A lot can change in a month...
Last week I asked my wife to swing by the LFS to pick up some salt and she texted back:
"should I grab a coral too? :)", which tells me I've reached spousal-hobby approval level #4. She grabbed a cool little pipe organ, so we now have 5 corals. The neon green hammer has grown a ton and the chalice is slowly encrusting onto the surrounding rock.
Our blue tang, Frankenstein II graduated out of Quarantine, but the yellow tang didn't make it. Again :( So we now have the ultimate Nemo & Dory cliche...
I've been doing 20%-40% water changes every 2 weeks or so. I keep wanting to set up my kalk doser on the second DOS head, but my water changes have been keeping up with my dKH demand. I'm using Reef Crystals, which is ca/alk fortified. I wonder if I should switch to a "standard" salt so I can start dialling in alkalinity using kalk as planned? I just bought a new bucket, too!
I've had a pretty decent dusting of diatoms on the sand pretty much non-stop for the past 5 or 6 weeks. I finally vacuumed the sand, which made my tank look PHENOMENAL for about 3 days, but they slowly came back. Do I have a silicate problem? I'm using RO/DI...
The fire shrimp molted again. The long-spined urchin is spending less time on the glass and more time on the rocks. He's been making some real progress on the algae... Oh yea, I've had a dusting of green algae on the rocks for the past month. It's very short (not hairy, not long. Almost encrusting-like) and doesn't really brush-off. It almost looks grey under the Kessil. It's not too gross-looking, thankfully, but it's there... It looks like it might be slowly disappearing from the unlit parts of the rock? Maybe that's wishful thinking.
Coralline algae is just starting to grow. There are a dozen little purple spots starting to form on the rocks.
I pulled out the Gyre & the MP40 and gave them their first vinegar bath. I had my first skimmer cup overflow. Man... the Vertex 180i is difficult to dial-in with such a small bioload. My ATO reservoir ran dry one night, oops.
We hosted the boys' birthday party this past weekend (their b-day's are 2 weeks apart, so we have one combined party :)). It was the first time showing off the tank to a bunch of the friends I'd been bragging to over the past couple months. While my wife was putting up decorations and food prepping, I was cleaning the glass on my tank... I probably brought my hobby approval back down to #3, but the tank looked amazing. It's always nice to get a little tank flattery from your buddies :)
Thanks
@Dennis Cartier,
@Preme,
@Jason boles! My tank was originally built by Concept Aquariums in Calgary, AB. It was designed to fit a MarineLand Ventura stand and came with a custom sump. I bought it off a local reefer who decided to move houses before he'd gotten around to the build, so it had never even seen water. He actually planned on having two... one on either side of his fireplace, so this tank has a twin somewhere out there in Vancouver! I hear the other buyer went freshwater.
KJ
