IM Fusion 15

[Gumbies R Us]

Went hiking in the Smokies.

Now what you really want:

When the lights are on I'll be grabbing some pics of the corals.

Nice looking clowns!

 

[Kigs15]

So, I moved the tank from one room in our house to another. Please reference previous post why I did this. The move went amazing since it's such a small tank I drained 2/3 of it and dragged it... slowly. However, when I plugged everything in I happened to plug my ATO pump directly into the wall and poured about 2 gallons of RODI water into my tank causing my salinity to fall to 32.5.

Enter panic mode. I couldn't figure out what the heck I did so I unplugged everything and started to trace wires. Figured it out pretty fast after that.

So, over the course of about 4 hours I slowly raised the salinity back up to 35 and here we are. I've got some pretty hardy stuff in there so hopefully that swing wasn't as stressful for my tank as it was for me. When the space is clean I'll take a pic of what I've done. For now, please enjoy these shots of my hammer and toadstool on the next post.

 

[Kigs15]

 

[Kigs15]

Got some more corals and I'm moving forward with an IM100 EXT build. I'm stoked about that but it'll be about another month before that starts.

I also wanted to share my light schedule. I'm running the k7 mini about 7in over the water line and I've got some Birdsnest up top, LPS in the middle, and some softies lower down. Everything looks plump, happy, and healthy.

I personally really like the way it looks.

 

[Kigs15]

I was doing an awful lot of reading over the week. Specifically about some Noop V3s I just bought for the bigger tank I'm getting. Well, that led me down a huge rabbit hole and I changed my light schedule. I know I'm not really supposed to be doing so many changes (luckily they are relatively minor on the PAR side of things) but I did it anyway. Both tanks will run very similar to the attached files. I wanted to mimic AB+ on both and I think I did that. The IM100 will get the attached. Over my IM15, the Mini is running at 30% max blue and violet channels and 7% whites which is 24% of that... With the appropriate ramps. I may wait a week and add a little more white to the Mini's schedule at the peaks but that is undecided as of right now.

Special thanks to this thread as well as this thread.

 

[Kigs15]

FTS:

Breeder box with Seachem Matrix as a softie holding spot.

 

[Kigs15]

I made another coral order and one of the mushrooms I got just didn't want to stay planted on what it came attached to. So, since I want to have it attached to something that is easy to glue and will look pretty natural when covered in coralline I chose Seachem Matrix. Crushed coral was going to cost me about 5x more than this solution did. Figured it'll double as bio media as well when it sits unused in my sump in the near future. For now it's an eyesore but I thought it was clever.

 

[Kigs15]

So, I'm lucky that I have a WWC local. I went and picked up a black molly that was already conditioned to SW to add to the IM15 after binging Jake Adams this week... They were also doing a 2 for $10 monti cap sale so I got a couple of frags for $5 each. I picked out a green and red one. Pretty happy about that!! It might just be me but prices sure do seem to be coming back down to earth...

I also picked up a peppermint shrimp because my wife and son fell in love with a few of the coral banded shrimps and I wanted one that would potentially take care of any aiptasia if we were going down that road.

I'll get pics when everything settles in.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

FTS:

Breeder box with Seachem Matrix as a softie holding spot.

Love the coral in your tank!

 

[Kigs15]

Hungry...

FTS:

 

[Kigs15]

Just finished a water change. Things are mad at me but it still looks pretty good imo :).

Few updates: My phosphates are out of control. I'm in a fight with them right now. Last week my tank was basically hair algae. I've starting using GFO and manually removed a lot of it. Helping out a LOT. Still out of control phosphates (1ppm) but they're getting better. Moral of this story is do your testing.

I love my molly. He's a mini tang. Always fat and happy destroying algae.

I bought a ton of poly-fil and I'm using that instead of the little cotton balls IM gives.

Last update is that I'm slowly removing my sand with every water change. I hate it. I got the wrong grade and it's just bad. Tank is small and hard for me to siphon it correctly and I end up removing a lot every time anyway. I estimate about 10 or so water changes before it's all gone. I'm going to leave this tank barebottom since I have my EXT100 up and running with the special grade sand and it's going to be much easier to maintain correctly.