House on a Hill Red Sea 750 XXL

Diesel48 · Jul 21, 2019

Couple weeks after the removal of the ABS plastic sheet. So far nothing bad has happened due to the disruptive event. I think it helped that the tank is new and it is bare bottom. Started testing calcium and MG when I do my water tests. Everything is pretty much in line with the salt mix I am using. I have not started dosing yet as there are no corals. I will probably purchase a Geo Calcium reactor soon and get that going.

My nitrate reads 0 on my safi-alert test and phosphate is .06 using the Hanna ULM. I assume there are some nitrates there just to low for the test. I feed a small sheet of Nori each day and two to three squirts of LRS/MYSIS mix.

The only uglies I have seen so far was the original diatom bloom. Not sure if that is a good thing or not. Or if it is all still coming. I have to imagine having the 5 tangs and 9 trochus snails keep the rocks fairly clean. Still waiting on some coraline to show up from the 4 ARC reef bottles. My Alk is only 7 so maybe once I boost that more of it will start showing up.

Thinking about adding a few Anthias and maybe an Achilles. After that I think my fish load should be good.

Diesel48 · Aug 13, 2019

About a week ago I stopped doing water changes. Still not detecting any Nitrates in my system. Phosphates have gradually gone down to about .03 according to the Hanna checker. I removed 2 of the 6 Brightwell bio bricks in effort to help this as well. I started feeding a bigger piece of Nori and one extra squirt of LRS.

I am a bit over 1 month after removing the ABS from the bottom of the tank. My rocks do have some sort of fuzzy film on them now. Especially in the crevices. I do not know if it is bacteria or algae. It has been there a couple of weeks now. It does not seem to be getting drastically worse so maybe the fish / snails are keeping it at bay.

I started regularly testing MG, ALK and Calcium. I have brought up all of my levels with BRS Pharma. I will be dosing by hand as of now. Targeting ALK of 9.0, Calcium 480PPM and MG at 1440PPM.

I have only seen a few specs of coraline alagae. Not much at all. I did have some on the ABS sheet I removed so kind of starting over with that too. I placed an order at Indo-Pacific Sea Farms for their reef tank tune up kit, which consists of multiple species of snails, micro hermits and amphipods. I also purchased two coarline plates from IPSF. I am going to try and post monthly pictures of the tank from now on. It will be a good log of where things have come and gone.

Diesel48 · Aug 14, 2019

Some pictures of the tank at 4.5 months old. The close up I tried to get a picture of the bacteria or algae in the crevices of the rock. Picture did not turn on that great.

Whip · Aug 18, 2019

Looks great! How many months into it did you go lights on?

I am at 4.5 months too and haven’t installed lights yet.

Diesel48 · Aug 18, 2019

I turned on the lights 1 month after the rocks were in the tank. However the rocks were in a brute trash can full of saltwater for 3 months before that. I added ammonia and seeded with Dr Tims, Microbater 7 and Seed while in the trash can. I did add all 3 again after the rock was transferred to the tank.

While adding the Reef Tank tune up kit from IPSF I did notice two good size spots of purple/pink coraline on the rocks. Seemed to come out of no where.

Diesel48 · Sep 5, 2019

After seeing some of the BRS investigates on UV I decided to add one to my tank. I went with the Pentair Smart UV 40 watt unit. I attached a Siccie 5.0 pump to target bacteria and algae. More than likely will not run this forever, maybe just the first year or so while the tank matures. Bare bottoms seem to have more struggles the first year of operation. I have had on and off cloudy water about every week. It looked clear because I forgot how clear it could look. After running the UV sterilizer for a day or to my water really cleared up. The Siccie is installed in the skimmer section of the sump. The UV sterilizer is very long so it is on the outside of the tank. It looks OK there. I still have a bacteria / algae strangeness on my rock. I think it is new tank uglies but hard to say. I think some of it is starting to go away but should be able to tell more in a few weeks.

I added an Achilles tang last week as well. It took him a few days to adjust to the aquarium and his tank mates but is now eating like a pig. I was a bit nervous the first few days as it was not interested in food at all.

I added carbon a 1/2 cup of BRS ROX carbon to run for a week. I have not run carbon since the tank was first started.

The last thing that I did was raise the lights 12" off the top of the water. I still need to get a PAR meter to verify intensity. I continue to test all parameters on Saturday. I am starting to see more and more coraline algae. The spots that I have are about the size of a penny. Not sure how they got that large with out me noticing them earlier.

4ddiction · Sep 23, 2019

Looking good!

Diesel48 · Oct 14, 2019

Uglies are here! Well my tank is definitely evolving. Due to testing 0 nitrates for some time and being nervous of dinos I started dosing Nitrates. I have been trying to keep it around 2.5ppm. My phosphates also started testing 0 so I purchased some Seaheam Fourish Phosphorus and started dosing that to keep it around .05PPM or so. The slimy stuff is still on my rocks but I am starting to see more coraline Alagae, the purple kind, but I am also see green for the first time. Until my Nitrates were testing about 0ppm the green was no where to be seen.

My tank has a lot more stuff going on, the back wall of the tank has a lot of algae or something on it. It seems to be receding a little bit at a time. My sump now has many pineapple sponges in it. These seemed to come out of no where. I am not even sure how they got in my tank, but there are a lot of them down there.

I looked at the tank during lights off and saw many copepods on the rocks. I think this is a great sign as it seems there is more bio diversity starting to come to life. I also saw a few larger amphipods crawling around as well.

I am going to start turning off my protein skimmer during the day. I am hoping that this will allow Nitrates and Phosphates to stay in a good range without me needed to dos the tank.

The UV light cleared up my water in a hurry. I am still running it but thinking about taking it down. I do not think it is something that I want to run long term. Not really sure how much it keeps algae at bay either.

Diesel48 · Nov 8, 2019

The tank continues to mature. I am running my protein skimmer everyday now. The last two weeks of testing NO3 I am getting a reading of 5ppm without dosing it. Maybe I finally have a consistent source of nitrates with my bio load and feedings. Phosphates range from .03 - .06 in the last few tests. I have not dosed more Seachem Flourish Phosphorus either. I did add feeding some dry pellets about every other day.

I scrapped the strange bacteria / algae off the back glass 2 weeks ago. It did not come back. I have not run UV in about 2 weeks. I used a brush to brush off the slimy brown bacteria / algae of the rocks. I think it was a part of the new tank uglies. The first few times blew it off it slowly grew back, this time it appears to have subsided. There is still some in the deep crevices of the rock but nothing to alarming.

My dry rock is getting a lot of green on it. It looks like green coraline but regardless it is green. I have not really had anything green in my tank until the last few weeks. It was pretty much brown up to this point.

I tested alkalinity and it was 6, so I have resumed dosing. Going to try and keep it around 7.5-7.8. If the tank keeps doing its thing for the next few weeks I will probably put a coral or two in it and see how it goes.

My Achilles tang is doing great. It is starting to mature. The orange dot near its tail is starting to get larger and more vibrant.

Gari · Nov 8, 2019

Nice setup

Diesel48 · Nov 25, 2019

Tank continues to mature and look better. Stark white dry rock seems to be coming to life. I am getting a lot of little feather dusters in the rock. The strange brown / white slimy algae or bacteria has not come back. I do not think it was Dinos but maybe something that sterile rock can go through during the new tank uglies. I am still getting a little Cyano here and there but think it is just the tank maturing. It only comes and goes in extremely small spots so I am going to just let it do its thing.

The bottom of the tank has a bit of green on it. It is amazing how things went from brown to now having bits of color. I continue to feed 1/2 sheet of Nori, a bit of LRS and TDO chroma pellets. I added more clean up crew about a month ago. 10 snails and 5 hermits. Maybe that helped with the brown alage as well. Not sure. I will add some more maybe this weekend or next.

Thinking about adding a coral or two in the next few weeks. My NO3 has been stable at 5ppm and P04 has been between .03 - .06ppm. I am starting to monitor alk again and will try to keep it around 8.5dkh.

Diesel48 · Dec 21, 2019

Just finished water testing today.
NO3 - 5ppm
PO4 - .06ppm
ALK - 8.4 dkh
Calcium - 435ppm
MG - 1525 ppm - Still waiting on this to come down. I think I over dosed it a long time ago. Just takes awhile for it to drop.

I added 5 different tester corals at the end of November.
1 - Gonipora
1 - Torch
1 - Mystery Acro
1 - Jackolantern Lepto
1 - Superman Monti
1 - other Acro, not sure what it was.

Well it really did not go well. Out of those corals I think the only ones that will make it are the Goni and torch. I have no idea why. My parameters seem to be stable. The Lepto and Monti did not look good a day after I put them in the tank and slowly go worse and worse. The "other acro" never did anything but lose its flesh. The Mystery acro was a pretty good size frag, really log green ployps on it. It is slowly going away. The tips turned brown after about a week and is slowly getting worse. I am kind of at a loss. Maybe the tank is still to new? It is 9 months old right now. I have coraline growing on the rocks and a little on the glass, many feather dusters in my rocks, pineapple sponges in the sump and some deep pores in the rock.

I am changing out 3 gallons a day of saltwater, dosing 20ml of soda ash to keep alk at 8.5, monitoring calcium but so far not really adding much as there is not a lot of uptake.

I have not used a PAR meter to check on my lights, that seems to be the only thing I should maybe check besides wait a few more months. I thought by this time I would be able to put a few acros in there and have a little success. Any thoughts on this?

My lights turn on at 10am, slowly ramp up for an hour. They pretty much do 4 hours of blue, then 4 hours of the highest intensity blue/white for 4 hours and then another 4 hours of blue at a lower intensity with a ramp down from 9 to 10pm.

I have not run carbon in a few months, maybe that would help strip anything out as well.

Blitheran · Dec 21, 2019

Diesel48 said:
Just finished water testing today.
NO3 - 5ppm
PO4 - .06ppm
ALK - 8.4 dkh
Calcium - 435ppm
MG - 1525 ppm - Still waiting on this to come down. I think I over dosed it a long time ago. Just takes awhile for it to drop.

I added 5 different tester corals at the end of November.
1 - Gonipora
1 - Torch
1 - Mystery Acro
1 - Jackolantern Lepto
1 - Superman Monti
1 - other Acro, not sure what it was.

Well it really did not go well. Out of those corals I think the only ones that will make it are the Goni and torch. I have no idea why. My parameters seem to be stable. The Lepto and Monti did not look good a day after I put them in the tank and slowly go worse and worse. The "other acro" never did anything but lose its flesh. The Mystery acro was a pretty good size frag, really log green ployps on it. It is slowly going away. The tips turned brown after about a week and is slowly getting worse. I am kind of at a loss. Maybe the tank is still to new? It is 9 months old right now. I have coraline growing on the rocks and a little on the glass, many feather dusters in my rocks, pineapple sponges in the sump and some deep pores in the rock.

I am changing out 3 gallons a day of saltwater, dosing 20ml of soda ash to keep alk at 8.5, monitoring calcium but so far not really adding much as there is not a lot of uptake.

I have not used a PAR meter to check on my lights, that seems to be the only thing I should maybe check besides wait a few more months. I thought by this time I would be able to put a few acros in there and have a little success. Any thoughts on this?

My lights turn on at 10am, slowly ramp up for an hour. They pretty much do 4 hours of blue, then 4 hours of the highest intensity blue/white for 4 hours and then another 4 hours of blue at a lower intensity with a ramp down from 9 to 10pm.

I have not run carbon in a few months, maybe that would help strip anything out as well.

Something should be wrong... my tank 10 gallon innovative marine was only a month and a half old before I added sps with zero sign of coraline algae

AJsReef · Feb 20, 2020

How’s the tank? Sorry to hear about the corals. Maybe an ICP test is in order?

Diesel48 · Feb 20, 2020

Been meaning to update, thanks for the push! The torch and Goni continue to do well. The torch has doubled in size. The Goni still looks good but is about the same size. My rocks got a green film type algae on the. Not sure that is part of the maturing process or not. Seems to me like my ugly stage was very deleyed. Maybe that was due to lack of nutrients in the beginning? The bottom of the tank has a green algae which bottom seems to have really attached to the glass. Even with a straight edge razor it is tough to remove. Almost feels like some sort of calcification under it. I added 40 astrea snails and 20 hermits to my clean up crew a few weeks ago to maybe help start cleaning things up. I was able to scrape the back glass of this film type algae with a razor.

A new lfs opened up by me that looks really nice. Hope they can make it. They have some true Bali live rock that a coral grower had. I am tempted to purchase some to bring more biodiversity to my tank. Not sure this is a good idea or not. I know pests can come with it but they can come with any coral to, even with dipping. My past tank 20 years ago was fine exclusively with live rock from the ocean and it was awesome. Any thoughts on this?

They also have some great ORA sps corals. They had some chunky frags if red planet. Was thinking of getting one and seeing how it does. I was going to wait until the tank was 1 year old, but it has been 3 months since my last try.

The green algae on the rocks isn’t bad, just something I did not have on my first tank. Looks like a film type algae. If it is gha, it does not get long.

I have an ICP test. Just need to do it and send it in.

Diesel48 · Nov 22, 2020

wow, lots of things have happened to my tank since my last post. The first thing that happened is that I got some sort of parasite. This happened even though all fish were quarantined and treated with copper. It killed all fish except my cardinal fish, two yellow tangs, and purple tang. in April I drained the tank to catch the fish and go fallow for 90 days. I did this and treated the remaining fish with copper for 30 days again.

during this fallow period I hooked up my pentair aquatics uv. I believe it is 40 watts. I run it out of my sump with a siccie 1.5 pump. I feed it back into the return chamber of the sump. I figure this will help with the fallow period and plan on running it on my tank forever.

At the end of July I added my fish back. A week later I saw a few white spots on my purple Tang. How in the world could this happen. I waited 80 days and fish looked great in qt. Well the decision has been made to manage ich and not eliminate it.

During the next couple of months I stocked the tank with fish from tsm. They offer quality quarantined live stock. I might have gone to fast as I had a green hair algae explosion. I never really had a gha issue the first year. I cut back in feeding. I was testing 0 nitrate and phosphate. I added one dose of vibrant. the next day I had dinos. This was not vibrants fault. Pretty sure it was the lack of nutrients for awhile and tank imbalance. This sucks. After lots of reading on this forum my plan of action was to run two strips of filter floss by my power heads and increase nutrients to 10ppm nitrate and .1ppm phosphate. I also ordered another UV, a cheap jaebo to run in the display only. However by the time it arrived,2 weeks or so, the increased nutrients and filter floss was doing its job. I am sure my pentair uv in the sump was helping too. The dinos were going away! They no longer where covering my rocks. The dino’s did take out the only 2 sps frags I had that were living so that sucked. During this time I also did dr Tim’s regamin with refresh and waste away. I did not do a black out or even lights out. Monitored nutrients daily and added nitrate and phosphate to keep them up. phosphate would drop after dosing the waste away so the next day I would bring both up. At this time I also decided to shut my skimmer down for 4 hours a day to let bacteria to build. After roughly a month i removed the filter floss strips as it seemed the dinos were gone. I still had gha, but the dinos were gone. I was no longer doing water changes at this time as well. To combat gha the next month or so I dosed bacteria once a week, and then manually scrubbed the gha with a tooth brush and siphoned into a filter sock. Not fun, but seemed effective. After another month or so no gha or dinos. I added pods and dosed live phyto to get some more biodiversity as I think dinos hurt that overall.

Things are getting back on track. I continue to shut the skimmer down 4 hours A day. I feed pellets with an auto feeder 2 times day and frozen at night. I also feed a bit of nori every other day or so. Just trying to keep nutrients in the tank.I removed my rollerMat as well, forgot to mention that. So right now the only filtration is my protein skimmer.

The zoas I have are growing and the 13 sps frags I purchased a month ago are surviving and encrusting. I am so pumped! Earlier on, sps frags I had would waste away in a week or so. Very frustrating. I think success now can be attributed to higher nutrients, and starting them out for a week at lower par. It probably also helps the tank is 20 months old now. I think my first frag rack is around 120 - 150 par. I believe this lets them get used to water parameters and tank lighting.

This journey Is taking longer than I originally thought it would but it sure seems like things are going in the right direction. After doing a par map of my tank I am slowly ramping things up. I run the t5s 9 hours a day and leds 12 hours with 4 hours of ramping up and down and around 5 hours of peak light. Shooting for 200-350 par on the rock work.

A big budget will not give you success in this hobby. I think the only thing that can is time and patience

Whip · Nov 22, 2020

First... so glad to see you provide an update. We started our tanks together on R2R and that was a blast. Many of the others have dropped off of the radar and that is a bummer.

Second... we need photos!

Third... I went through almost the exact same thing. I almost could cut this out of your build thread and paste it in mine! The GHA outbreak, mass fish death, slow coraline takeoff, SPS melting away, the ich, the 80 days of fallow, the return of ich, dinos, etc. CRAZY.

Well, after all of that we are still here!

Quastermayne · Nov 22, 2020

Sick setup man!!

Diesel48 · Jan 9, 2021

I definitely need to update pictures. However this last Monday Dino's returned. Not exactly sure how, I think I have been keeping nutrients higher but maybe they dropped or I am getting to close to the margin of error on the Hanna ULR checker. I have been attacking spots of Cyano and was attempting to get rid of it using Microbacter Clean. Maybe that was enough to bring on the bloom. This is with turning off my Skimmer 4 hours a day and not running any other type of mechanical filtration. The frustrating part is the SPS frags I put in around October have been growing pretty well. I sure hope the Dinos do not do them in like my last SPS frags.

Currently trying to keep P04 around .12ppm +/- .03 and N03 around 5-10ppm.
Dosing Microbacter 7
Dosing Phytoplankton
Adding some pods from the LFS
Changing my bag of GAC out weekly
I am not changing the lighting schedule yet. If it gets worse I will consider it.

I attached my Jaebo 55 Watt UV and Sicce 1.5 pump to the side of the tank. About 24 hours after running this, corals seem happier already.

Diesel48 · Jan 23, 2021

Took the DT UV off and cleaned the back wall. Not seeing any dinos at the moment. Lets hope they are gone for good.

Some SPS are doing great and still growing. The two on the left side of the tank are a little suspect. Seeing some tip burn which could be from dinos 3 weeks ago but alk is not really high.

Todays tests.
N03 : 5-10
P04: .12 ppm - I have been dosing phosphates the last 3 weeks to keep it above .1ppm. I think I am going to try and keep it there.
Alk: 7.3 DKH
CA: 420 ppm
MG : 1360 ppm

Trying for the first time at taking some closer pics with a camera lens that I had. I can se how a macro lens would be helpful.

Setosa is about a month old. Got it as a fresh cut from a local reefer. It cracked when I dipped it and mounted it. The crack as healed in the last month.

Some Acro from the LFS, no idea what it is, but it is one of my stand outs. I cut it off the plug and reglued when I got it back in October of last year. It it slowly recovered and encrusted over the glue. In the last month it went over the edges of the plug. Through even though other SPS have died this one has never skipped a beat. Makes me wonder if the others were suspect to begin with.

Bonsai from October. This is another one of my purchases from October. This one was cut and re-glued. It continues to do great through out everything. Really happy with it.

Anacropa, got this a couple of months ago from a local reefer. One tip started getting algae during some event but seems to have turned around.

From a local guy as well. Cut and re-glued. It started encrusting so I mounted it last week Saturday. Hope it doesn't die there and starts to take off. Purchased in November.

Blue Slimmer, just mounted to the rocks last week Saturday. Had since November.

Stag that was purchased in the end of August. This one seems to be doing well. I purchased 10 acros at this time from the same guy. They all seemed pale out of the 10 I only have 3 left. Hoping it continues to do well. This one did darken up over time.

From the same pack in August. Seems to be doing well but I have been seeing Misentrial filaments the last couple of weeks after dinos. I hope it pulls through. You can almost see the base grow daily even though the filaments are out from time to time.