I went for a slightly heavier grain because of that issue in the past, and that's also a big part of why I have the MP40s towards the top of the tank. My wife and I designed the aquascape with the intention of having torches/gonis/etc. lower in the tank with less flow, and we'll be putting a bunch of acros up top in the crosscurrent (and somewhat shielded from the torches by the flat bases).
Very happy so far and, if we didn't have a 150 lb clumsy dog my wife worried about running into the tank, I would've much preferred to go for the peninsula.
Do it man!
Sounds like you like that RO SKIMMER I have been looking at that one too.Update 1-24-24
Tank has continued to chug along. No more random coral deaths, and everything's continued to color up and look better. We're putting a hiatus on adding any more coral to the tank for the next 3-ish months, though, just to be safe.
Food and feeding
Costco was doing a sale on an upright garage freezer last month, so we picked one up. As a compromise with my wife to avoid frozen food proliferating throughout our fridge, I took two drawers in said freezer, and stocked up on frozen food. After asking around, I ended up doing a bulk order from Brine Shrimp Direct given their pretty solid pricing: 77 flat packs (mix of mysis, spirulina mysis/brine, krill, ay caribe, and arctic copepods), 1.2 and 2.4 mm pellets, flake food, and the omnivore gel diet.
For a data point for those wondering how much others feed their tanks: I've been feeding a total of ~15 cubes of food per day, split among three feedings, with one feeding enriched with five drops of Garlic Power and three or four drops of Selcon. I'll also feed a pinch of flake and pellet during the day, since I'm going to be buying an Avast Plank from @srt4eric soon and am trying to get them used to pellet/flake food for automated feedings to replace one frozen feeding). I'll also give them a sheet of nori every couple days. Given how fat some of my fish are I'm guessing this is leaning towards the heavier side of feeding, but they seem to all be doing well. The coral also gets 40 mL/day of Red Sea AB+ .
Video of feeding time:
PXL_20240118_164803809.TS.mp4
drive.google.com
Nutrient management
I'm pretty sure adding the bella goby to the tank caused a nutrient spike due to a combination of a prior lack of thorough sand sifting and lots of food on the sand bed. Phosphates got pretty high (0.57 at one point, and 50 ppm nitrate), so I spent the better part of a week slowly dosing lanthanum chloride to bring it down, and continued dosing ~25 mL of homemade NoPox* daily. Phosphates are now around 0.20 and dropping slowly.
I also got a great deal from a friend up here so I swapped out my previous IceCap K2-200 skimmer for a brand new Reef Octopus Regal INT200 protein skimmer. Love it so far: quiet, will be easier to clean, and has a float switch to avoid overflow. I'll be hooking up a recirculating CO2 scrubber at some point to help raise pH, too.
Next steps
Continuing my theme of 'trying to automate as much as possible', my next projects are going to be:
- Setting up an automatic dry food feeder to replace one feeding per day, and to be able to leave the tank completely alone for several days in emergency situations
- Setting up two dosing pumps: one four-head doser for Red Sea ABCD dosing, and another two- or three-head doser to automate NoPox dosing and AB+ dosing.
I'd strongly advocate not getting the sump and using the money to purchase your own sump, either through Trigger or Synergy Reef. (Synergy Reef is awesome, I've had nothing but good dealings with them, and they got the sump to me FAST.)
I agree with IOWL, it's not that the IM sump is bad by any means, but for the money you can get alot more flexibility from the vendors he mentioned (most likely for a few hundred less). Looking back, I probably should have done exactly that. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Do I hate the IM Sump? No, it gets the job done. It just made my life a tad more difficult trying to fit all the ancillary equipment underneath and still have access to everything in the sump.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Thank you for the compliments, and borrow away! I "borrowed" it from @bayarea_reef 's build, with the caveat that I'm running Reef Tiles for the display (developed by our local club's very own @phatduckk ).
If you want a roller mat the sump is an issue but if you want 2 returns it is easy. I just drilled an extra hole in the black return area and I have 2 return pumps plumbed. Was not difficult at all.Took the words right out of my mouth.
It looked good and I was excited to have it. However, in retrospect, I'm glad IM borked my order* and I explored other sump options. Several things I considered doing - dual return pumps (which I did), and filter rollers (which I did not end up doing) - would have required either modifying the sump or not been possible.
Right; that's why I noted I would have had to modify the sump.
Hi! I was just watching your video on the I'm 200 setup. Did you use the plumbing that came with the system or did you do your own plumbing?
