Little Fish House on the Prairie - Nuvo 20

revhtree

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Looking good! Which clown fish is Paw and which is Maw? :p
 
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AdamBWS

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Looking forward to the pictures. What settings are you using on the Kessil?

Full power daylight is 70 power, 45 color right now. 6 hours of that.
Other than the 6 hour photo cycle, I have it ramp down power on either side of that in 15 minutes, and taper it down to basically full windex mode. Hope that helps!

I'm still looking for the right settings for my tank and corals to get the best coloration.

Looking good! Which clown fish is Paw and which is Maw? :p

Thanks! The one with the spot is the big girl, and the male actually ended up jumping a few months ago. Pretty disappointing, but I've since replaced him with a smaller, and WAY SMARTER, black ice clown. When he's being abused he just swims away haha

I'll try to get some new glamour shots of the fish when I can!
 

PR_nano

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Full power daylight is 70 power, 45 color right now. 6 hours of that.
Other than the 6 hour photo cycle, I have it ramp down power on either side of that in 15 minutes, and taper it down to basically full windex mode. Hope that helps!

Thanks it helps, I seen a few Nuvo 20 with Kessil 360 but not sure what settings folks were running. I recently set mine to 65 int for 4 hours with 3 hours ramp up and 3 hours ramp down. I set color at 35 peak with ramp up/down.

I was running at 50 int and Zoas were stretching in the sandbed. Nice corals and pictures following your progress.
 
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AdamBWS

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Thanks it helps, I seen a few Nuvo 20 with Kessil 360 but not sure what settings folks were running. I recently set mine to 65 int for 4 hours with 3 hours ramp up and 3 hours ramp down. I set color at 35 peak with ramp up/down.

I was running at 50 int and Zoas were stretching in the sandbed. Nice corals and pictures following your progress.

Thanks!

It sounds like compared to your tank I should be running a bit more power. I might try to kick it up to 80% over the next couple months. I’m pretty acro heavy.

The Nuvo 20 doesn’t have room in the center chamber for the mechanical valve on the ATK. I removed the mechanical float, put the ATO line in the dosing tube holder, and I’m waiting for a third optical sensor for the Apex to show up. I’ll set that up as my high level alarm switch.

image.jpg
 
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AdamBWS

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Checked phosphate again - 0.37
Having trouble keeping phosphate down obviously, so now I’m running an additional 2 tablespoons of GFO (double what the container says for my water volume), to try to pull that down. Might need to seriously consider a skimmer in the future.

My green dragon is the coral that’s been struggling the most to color up.

DA46471C-FDA5-4862-9A27-84C37C35E9FA.jpeg
 
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AdamBWS

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Bought a Nuvoskim skimmer and am dropping phosphates slowly.

Tank is the healthiest it’s ever been and the alk consumption is skyrocketing. Targeting 8.0, but it’s been steadily maintaining 7.0 because the consumption keeps increasing so quickly. Stable nonetheless. PO4 is hovering closer to 0.15, and I’m continuing to use GFO to try to get it below 0.1 safely. I’ll be checking and refreshing my RODI to make sure I’m getting ~0 TDS water.

One month coloration update on the green dragon:

BA86A6C2-5872-45F0-9DFF-52923EF652E5.jpeg
 
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AdamBWS

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Trimming back on feeding to about once every two days. Alk consumption keeps going up, and I'm testing every 5 days to keep up with the demand to try to keep alk reasonably stable. Finally feel like this little tank is gaining a little bit of stability!

Phosphate hit a low of 0.06 and creeped back up to 0.2. Will continue to monitor, but the coral looked the best it ever has when I was below 0.1.

Just got some extension tubes for my camera so I can shoot with the 50mm. Quick shots handheld with the flow still on.





 

jaren45

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On the topic of alk consumption, how much and what of are you dosing? Curious to see what your consumption is as I have a similar setup
 
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AdamBWS

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On the topic of alk consumption, how much and what of are you dosing? Curious to see what your consumption is as I have a similar setup

I'm currently dosing 45mL/day of recipe #1, so pretty high consumption for the water volume.
Supplements are about a decade old BRS bulk powder. Calcium chloride and sodium bicarbonate. I've still got quite a bit of this left over from an old tank, and it's been working well for me.

If I run out of this stuff, I'll probably do an ICP test to see if I'm deficient in any elements that would be fixed with a more modern dosing medium. But for now I'm happy with how my dosing is working.

I fragged a bunch of corals that were growing into each other, so I expect my corals to be a bit stressed and my alk consumption to drop for the next couple weeks.

Hope that helps!
 
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AdamBWS

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Some pictures Sunday - Shot with my iPhone 12 Pro with Reefing Art 20000k lens, lightly edited in Lightroom.

Levels have been spot on lately, and my tank is looking great! Added the first corals about a year ago - Forest Fire Digi was one of those first ones.

Consistency in levels and maintenance have been my secrets to success. The tank has also blown up once it seemed to get enough biological filtration. I think real live rock is critical.

SC Orange Passion - This is my favourite coral. It keeps looking more and more incredible as it grows out. Friends don't notice it immediately looking at the tank (I mounted it at a stupid angle for front viewing), but it's awesome from top down.




 
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AdamBWS

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Nutrients have reached an all time low.
(0.01 PO4, 4 Nitrate)
Colours look awesome. Took off GFO so nutrients don't go to 0.









 
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AdamBWS

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Nutrients are lower than I want.

Nitrate - 2.5
PO4 - 0.01

Going to start feeding daily (instead of every 2 days), and only run the skimmer at night for 8 hours. Just want to make sure that I'm not starving my coral!

Major Lazer Acropora (shot and edited with iPhone 12 Pro, Reefing Art 20000k and macro)
IMG_9674 2.jpg
 
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AdamBWS

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No photos today, but my alk consumption continues to increase. I'm at about 58 mL/day alk consumption, which equates to about 4.5 dKh per day. Seems kind of nuts. Would alk consumption reduce considerably if I dropped my target from 7.8 down a bit?

I also sent off an ICP test just to see where things are at. I've got a couple corals that have a bit of bleaching, but I think I can attribute it to low nutrients. Trying to overfeed a bit and my skimmer is just running for 8 hours a day. I'm pretty happy with the tank right now, so I don't expect any huge issues with the ICP, but if there's room for improvement that would be sweet!
 
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AdamBWS

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So I got my ICP test back, and it looks like things are doing pretty well.

Calcium tested lower than I expected. Looks like my test kit I use is off quite a bit. Tested 429 on ICP, 450 by me.

Strontium (I'm pretty sure I don't need to care about this), Potassium, Boron, and Iodine were all a bit lower than the threshold Triton has set. I'm going to be buying the Red Sea Trace A and B kits to handle K, B, and I. Not sure if I need to buy test kits immediately to measure potassium and iodine, or if I can trust the correlations Red Sea has based on calcium uptake of the corals. That'll take some more research...

The tank is sort of settling into an ultra low nutrient setup. I'm only running the skimmer 8 hours a day, and have moved over to medium feeding daily. Swapping between frozen, flake and pellet. I've started feeding reef roids twice a week instead of once, and I'm going to be dosing acropower to get some more free aminos available in case my water is too clean.

That said, I don't really have any major complaints with the tank, just doing some minor tinkering now that it has seemed to be stable for a few months! A bit of bleaching on the acro in the last pic, but I'm thinking that's just a low nutrient issue right now. Al was slightly above the alarm threshold, but the batch of Aquaforest salt I've been using has a bit of Al in it according to the ICP they do on all of their batches.









 

Jvega214

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Geez, your tank is the definition of what I had in mind when I set up the Nuvo 20 as my second tank. Love what you’ve done! What light settings did you end up sticking to? Did you ever do PAR readings?
 
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