I have SPS now!

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Shawn_epicurious

Shawn_epicurious

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ahh. I remember adding my first SPS. Why buy small SPS Frags when I can buy large colonies from Liveaquaria for same price. I'll tell you why - because even when your a pro they just don't do well when they get into our reef tanks. I've come to realize that these nearly always carry pest and may only survive when chopped up into 20 pc in hopes of one surviving - something vendors do. Good luck and keep at it!
I am beginning to see that now. I was told once that larger colonies are harder to transfer. ...they just look so pretty in the store lol

my next purchase will be an online frag pack... a beginner pack : ) I hope this doesn’t come out wrong...

My wallet is not a deterrent to buying the things I want : ) I get that I over did it for my level of both experience and tank tank maturity.
 

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its difficult, I did not start to see success with my latest tank until about a year in. All was going well and then buying colonies lead to AFEW getting into my tank and me having to start again. I am in a good place at 18 months but really don't want more setbacks. I had to buy frags and they are sooooo slow to take off as thy just don't have the biomass to grow rapidly. if you have a colony and it survives they usually grow really fast but pests are so much more of a threat.
 
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I have not been posting much lately. It has been a frustrating week. I woke up to 5 dead fish earlier this week. I lost four Cardinal fish and my Copperband Butterfly fish. : ( I have been doing daily water changes since... added some fresh carbon and got rid of the ammonia. ...my grandsons did.... something. I found a candy wrapper under my cabinet. They won’t admit to anything : (

No SPS left either....
 

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I am beginning to see that now. I was told once that larger colonies are harder to transfer. ...they just look so pretty in the store lol

my next purchase will be an online frag pack... a beginner pack : ) I hope this doesn’t come out wrong...

My wallet is not a deterrent to buying the things I want : ) I get that I over did it for my level of both experience and tank tank maturity.
I would reccomend a battlebox from battlecorals for this, amazing sizes and value. Adam is great!
I have not been posting much lately. It has been a frustrating week. I woke up to 5 dead fish earlier this week. I lost four Cardinal fish and my Copperband Butterfly fish. : ( I have been doing daily water changes since... added some fresh carbon and got rid of the ammonia. ...my grandsons did.... something. I found a candy wrapper under my cabinet. They won’t admit to anything : (

No SPS left either....
:( This sucks! Ammonia spike?
 
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I would reccomend a battlebox from battlecorals for this, amazing sizes and value. Adam is great!

:( This sucks! Ammonia spike?
I am going to take your advice on the Frag pack... but to be honest, I am going to hold off on new SPS until after Christmas. That will get my tank to a year old for maturity. More importantly, that will give me time to get better at keeping my phosphates stable...

And yeah, I had 5 dead fish in there... ammonia spiked high
 

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I am going to take your advice on the Frag pack... but to be honest, I am going to hold off on new SPS until after Christmas. That will get my tank to a year old for maturity. More importantly, that will give me time to get better at keeping my phosphates stable...

And yeah, I had 5 dead fish in there... ammonia spiked high
Wow. Sorry to hear that. It had to be something in the water. Cardinals are pretty hardy. Did you use your tank to waterboard your grandkids to find out what they threw into it?
 

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I still can’t skim... it just overflows... is that normal for this situation?

You still have something in the water causing the skimmer to go nuts, keep up on new carbon
 

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I still can’t skim... it just overflows... is that normal for this situation?
When I have had this happen in the past, I turn the skimmer all the way open to skim as little as possible, then run a tube from the collection cup (mine has a little nipple on the bottom with a cap) to a 5 gallon bucket and let the skimmer go to town. It seems like an insane amount is coming out for a while but I think I only ever got a couple gallons before it slowed down and stopped. Have some saltwater mixed up beforehand and let it do a water change for you.
 
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When I have had this happen in the past, I turn the skimmer all the way open to skim as little as possible, then run a tube from the collection cup (mine has a little nipple on the bottom with a cap) to a 5 gallon bucket and let the skimmer go to town. It seems like an insane amount is coming out for a while but I think I only ever got a couple gallons before it slowed down and stopped. Have some saltwater mixed up beforehand and let it do a water change for you.
I’ll try that
 

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I’ll try that
When it happened to me it was because I left my skimmer off for a period of time. I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I believe dissolved organics from fish poop and anything else like uneaten food etc. makes the water oily and the oil tends to float and be caught up in the surface tension of the bubbles your skimmer makes. once the skimmer has gotten a lot of this built up stuff out of the water it should calm down. someone more experienced can probably explain it a lot better but that's my basic understanding.

About 1.5 years ago I was kind of where you are now. (ok not the exact same circumstances but Phosphate control in general) Tank was about a year old and I had a lot of hammers, forgspawn and other LPS and soft corals that were doing well, but I also had pretty high phosphate that I couldn't figure out the best way to control. I could not for the life of me get a fuge right no matter how many different rearrangements i tried (i DIY all my filtration pretty much) I ran GFO in a reactor for a while and ended up with a nasty crop of dinoflagelates. The piece of equipment that let me take the next step was an algae turf scrubber. People have success with plenty of other methods that's just i chose to try. And i'm a big DIY guy, but there are plenty of commercially available options too. Hair algae uses a ton of phosphate and nitrate (chaeto only really wants nitrate) and IMHO its a process that wants to take place in your aquarium and use the nutrients up... why not take advantage of it? If you do decide to try it and go DIY, here is a great site with guidelines that will help you make a functioning unit. Don't guess on sizes and ratios... there are a couple of important numbers to get right if you want it to work well. Not difficult though with other people's trial-and-error at your disposal.


Also, i did read or skim all of this thread and i probably just missed it but i don't remember how you were measuring phosphate. Phosphate is notoriously hard to measure and i found out the hard way. Do yourself a favor and get a hanna checker. no color guessing... it passes light through your water sample and gives you a digital number. They are the most reliable for phosphate, especially when you get to low range. Anyway im not by any means an accomplished SPS keeper but that was my experience of the point that kind of tipped the scales in my favor. Just a thought. My SPS are all growing, certainly not as colorful as they could be but i am in the process of tuning the new ATS i built for my upgrade this year. I suppose any other method people are successful at is of course a valid choice too. I just personally like letting nature do the work. Less chance of something drastic happening.
 
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When it happened to me it was because I left my skimmer off for a period of time. I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I believe dissolved organics from fish poop and anything else like uneaten food etc. makes the water oily and the oil tends to float and be caught up in the surface tension of the bubbles your skimmer makes. once the skimmer has gotten a lot of this built up stuff out of the water it should calm down. someone more experienced can probably explain it a lot better but that's my basic understanding.

About 1.5 years ago I was kind of where you are now. (ok not the exact same circumstances but Phosphate control in general) Tank was about a year old and I had a lot of hammers, forgspawn and other LPS and soft corals that were doing well, but I also had pretty high phosphate that I couldn't figure out the best way to control. I could not for the life of me get a fuge right no matter how many different rearrangements i tried (i DIY all my filtration pretty much) I ran GFO in a reactor for a while and ended up with a nasty crop of dinoflagelates. The piece of equipment that let me take the next step was an algae turf scrubber. People have success with plenty of other methods that's just i chose to try. And i'm a big DIY guy, but there are plenty of commercially available options too. Hair algae uses a ton of phosphate and nitrate (chaeto only really wants nitrate) and IMHO its a process that wants to take place in your aquarium and use the nutrients up... why not take advantage of it? If you do decide to try it and go DIY, here is a great site with guidelines that will help you make a functioning unit. Don't guess on sizes and ratios... there are a couple of important numbers to get right if you want it to work well. Not difficult though with other people's trial-and-error at your disposal.


Also, i did read or skim all of this thread and i probably just missed it but i don't remember how you were measuring phosphate. Phosphate is notoriously hard to measure and i found out the hard way. Do yourself a favor and get a hanna checker. no color guessing... it passes light through your water sample and gives you a digital number. They are the most reliable for phosphate, especially when you get to low range. Anyway im not by any means an accomplished SPS keeper but that was my experience of the point that kind of tipped the scales in my favor. Just a thought. My SPS are all growing, certainly not as colorful as they could be but i am in the process of tuning the new ATS i built for my upgrade this year. I suppose any other method people are successful at is of course a valid choice too. I just personally like letting nature do the work. Less chance of something drastic happening.
I am using a Hanna ULR checker for phosphates
 

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I would reccomend a battlebox from battlecorals for this, amazing sizes and value. Adam is great!

+1

When I was fisrt starting out in SPS I got a battlebox from adam. He emailed me to see what I wanted, and I told him I was new to the SPS game, but didn't want any "pests"(monti's, birdsnests, pocci, etc), and he hooked me up with some very pretty and hardy SPS. They are still growing to this day.
 

A worm with high fashion and practical utility: Have you ever kept feather dusters in your reef aquarium?

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