DesktopReefer’s (formerly bank3r) 2 Gallon Pico Jar

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Good news/bad news. I went real fancy and made a 35 PPM homemade solution (36.5g salt and 963.5 distilled water) for calibrating my refractometer. Good news, it was almost spot on as the distilled water calibration at 0. Good news also, it seems we are now sitting right about 1.025-1.026 which is my goal. Bad news, this means I can't blame the zoas lack of opening and the less than ideal polyp extension on the salinity. We'll keep trucking on.

My plan is to skip the Nitrate and Phosphate tests today but still dose my AB+. I'll pick back up testing tomorrow. I'm less concerned with daily testing right now because it seems everything is staying around 0 for Nitrate and Phosphate on only AB+.
 
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Slight change of plans... I've been dosing Reef Energy AB+ for 5 days straight (0.3mL for my volume) and have yet to see any change to nitrates and phosphates. I highly doubt a couple more days of just AB+ will drastically affect the Nitrate and Phosphate.

My Acros are not showing great polyp extension (PE) and some of my gonis are not extending as much as they were when they were added. They all still have great color and of course it's too early to see noticeable growth (week and a half). Since they came from a known high nutrient system, my lack of nutrients is my only guess for what may be affecting the corals. The only other guess I have was that the Acros are still recovering from the nipping of the YCG that is now gone. My only reason for making that a lower likelihood is that the gonis have also been looking more sad (less extension).

I came to this assumption based on a few factors, and ya'll are free to disagree with me:
  • I just did a 90% water change less than a week ago so I have a really hard time believing any of the elements (Ca, Mg, Alk, etc.) are much lower than brand new salt
  • I watch my temp all day long (yay desktop tank). It's been pegged between 78.4 and 79.4 with most common between 78.8 and 79.2 (pretty darn stable)
  • After all of the back and forth, I'm fairly certain my SG has been between 1.025 and 1.026 for the last couple weeks
  • Lighting hasn't changed since the corals were added
So I'm therefore going to move on to another portion of this testing. I just added a pinch of Reef Roids and target fed all of the corals. I kept the pumps off for 20 minutes until the mushrooms were able to pull in all of their food. I will now test Nitrate and Phosphate 24 hours after adding that much. We'll see where I go from there but I'll keep this updated.
 
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Great news... I'm seeing a little better polyp extension on the Acros today already and it hasn't even been 24 hours since feeding. Mushrooms look excellent and the montis haven't changed a bit (they've been rock solid the whole time). Gonis are still looking about the same. One set is not extended, but you can see all the polyps, one set is almost completely closed up (mostly just see skeleton), and 3 are looking decent.

I'm excited to see what phosphate and nitrate looks like today 24 hours after feeding a pinch of reef roids. I've always heard this stuff is saturated with phosphates and raises levels in the tank quickly, but I'd like to see how it does in this jar.
 
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Well I don’t know how quickly nitrates and phosphates are supposed to show up after reef roids, but I’m still measuring at or close to 0 for both. Definitely nowhere near 0.1 phosphate.

67DF510D-13EF-41E2-904E-8C6A0ACBA11F.jpeg D7364179-01D0-4EC3-96B6-2A2A5DECE5CB.jpeg
 
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Ok. Update time.

I continued doing AB+ the rest of the week last week and dosed another 2 days of Reef Roids. Anyone want to guess the result? Hint, it’s the exact same as last update. Yes folks, I was still testing 0 nitrates and 0 phosphates after a full week of AB+ and 3 days in a row of Reef Roids.

The corals were still looking a little “blah” so I decided to take a page out of SBB’s book and bought a $5 bottle of NeoNitro. After a couple days of dosing roughly what would drive 2ppm per day increase, I’m finally at what I would estimate to be 2-3 ppm. YAY! And you know what, the milli is already looking fluffier.

So what’s next? As you can see from prior posts, I kind of change up my plans based on how the tank looks. I still have yet to get any nuisance algae (knock on wood) and I’m finally on the road to bringing up my nitrates. I think I’m going to stick with reef roids for a source of coral food and phosphates and NeoNitro to raise nitrates. I’ll probably target between 5 and 10 nitrates and something under 0.1 for phosphates. We’ll see how that works out and go from there.

Thanks for those that are still following along!
 

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Great little jar you have there! How do you have your light mounted? I've checked out those bulbs before.
 
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Great little jar you have there! How do you have your light mounted? I've checked out those bulbs before.
Thank you for tagging along!

Great question! In doing research it seemed like these bulbs were built to not have a housing around them so they could properly get rid of heat.

This is the exact one I ended up getting: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Globe-E...t-Metal-Clamp-Black-Desk-Lamp-56963/205139331

The 4 nice things about it: (1) it’s nice and cheap, (2) it clamps securely to the side of my desk, (3) it’s a decent height (I have the bottom of the bulb about 12 inches from the water), (4) most importantly, the hood for the bulb is easily removed.

I’ll have to get a picture of the full setup soon. A little “behind the scenes” look.
 

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Cool. I have been thinking of doing a pico jar as well sometime in the future, but lighting was my hang up. I have looked at these bulbs before but it's nice to see it in action.
 
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Corals were looking nice and happy today so I decided to do an impromptu photo shoot. The colors always look way better in these top down shots so that is the perspective.

MattV “Red Dana”
17F16CAA-56FF-4A53-A37B-36FC47223E39.jpeg


SBB “Sparkler Monti”

DE1472E0-463C-4672-BC9A-A31A1EEDFD73.jpeg


SBB “Jungle Juice”
4B1FBD6D-F634-489C-B0E8-135128C275C0.jpeg


SBB “Carnation” Goni
C96B9FAC-0109-4946-BA42-34F32F5923B3.jpeg


SBB “Keropi” goni
ED878DEF-6800-492C-9D52-92E53A085EA7.jpeg


SBB “Eternals” mushroom

8E92B25D-B8BD-41F3-812A-2294BB0E5730.jpeg


No name Yuma from SBB
BED4DB3C-2BD2-40D9-AD38-A549749CBE02.jpeg


SBB “Malibu Rising” mushroom

90BBF9DB-5F23-4161-8690-A2EF734D5C9F.jpeg
 
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After 4 days of dosing NeoNitro I think I’m up to right about 5 ppm. Need to do some phosphate testing, but I’m assuming it’s around 0 right now.

Oh, I also found a new fun way of comparing the color on these tests. I’m usually terrible at seeing the color differences. I threw the first pic here into google photos. I cropped a small square of the middle of the vial, saved as a new photo, and then cropped and saved a cutout of the card. I then made a “collage” which is the photo on the bottom. That’s a lot easier for me to judge.

D1807263-F9E6-49F9-ADF6-F7B5C789E37A.jpeg
65912C2F-2DB9-4D86-860E-0A00D660A76B.jpeg
 
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Everything is humming along. I’m keeping nitrates right around 5 and even dosed my water change water to keep it consistent for the corals. I should have a Hanna ULR phosphate coming on Friday so I’ll be tracking phosphate a little better. Here are a couple recent pics.

Reef Roids… Goni and bristleworm approved. Two thumbs up!
 

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Time for an update. This one is going to be totally disorganized so just deal with it.

I’ll start with the latest things.

I started dosing 2 part. So all the corals have been doing well but growth is pretty slow. I just accepted it since I really just want good color not massive growth. Well then I started noticing the edges of a bunch of chunks of coralline were turning white. After some research, I am assuming it’s due to low alk and or calcium. I also saw lots of posts about medium packed tanks that were using about 1dkh a day. Well I decided to buy an API alk test and some small bottles of b-ionic 2 part. I just did the alk test a few hours ago and it looks like maybe 5 dkh or so. The last water change I did was Monday and I’m using Red Sea blue bucket which is 8 dkh. So I’m probably using between 1 and 1/2 dkh per day. This pretty much confirmed that the whitening of coralline and slow growth is probably dkh swings or just low dkh.

When it comes to small tanks, dosing is not an easy thing to do. Most chemicals assume you have a 20 gallon or larger tank. Well mine is 1/10th the size. So what to do. Many bottle, including the b-ionic 2 part, have dropped tops. So I take a little medicine cup with a 5 ml line, count the number of drops it takes to get 5 ml from the bottle, then divide by 5 to figure out how many drops (roughly) equal 1 ml. Well there you go. For me, about 18 drops of b-ionic makes a ml. The bottle says initial dose should be about 1ml per 4 gallons. Well I’ve got just at 2 gallons of water so that meant 1/2 ml which I now know is 9 drops. Voilà, we’ve solved dosing for a pico.

Im going to play around with dosing the next couple of weeks to make sure I tune in the right dose per day, but I’m hoping this could lead to a recovery in the coralline algae and maybe faster growth of the lps and sps.

Alright, next topic, red flatworms. So every few days I’d see a couple red flatworms on the glass. They are really easy to grab with a turkey baster and kill so I just did that by hand. I was hoping they would eventually go away. Well I keep seeing more and more on the glass so it’s time to deal with this before they take over. I put some flatworm exit in my Amazon order with the test and 2 part. I have 2 gallons of water mixing right now and I’ll probably dose the flatworm exit this weekend followed by a 100% water change an hour or 2 later. If I have to dose again, no big deal, just another 100% water change.

On to the next topic, bubble algae. So one of the corals I got in had one bubble of bubble algae. I went ahead and pulled it off. A few weeks later, I found a few more on some other rocks. I pulled those manually. Well as you guessed, I’m now seeing a handful of patches. Soon I’m planning to pull out the rock structure and do some hydrogen peroxide treatment on the bubble algae. We’ll see how it works.

So nitrates and phosphates. I got the low phosphate checker used and I’ve got the API nitrate checker. I’m now trying to keep my phosphate at or around 0.1ppm and nitrates at or around 5ppm. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m pretty sure the corals look better. I have darker coloration and better extension of the gonis. So I’m using NeoNitro for keeping nitrates and my reef roids for phosphates. I’m going to keep steady on this plan and we’ll see what happens.

That’s it for now. Cross your fingers for the flatworm exit that we get rid of the flatworms and don’t crash the tank. I think I’m catching it early enough that the die off won’t be too bad… famous last words.
 
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