ChukeeR's 266G Reef Savvy + Synergy Reef Build / Upgrade

[CoralManz]

It's coming along nicely and man Im totally digging your aquascape! Btw are you still using the SPS AB+ program?

 

[HiddenUser]

It's coming along nicely and man Im totally digging your aquascape! Btw are you still using the SPS AB+ program?

Thank you! Yep still running the SPS AB+ program with a 9.5hr photo period. I think I have the intensity set to 70%? Seems to be working for me so I've been hesitant to do any additional tinkering.

 

[HiddenUser]

Posted this in another thread...Just how the 'fish room' looks now...pretty much the same as a few months ago...

Still considering getting a second RD3 Speedy 230...I think I'm getting about 2-3x turnover an hour with just the return alone.

 

[revhtree]

Looking good!

 

[HiddenUser]

I am not good at keeping this thing updated...

After switching from NO3O4-X to a bioellet reactor (w/ EcoBak pellets) and letting the reactor do its thing for about 5 months my tank pretty much took a digger face first. For whatever reason I could never get my nitrates below 5-10 using the biopellet reactor. I was even dosing MicroBacter7 for the first two months in attempts to seed the bacteria. I would test Phosphates with my Hanna ULR Phosphorus Checker and it would always come back as 0, probably because the GHA had already absorbed it. Obviously I had some excess nutrients in my tank based on the amount of GHA I had.

In the last 6 months all of my SPS frags (which were all encrusting and growing nicely) have pretty much died with the exception of a few Montis. My tank has been overrun with GHA, literally it's EVERYWHERE! To make it more entertaining, I had a Melanarus Wrasse who developed a taste for hermit crabs, shrimp, and snails...He pretty much single-handedly obliterated my entire CUC.

I made a water bottle fish trap and got the Melanarus Wrasse out. Caught him within the first 20 minutes!! I took the biopellet reactor offline and switched back to NO3O4-X. At this point the nitrates seem to be undetectable with my Salifert test, but there's still GHA all over my rocks. I replenished my CUC and I've also been scraping, brushing, pulling out GHA, etc. I also actually ditched my two Vortech MP60QD pumps and replaced them with Maxspect XF280 Gyre pumps. I hate having cords in my tank, but these things are amazing regarding how much water they move!

The good news is that I can pretty much go almost two weeks without having to clean my glass, the GHA doesn't seem to be growing, or it's at least not growing nearly as fast as it was, and I'm going to have some really well fed turbo snails. I wish the tangs would do a better job at cleaning off the rocks, but they seem to prefer to only eat the nori sheets.

I'd take a picture to share the the devastation, but it's pretty embarrassing to see how nicely things were coming along and compare it to how it looks now. Hopefully I can get it revitalized this summer so that I can start adding frags again this fall. Summer is a bit of a tough time to take care of the tank regardless of all the automation in place as we're traveling nearly every weekend to do DockDogs competitions with our pups, so I imagine this is going to be an even slower process to get this thing looking decent again.

 

[Ortho281]

I am not good at keeping this thing updated...

After switching from NO3O4-X to a bioellet reactor (w/ EcoBak pellets) and letting the reactor do its thing for about 5 months my tank pretty much took a digger face first. For whatever reason I could never get my nitrates below 5-10 using the biopellet reactor. I was even dosing MicroBacter7 for the first two months in attempts to seed the bacteria. I would test Phosphates with my Hanna ULR Phosphorus Checker and it would always come back as 0, probably because the GHA had already absorbed it. Obviously I had some excess nutrients in my tank based on the amount of GHA I had.

In the last 6 months all of my SPS frags (which were all encrusting and growing nicely) have pretty much died with the exception of a few Montis. My tank has been overrun with GHA, literally it's EVERYWHERE! To make it more entertaining, I had a Melanarus Wrasse who developed a taste for hermit crabs, shrimp, and snails...He pretty much single-handedly obliterated my entire CUC.

I made a water bottle fish trap and got the Melanarus Wrasse out. Caught him within the first 20 minutes!! I took the biopellet reactor offline and switched back to NO3O4-X. At this point the nitrates seem to be undetectable with my Salifert test, but there's still GHA all over my rocks. I replenished my CUC and I've also been scraping, brushing, pulling out GHA, etc. I also actually ditched my two Vortech MP60QD pumps and replaced them with Maxspect XF280 Gyre pumps. I hate having cords in my tank, but these things are amazing regarding how much water they move!

The good news is that I can pretty much go almost two weeks without having to clean my glass, the GHA doesn't seem to be growing, or it's at least not growing nearly as fast as it was, and I'm going to have some really well fed turbo snails. I wish the tangs would do a better job at cleaning off the rocks, but they seem to prefer to only eat the nori sheets.

I'd take a picture to share the the devastation, but it's pretty embarrassing to see how nicely things were coming along and compare it to how it looks now. Hopefully I can get it revitalized this summer so that I can start adding frags again this fall. Summer is a bit of a tough time to take care of the tank regardless of all the automation in place as we're traveling nearly every weekend to do DockDogs competitions with our pups, so I imagine this is going to be an even slower process to get this thing looking decent again.

Sorry to hear this! Not sure why your Biopellets never took off? I have had one on my home DT for 3 years and it has kept my nitrate near zero without doing any water changes. Could it be that you had too much flow going thru your reactor not allowing the bacteria to take seed? Just a thought, I'm by no means an expert. Good Luck! Hope everything turns around for you. I really like your system!

 

[HiddenUser]

Sorry to hear this! Not sure why your Biopellets never took off? I have had one on my home DT for 3 years and it has kept my nitrate near zero without doing any water changes. Could it be that you had too much flow going thru your reactor not allowing the bacteria to take seed? Just a thought, I'm by no means an expert. Good Luck! Hope everything turns around for you. I really like your system!

I had wondered about the flow through the reactor as well and I did quite a bit of adjsuting so that I would have a decent tumble, but it wasn't blasting the pellets everywhere...I would get a really good bacterial mulm on the screen at the top of the reactor, it just never seemed to do what I wanted in terms of nitratre and phosphate consumption.

I'm just wondering if it was a result of implementing it into my system when my Nitrates and Phosphates were very low to begin with, therefore the bacteria didn't have sufficient food to get established and multiply.

Either way, the NO3O4-X is working for me...now it's just a slow process of letting the CUC do its job.

 

[Ortho281]

I had wondered about the flow through the reactor as well and I did quite a bit of adjsuting so that I would have a decent tumble, but it wasn't blasting the pellets everywhere...I would get a really good bacterial mulm on the screen at the top of the reactor, it just never seemed to do what I wanted in terms of nitratre and phosphate consumption.

I'm just wondering if it was a result of implementing it into my system when my Nitrates and Phosphates were very low to begin with, therefore the bacteria didn't have sufficient food to get established and multiply.

Either way, the NO3O4-X is working for me...now it's just a slow process of letting the CUC do its job.

That could very well be the issue, but if your nitrates was reading btw 5-10 ppm, I would think it would eventually take off? I would stick with what ever works which it sounds like the NO3O4-X is.

 

[HiddenUser]

That could very well be the issue, but if your nitrates was reading btw 5-10 ppm, I would think it would eventually take off? I would stick with what ever works which it sounds like the NO3O4-X is.

Possibly...I just felt like 6 months was enough...I think I read a forum post somewhere that said it took another guy 8-12 months before he saw his reactor do anything beneficial??? Didn't feel like have a 270G refugium, haha.

 

[HiddenUser]

Nerding out a little here, but check out the pH swing difference here...I have a 65G tank plumbed into my sump which is basically the exiled fish tank. I had decided this week to run the lights on that tank opposite of my display and whoa the difference it makes for pH is pretty crazy...

 

[pmoneyt]

nice tank

 

[HiddenUser]

So I am pretty embarrassed to post these, but this is the aftermath of switching from dosing NO3O4-X to using biopellets for 6 months...Pics arent the greats because they're from my phone, but you can see plenty of the GHA...

This is probably 100 times better than what it a month ago as well...stuff seems to be recovering and some of my coral that was buried under GHA actually seems to have survived and is recovering...still a disaster though.

 

[Ortho281]

So I am pretty embarrassed to post these, but this is the aftermath of switching from dosing NO3O4-X to using biopellets for 6 months...Pics arent the greats because they're from my phone, but you can see plenty of the GHA...

This is probably 100 times better than what it a month ago as well...stuff seems to be recovering and some of my coral that was buried under GHA actually seems to have survived and is recovering...still a disaster though.

No need to be embarrassed! If you are in the hobby long enough you will have to deal with GHA for one reason or another. My home 65 gallon was dealing with a little GHA due to a breaker tripping for 7 hrs during the night causing me to loose 5 fish (4 of which I could not find to take out). I cut back my feeding and start doing more WC and now things are back to normal. I had a EcoTech back up battery which also failed and has since been replaced.

 

[Black Pearl]

About a month or so ago, I started seeing GHA and bryopsis in my tank and hit the panic button. I was already dosing Vibrant, which was helping clear the water but no affect on the Algae.Then I ran across this thread advocating the use of Fluconazole, ordered some capsules and dosed recommended and in four days started to see the effects. Totally eliminated the GHA and Bryopsis. It may have done such a good job because I caught it early at the first sign of it growing although it was pretty heavy around my pumps which I manually cleaned with Hydrogen peroxide

 

[nitro]

Beautiful dog

 

[HiddenUser]

About a month or so ago, I started seeing GHA and bryopsis in my tank and hit the panic button. I was already dosing Vibrant, which was helping clear the water but no affect on the Algae.Then I ran across this thread advocating the use of Fluconazole, ordered some capsules and dosed recommended and in four days started to see the effects. Totally eliminated the GHA and Bryopsis. It may have done such a good job because I caught it early at the first sign of it growing although it was pretty heavy around my pumps which I manually cleaned with Hydrogen peroxide

I actually on day 6 of my Fluconazole treatment. I dosed 20mg/gallon and that stuff is amazing! Bryopsis in my 65G tank next my sump has turned white and I've actually dislodged a lot of it with a turkey baster. I'm noticing that a lot of the GHA doesn't seem to be so firmly attached either. I think it has to be working somewhat as I finally have some detectable phosphates in my water again...For the longest time my Hanna ULR was reading 0...but now I'm at .079. Might also be partly due to just letting my skimmate overflow back into the sump since I took the cup off for my fluconazole dosing.

Beautiful dog

Thank you!

 

[Black Pearl]

Yes I had a po4 spike also, some put GFO back online, I dosed Phosphate Rx @0.08,.Three weeks post treatment so far so good

 

[HiddenUser]

Yes I had a po4 spike also, some put GFO back online, I dosed Phosphate Rx @0.08,.Three weeks post treatment so far so good

Haha! I just ordered some Phosphate RX! I'm on a mission to be rid of all this algae!

 

[HiddenUser]

Quick little update...We're on the upswing again and we've managed to finally get rid of the algae...It took 3 separate rock scrubbing sessions, 4 20% water changes done on a weekly schedule, and the addition of about 50 blue legged hermits. During this period we also quit dosing NOPOX and 2-Part, stopped running carbon, and we let the water parameters get evened out through the water changes. Two months later the algae is gone and the frags that didn't die have made comebacks and are growing again...

Added one of the new Reef Octopus BIO-React 150 biopellet reactors and have been running that for a little over a month now instead of using NOPOX again, and thus far no issues. Previously when I tried to switch from NOPOX to biopellets it was a nightmare and the effects of it were noticed within a few weeks. I am hoping that we won't run into that again. Right now I love the fact that the biofilm isnt clogging up my pumps and I'm not seeing such a huge drop in pH like I did when I was dosing NOPOX.

Also picked up a Hawaiian Golden Dwarf Moray a few months ago. I've wanted one for a long time and our LFS had two of them. Fun to watch and doesn't pick on any of the fish, but he did clear me out of Peppermint Shrimp.

 

[monkiboy]

awesome update - thanks for posting up. been following along waiting and glad to see progress - good work!