon and I am resetting my QT clock. It makes me sad to know that I may have lost my other fish in QT because I missed this detail. It is frustrating to know that I should not have carbon in there, but miss that it was actually integrated into the filter.....

On a brighter note, the fragswap was fantastic!

Eagle_Steve was kind enough to donate some Chaeto to the cause (a pretty big amount) that is crawling with pods. He also helped me big time with his Hanna checker.

@dantimdad was amazing to meet in person! He gave me a frag of his frogspawn straight from his own tank to help out with the rebuild. I certainly plan to return the favor when it comes time to get his store going! His son also got the raffle ticket right before my wife and I, and won a prize in the drawing. Congrats!

Here are some pictures of the new additions.

Great Frogspawn Frag courtesy of dantimdad. He gave me a generous piece with 2 heads, a frag is an understatement. It is still opening up in the picture and has amazing color!

Unknown Zoas, if anyone can identify I would appreciate it.

Bad picture, but these are CB rockstar zoas. I got 5 heads for a grand total of $30, I am pretty happy with that.

Finally you will see that my rock is now getting color at lighting speed, I guess I am doing things better this time around!

Looks great!

 

[Eagle_Steve]

Well... I did something dumb...

I have been treating my cardinal for well over a month now and have done everything from freshwater dips, ruby reef rally, therapeutic copper, metro, furan-2, kanaplex and have not been able to cure this guy. When I first got my QT set up, I knew that carbon was bad and I needed to remove all filters. I checked the HOB filter and found it was just a filter floss sort of thing, so I left that to hopefully give my bacteria a place to thrive. Today at the frag swap in Nashville, @Eagle_Steve was kind enough to offer to double check my copper level with his hanna checker, I have just been using the salifert test. Before I met up with him I took another copper measurement and found my copper to be .75 with cupramine. When a sample was put in the Hanna, however, it came back as no copper in the water. This was quite puzzling. Eagle_Steve was kind enough to discuss possibilities with me at length, and he finally pointed out something I did not realize. The filter floss type filter has carbon in the middle of it, when I checked it out before QT I 100% missed that, I apparently didn't feel the copper between the layers. The theory is that the carbon has been absorbing all of my copper. This still does not answer why the salifert test reads the amount that I expect, though. All that to say, I removed the carbon and I am resetting my QT clock. It makes me sad to know that I may have lost my other fish in QT because I missed this detail. It is frustrating to know that I should not have carbon in there, but miss that it was actually integrated into the filter.....

On a brighter note, the fragswap was fantastic!

Eagle_Steve was kind enough to donate some Chaeto to the cause (a pretty big amount) that is crawling with pods. He also helped me big time with his Hanna checker.

@dantimdad was amazing to meet in person! He gave me a frag of his frogspawn straight from his own tank to help out with the rebuild. I certainly plan to return the favor when it comes time to get his store going! His son also got the raffle ticket right before my wife and I, and won a prize in the drawing. Congrats!

Here are some pictures of the new additions.

Great Frogspawn Frag courtesy of dantimdad. He gave me a generous piece with 2 heads, a frag is an understatement. It is still opening up in the picture and has amazing color!

Unknown Zoas, if anyone can identify I would appreciate it.

Bad picture, but these are CB rockstar zoas. I got 5 heads for a grand total of $30, I am pretty happy with that.

Finally you will see that my rock is now getting color at lighting speed, I guess I am doing things better this time around!

Looking good. As mentioned before, you are not that far from me and if we need to test with the Hanna again, let me know. Also, since it kinda baffled me on the salifert test and the copper, I got a kit on the way home to play with and test my current QT with. My Seachem kit and Red Sea kit show it at .6, the salifert kit at what looks like 1 and the Hanna shows .65. The .6 area is hitting on 3 kits (where I aim for with cupramime). Salifert is a little hard to read for me, so I tested fresh made water with plain ole IO and tested. 0 on my normal 2 kits and 0 on all kits and the Hanna. Added 2 drops of cupramime to the gallon I pulled from the mixing station. Mixed well, let sit with a small pump circulating it for about 5 minutes and tested again. Based on the directions of 20 drops per 10.5 gallons, that should have put copper in the .2 range. Which it on Red Sea, seachem amd Hanna (.27). The salifert kit showed in the .5 range or higher, again hard for me to read. I plan to mess with the kits some more later today and will let ya know what I find out. I have a small HOB filter on the tub with the water and have a normal filter with carbon in it. So I am curious to see what all the kits read after a few hours of the water running through the carbon and floss pad.

Might have to ask Randy about what carbon pulls out and what triggers the color changes in each kit. That may explain it. I am not a chemist, so who knows lol. But I am intrigued by this lol.

 

[dantimdad]

It was great meeting you!

I didn't see any zoas that cheap. Dang it!

 

[ccombs]

It was great meeting you!

I didn't see any zoas that cheap. Dang it!

Dang! Sorry, I didn't even know how good of a deal I was getting I guess.

It is funny, I am trying to get my wife more involved. She loves the tank, but is kind of indifferent about what goes in it and what types of coral she likes. I finally got her to pick out a coral that she found really cool.... it was a $300 zoa frag that had like 3 heads....

It was funny, when they guy at the booth told us the price I smiled because I knew what was coming, she looks at me, says 'nope' and walks to the next booth hahaha.

 

[ccombs]

WARNING: Shameless Self Promotion Ahead!

This rebuild has made me look back at all of the mistakes I have made. If you have been following along, you know I have made plenty. One thing that has been important to me is to be open about my mistakes so other hobbyists can avoid what I went through. I am still very new, but have learned a lot in a short amount of time, and I really wanted to summarize my learnings to hopefully help others. On this forum, sometimes it might be easy to hide mistakes to save face. This forum has been judgement free and everyone is here to help. I encourage others to be open about what they have done wrong for the advancement of the hobby.

@Seawitch was kind enough to let a newbie like me write an article. She helped me edit it and made me seem much more intelligent as a writer than I actually am. If you are a new reefer reading this, or an old reefer wanting a summary to pass along to someone in the hobby, check out the link to the article below to see what I have learned in the past 9 months or so.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/a-letter-to-my-younger-self.584168/

 

[Seawitch]

@ccombs your article was really valuable because you said out loud what many people think but don't dare say. And you write well. I just polished it a little. That's my job. But thanks.

 

[rkpetersen]

The filter floss type filter has carbon in the middle of it, when I checked it out before QT I 100% missed that, I apparently didn't feel the copper between the layers. The theory is that the carbon has been absorbing all of my copper.

I'm not sure what's causing the discrepancy in your readings between different copper tests.
However the question of whether GAC adsorbs copper has been looked at before, and the consensus seems to be, very little.
Carbon will take up a lot of medications, which are typically large organic molecules.
But it may not actually account for why your copper has vanished.

 

[ccombs]

I'm not sure what's causing the discrepancy in your readings between different copper tests.
However the question of whether GAC adsorbs copper has been looked at before, and the consensus seems to be, very little.
Carbon will take up a lot of medications, which are typically large organic molecules.
But it may not actually account for why your copper has vanished.

Hmmm, well then that makes this more interesting. The thing that does not make sense to me (as you also stated) is that if the carbon absorbed the copper, both tests should read the same. I asked Randy in the chemistry thread if he had any thoughts.

This one is above my pay grade for sure. I am thinking about doing some isolated tests with the salifert and buying my own hanna.

Eagle_Steve did some tests like this yesterday and there were discrepancies, but nothing like this. My test is within expiration, maybe I need to get an additional salifert to compare.

 

[CeeGee]

I may be wrong but I always thought that if using cupramine which is a seachem product they had a test kit that measured it that you had to use. Cupramine isn’t like normal copper from what I understand.

Not sure where you are getting your fish but I have a lot to say about the quality of livestock (and advice) in our area. Will not share it here.

 

[ccombs]

I may be wrong but I always thought that if using cupramine which is a seachem product they had a test kit that measured it that you had to use. Cupramine isn’t like normal copper from what I understand.

Not sure where you are getting your fish but I have a lot to say about the quality of livestock (and advice) in our area. Will not share it here.

Yeah, I have not been too thrilled with some experiences I have had.

Cupramine is an ionic copper and most others are chelated. I am not sure which test kits are accurate for which anymore.

 

[CeeGee]

I haven’t used the seachem stuff but from what I always understood you had to use their kit.

 

[rkpetersen]

I am not sure which test kits are accurate for which anymore.

I wouldn't use anything but the Hanna HR Copper Checker. Demonstrated to be accurate with both ionic and chelated copper.

 

[ccombs]

Tank is coloring up really well. I need one of those orange photo filters that was recommended.

I don't know why I am so bad at taking pictures haha.

Tomorrow I will try and snap some pictures when everything is open. My GSP got assaulted with sand again and closed lol.

The film algae on my glass has been a ton to manage. I am having to scrape it every day so it does not turn green. Sand is kept fairly clean with goby and CUC.

In other news, I turned on my AWC system and it only seems to be adding water, not pulling it out. Tomorrow I will need to start some troubleshooting and confirm it is correctly hooked up. I believe it is, but I guess it is worth checking again before I open a ticket with Neptune.

Also, if you are in the Hitchhiker and Critter ID mood, check out this mysterious thing I found in my tank.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/my-wife-thinks-it-is-a-popcorn-kernel.585385/#post-5950249

 

[Hallowhead]

Do you have a hardware list ?

I'm curious on your filter system - did you keep any filter socks or all media baskets ?

 

[ccombs]

Do you have a hardware list ?

I'm curious on your filter system - did you keep any filter socks or all media baskets ?

(2) Kessil 160we Tuna Blue w/ Mounting Arms
IM Aqua Gadgets UV
(2) Cobalt Neotherm 100W Heaters
(2) Mid Size Mighty Jet Return Pump
IM Aqua Gadgets Media Caddy (Only Running Filter Floss)
In Tank Media Refugium Basket
IM Desktop LED Chaeto Light
Tunze 9001 Skimmer
Neptune ATK with 35 Fresh Gallon Reservoir
Neptune DOS for Water Changes with 35 Gallon Salt Reservoir
Various Neptune Sensors for ATO and Low Reservoir Warnings
APC 1500VA Battery Backup (Neptune Power Monitoring in Use)
Netgear Powerlink Modules to Establish Wired Connection

I threw away the filter socks because they were not as effective as I would like.

Left side is the UV filter and it has a filter floss type pad before the UV. Right side I have the media basket with filter floss, now followed by carbon.

 

[ccombs]

First things first... meet Bandit. He is 6 weeks old and is an Australian Shepard Mix. We got him today because Buddy needs a playmate since we are gone a lot during the day. Hopefully in about a year or so we can trust him left out with Buddy. Right now I am laying in bed and Buddy is curled up between my legs and Bandit is to the left of me having some sort of pup dream...he is running in his sleep lol.

Next, check out what is going on in the tank! Rock is coloring up. I dropped some carbon in yesterday and the water is getting closer to the clarity I am looking for. One of the zoas from the frag swap has grown about 3x. The other one had gotten larger, but no new polyps yet. The frag from @dantimdad has opened up and looks great! This is about where it normally is, sometimes it extends more and it always retracts at night.

Once again I SWEAR my tank is not as blue as the pictures make it seem!

Oh! Also! Shout out to @Eagle_Steve ... my glass is crawling with pods and my goby has put on some weight, he picks at the rocks all day long! I don't understand how they get them off the rocks. I can see them on the glass, but I cannot spot a single one on the rocks. He now spends a lot of time picking at them, though.

 

[Rick.45cal]

It’s great to see that everything headed in the right direction!

 

[Mike.P]

First things first... meet Bandit. He is 6 weeks old and is an Australian Shepard Mix. We got him today because Buddy needs a playmate since we are gone a lot during the day. Hopefully in about a year or so we can trust him left out with Buddy. Right now I am laying in bed and Buddy is curled up between my legs and Bandit is to the left of me having some sort of pup dream...he is running in his sleep lol.

Next, check out what is going on in the tank! Rock is coloring up. I dropped some carbon in yesterday and the water is getting closer to the clarity I am looking for. One of the zoas from the frag swap has grown about 3x. The other one had gotten larger, but no new polyps yet. The frag from @dantimdad has opened up and looks great! This is about where it normally is, sometimes it extends more and it always retracts at night.

Once again I SWEAR my tank is not as blue as the pictures make it seem!

Oh! Also! Shout out to @Eagle_Steve ... my glass is crawling with pods and my goby has put on some weight, he picks at the rocks all day long! I don't understand how they get them off the rocks. I can see them on the glass, but I cannot spot a single one on the rocks. He now spends a lot of time picking at them, though.

That frogspawn is beeeeeeautiful!!! They're one of my favorite corals, and that one looks extra special.

 

[dantimdad]

First things first... meet Bandit. He is 6 weeks old and is an Australian Shepard Mix. We got him today because Buddy needs a playmate since we are gone a lot during the day. Hopefully in about a year or so we can trust him left out with Buddy. Right now I am laying in bed and Buddy is curled up between my legs and Bandit is to the left of me having some sort of pup dream...he is running in his sleep lol.

Next, check out what is going on in the tank! Rock is coloring up. I dropped some carbon in yesterday and the water is getting closer to the clarity I am looking for. One of the zoas from the frag swap has grown about 3x. The other one had gotten larger, but no new polyps yet. The frag from @dantimdad has opened up and looks great! This is about where it normally is, sometimes it extends more and it always retracts at night.

Once again I SWEAR my tank is not as blue as the pictures make it seem!

Oh! Also! Shout out to @Eagle_Steve ... my glass is crawling with pods and my goby has put on some weight, he picks at the rocks all day long! I don't understand how they get them off the rocks. I can see them on the glass, but I cannot spot a single one on the rocks. He now spends a lot of time picking at them, though.

Looking good!

Things are headed right now.