New Waterbox 100.3, update 1/16/21

muggle reefer

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Normally you get all your stuff together and then start your tank. Well this is not going that way. We purchased a new waterbox 100.3 on sale last week and the tank got here faster than expected. We currently run a red sea max 130D.

So as a result we have a number of fish about 30 pounds or so of cultured live rock and so on. For the new tank so far we have a hydro sells D pump, an auto top off a red sea reef wave 25 and a red sea 300 protein skimmer. We have ordered more dry rock and purchased more aggregate today but could not get all of it. We were going to go to a local fish shop to get our dry rock and some of our supplies for the new tank but the shop is 50 minutes away and we decided due to covid not to go. So we ordered and have to wait. We are going to take our time and do a fishes less cycle with Dr. Tim's first. Hope to be adding water to the new tank by end of this week.

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muggle reefer

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Today is day one of our fish less cycle. We added water over two days as we only have a 35 gallon can for our mixing station. However this is the only time that is really a problem as we won't be normally mixing 90 gallons at a time. We put in 3 10 pound bags of crushed aragonite, and one 20 pound bag of live sand. We purchased 40 pounds of new aragnite, I put two large pieces in our old tank to speed up their cure, then added a few pieces of cured live rock from our old tank to the new one. i planned to transfer more but I am out of salt water to compensate for displacement in the old tank as we used up all the salt yesterday. We are using Dr. Tim's Fishless cycle, we ran the tank all night with filter stacks to remove the stuff that makes the water cloudy dirt etc suspended in the water. We installed all the electrical items that we have right now, skimmer is ordered but not here yet. Don't need it to cycle tank.

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muggle reefer

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Following our directions from Dr. Tims aquatics, we ran our first tests tonight. I am doing this as a father son project with my 15 year old. He ran his testing on the tank tonight.
Ph 8.2
nh2 .8
no2 .05

We got word that our skimmer is on the way, we will be running the red sea 300 skimmer in the sump. Ordered some more goodies from the BRS black Friday sale. Don't have any temp control yet, ordered a thermometer to see what temperature we are running. Hopefully this all trends in the right direction but I think it will. I invested time Sunday in the light set up basically watched some videos for AI Hydra light set up on a 130 tank. We are smaller so I adjusted accordingly.

Also ordered a lid for our tank from clear view lids. Once we can move our fish over my son has some new fish picked out for the tank and has given his Christmas list to his grandparents for his fish order.
 
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muggle reefer

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Our day 4 test results
ph 8.0
nh2 1,2
n02 0.1

Not very exciting but let's see how it goes. My son is looking foreword to adding fish and is running the tests.

We got a cheap thermometer so we could monitor water temp, we are not heating the tank right now, it is sitting at 68 degrees f. We will thus add a heater.
 
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muggle reefer

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Day 5 test results
ph 8.0
nh2 1.2
no2 .2
looks like our nitrite was higher on this test. We have been raising gradually the water temp all day. It was sitting at 68, so we have added a heater and turned it on. We ran the salinity a little low initially, we are going to start raising that to normal levels now. We saw a presentation by Dr. Tim and he said low salinity during the cycle can help bacteria growth so we started salinity a tad low on purpose. He recommend 1.15 i think and we ended up at about 1.20 on our initail test as we estimated the salt in the mix barrel and just shorted it a bit on purpose.
 
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muggle reefer

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On day 6 we added more ammonia drops, so today is day 7, our ammonia and nitrite are higher than the last reading. Ph difference i think is just how we are reading the color one test to the next. I agree with sons findings though that ammonia and nitrite are up. We will test again tomorrow. I think the instructions call for these to trend downward. I am not sure if we should add fish Monday if we are at same or similar numbers. It looks to me like we need to test a another day or two.
ph: 8.2
nh2: 2
no2 .5
 
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muggle reefer

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We did our day 8 tests tonight, results as follows
Ph: 8.2
no2 .5
nh3 2
So according to direction these are supposed to trend down, however since we are also transplanting from a running tank, we transferred 4 gallons between the two tanks, we pulled an additional 4 gallons out of the old tank and put some 4 gallons of fresh salt water in. So 8 gallons out of the old tank and 4 gallons transferred into the new tank.

We have some algae in our old tank, so we transferred some live rock but put it all in the sump for now so that it would be in the dark and kill algae. My hope is our nitrite and ammonia will trend down ward now.

Also we got the Ai Hydra 35 lights. I thought we would have to spend hours setting them up. It took my son longer to down load the app than to set up the lights. They worked wonderfully. We have unplugged them though as we don't want to give algae a big food source before we are ready to transfer fish corals etc.

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muggle reefer

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Technically according to Dr. Tim's directions we should have been able to add fish today, however things are not going to schedule for us. Our water perimeters were unchanged again today as follows:
Ph 8.2
Nh3 2
No2 1

Our Nh3 actually went up, so we will keep testing. We shifted 4 gallons of water between the two tanks again.

So we shall test again tomorrow and see where we are at. As we have shifted some established live rock into the tank, we are going to let things run a few days and see what happens.
 
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muggle reefer

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Water test, 12/2
Well today we were supposed to get our new heaters a new reactor and some carbon from the BRS black friday sale, UPS marked the tracking delivered but our stuff is not here, so began my evening with filing a claim with UPS.
New water test restults:
Ph 8.2
Nh3 1.2
NO2 1

Our ammonia definitely looked like it has come down a bit, our Nitrite looked about the same.
Now off to neighbors to see if they have our package as our neighbors package was at our house and we delivered to them.
 
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muggle reefer

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We have been testing and testing, seemed like we were getting nowhere. I wondered are we doing something wrong, are we not following procedure in some manner? I was beginning to wonder. So tonight we tested ammonia in our old cycled tank and the new tank. I feel like we validated our results and saw an improvement in ammonia.
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Below are tonights tests, bottle on the left is our old tank testing at zero amonia. On the right is our new tank testing at about .8. We were at a solid 1.2 on our last test. I think we are making progress and I feel more confident in our test results as the known cycled tank where we feed every day and have live fish tested at o. or at least not measurable with test we are using. So I feel like we have validated our procedures.

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muggle reefer

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Holy crap! Nice log of everything going on here. Very cool!
Thanks, easiest to just enter our data here so we see how things are going, I learned from someone worried about their test results to photograph the test results then we can look at how we are doing relative to the last test and not just rely on our readings.
 
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muggle reefer

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We have now tested consistently at 0.2 for ammonia, so we have introduced our clown fish to the tank. Our clownfish being the outgoing fellow he is swam right into the dish so in the new tank he goes. You also get a shot of our non fish Ramsey, one of our rescue cats, named for Ramsey Bolton of Game of Thrones as Ramsey is the extreme opposite of Ramsey Bolton.
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muggle reefer

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Friday we moved the balance of our fish to the new tank, 1 Valentini Puffer, 1 6 line wrasse and 1 fire fish. We also ran more tests today and found no change in ammonia levels. We started up the protein skimmer, it is running like crazy.

We are running a red sea ask 300 skimmer. We turned it on today and it is blowing like crazy, some research says it can take a few days to settle down so i took the cup off and let it run.

We have two AI hydra lights, could not be happier with those, easy set up and easy to use.

Our nitrate has been trending downward/amonia. So we think this is okay.
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Showing just a little nitrite here.
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Ph has been nice and stable same readings in the 8.2 range each time
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We have the Red Sea Wave 25, we just are using manual control, I am not happy with the app, we got it to connect once but find it difficult to work with.
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Hurry is out on the skimmer, I hope this calms down in the next few days.
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Could not be happier with these lights, easy set up, and easy to control from menu.
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muggle reefer

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How are you like the 100.3? Debating on this or the 90.3
It is all about space and dimensions for me. The 100.3 is a 70 gallon display tank, I forget the depth wall to front, this was the biggest tank that worked for the space we had. In an ideal world I would have got a 4 foot long tank, I think the 130. Is next size up. However this tank give more water volume than most three foot tanks. I do find the reach from rim of tank to bottom of tank more of a challenge. However the front to back on this tank is relatively deep which give more space to set up essentially an island for the acquascaping and fish can circle swim around or through it.

I think the volume is the only real difference between the two, maybe the glass vs plastic weer teeth for the intake. I don:t see a big issue there either way. Our old tank had a plastic intake, I just cleaned it ever so often with a tooth brush. Scraped it now and then to get coralline off.

I feel the key when picking a tank is your budget and dimensions that work for your space. I am also forgetting if the 90 you are looking at is the one size down reef tank or the marine group. There are a couple differences there, mainly the included lighting which you can obviously switch out for what you prefer. I bought the whole package on a discount lighting and all. I love the AI hydra lights.
 

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Looking good!
 
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muggle reefer

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Time to do an update, so far tank is looking good. One fun item in particular. My son got fist for the tank for Christmas, a purple tank, a baby clown fish and a long nose hawkfish. We quarantined them all for two weeks and all looked good, we move the tank to the new tank, really happy with him. The hawkfish and the clown are in the old tank until we get a cover for the new tank. The hawkfish likes to live on the algae clip near the surface, I am afraid he might jump. During this time the clown fish has bonded with him. The clown frequently hangs out with the hawkfish and kind of snuggles him.
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We tested water today for amonia level on the new waterbed, it is low but not zero. Will do partial water change today.

Also really happy with the protein skimmer, it took a couple weeks but is is just working beautifully. At fist it was kind of like a volcano, just over reacting and going nuts now it has settled down and running beautifully. We have a red sea RSK 300 that I purchased from a fellow reefer on this site.
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Finally a shot of the purple tank, just a beautiful fish, we felt we could get away with him in this tank because the tank is deep so it has a lot of room to circle swim around the center so functionally it has nearly 6 linear feet to move in. It will also be the only big fish in our tank.
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