ggNoRe's Prostar 200 Peninsula Build Thread

[ggNoRe]

 

[ggNoRe]

Figured it was time for an update. Got my nutrient levels down and cleaned up a bunch of GHA but now battling dinos again. It's not too bad as corals and fish seem to be unaffected just lost a few trochus snails. Still working on removing them as they make the sand brown and it's not pleasing to the eyes. Already tried quite a few things but so far no avail. Carbon dosing, 3 types of bottled bac, nightly turkey basting, silicates dosing, short blackouts, and hydrogen peroxide. Going to try and let my nutrients raise naturally and try to keep my hands out of the tank for a little see if it sorts itself on its own.

 

[A Young Reefer]

Figured it was time for an update. Got my nutrient levels down and cleaned up a bunch of GHA but now battling dinos again. It's not too bad as corals and fish seem to be unaffected just lost a few trochus snails. Still working on removing them as they make the sand brown and it's not pleasing to the eyes. Already tried quite a few things but so far no avail. Carbon dosing, 3 types of bottled bac, nightly turkey basting, silicates dosing, short blackouts, and hydrogen peroxide. Going to try and let my nutrients raise naturally and try to keep my hands out of the tank for a little see if it sorts itself on its own.

It’s coming along nicely!

 

[ryanrick]

How's the battle with dinos going? I think I'm going to copy your latest method if it has held them off.

 

[ggNoRe]

They did come back but not as bad. In a sense because I let them. Found out I had a much bigger issue unfortunately.

I began to notice my euphyllia were going down hill. This seemed very odd as those are the only corals which I've basically never had an issue with. When I saw even my frogspawn, which I had grown from one head to about 20, dying I knew it was time to take action. My first thought was it was probably bacterial. I did the KFC dip on the frogspawn and put it back in the tank. Nothing changed. For some reason I had a hunch there was something going on with my UV sterilizer so I took it offline. Then I got an ICP. It reported everything looked great EXCEPT high amounts of copper, tin, and zinc. This actually wasn't the first time I got similar results. The first time I just threw in some Cuprisorb and didn't think much of it. This time I decided to completely clean out everything and remove all equipment from my sump. And with this I found the culprit! User error: For some reason I went full ****** when installing my UV sterilizer over a year ago and used a metal fitting that had slowly began to decay.

Since then my corals have slowly but surely been improving for about a month now. I am back to working on my initial issue which is when phosphates go low I get dinos and when high I get GHA. I'm currently trying to lower phosphates as they are at .15 and the GHA is the bigger issue of the two. Even with several hermits, over 50 snails including large turbos, 4 urchins, and a seahare the GHA still persists. Recently added a good chunk of chaeto from a well established system and some more Rowaphos. Also have some pods and phyto from JaysReefBugs otw.

I've encountered almost every issue a reefer can imagine over the past 2.5 years but somehow I still enjoy working on my tank and the hobby very much. Thankfully I set up a 10gallon nano a while back for my overly aggressive clownfish and that tank has saved about 10 or so corals that were dying in my display. I very recently added most of them back now that things have been going better.

 

[ryanrick]

Wow, that fitting turned all kinds of pretty colors. I'm glad you found the culprit! Keep us posted

 

[ggNoRe]

Knock on wood but system has been doing generally well since I started moonshiners about 6 months ago.

 

[ggNoRe]

Figured it was time for an update. Been absolute smooth sailing. Bout 18 months with Moonshiners and keeping my phosphates around .2-.3. 0 algae and 0 dinos all corals growing like crazy so much so that I have been selling corals and started up a large frag tank recently.