Tony's Innovative Marine 200EXT Build

[QuickrdenU]

Do you have details on the stand platform build? I want to do something similar for the 200INT I have coming next Monday

not really. Pretty basic. Screw some 2x together and trim the bottoms so that the tank will be perfectly level. As with building any rectangle, making sure it’s perfectly square is the hardest part.

 

[LiquidSpace]

Anything new?

 

[QuickrdenU]

Anything new?

Ehhh. I figured out that my hanna phosphate tester has been giving me false readings and might be the cause for dying zoas and slow growth on some other corals. It might also be the cause for my old dino outbreak. It was reading .13 and a water test came back saying 0.01. And I had been using GFO to get it down so I was probably bottomed out for a long while… But my Nitrates are about 26 even using a turf scrubber…

So I’m feeding some pellets to get the phosphates back up and then I’m going to try carbon dosing with vinegar, starting tomorrow to get my nitrates down. I’m turning off the ATS for now cuz I don’t love the noise and will only run my UV at night. I’ll does the vinegar slowly over the daylight hours. If it ends up working well, maybe I’ll just add it to my kalk container eventually? Idk. It takes me 35 days to burn through the entire container. I have to figure out if it’s ok for the vinegar to sit diluted in kalk that long. And it will increase the potency of my kalk so then it will probably last 45 days which would be nice. But I’m new to carbon dosing. I’m fully expecting the worst but hoping for the best.

Good news is, I was able to frag a bunch of hammers, frog spawn, and torch corals and moved them all around in my tank. One day I’ll have to sell some. Hopefully they’ll “look” better once I get the nutrients sorted.

I also currently have cyano but I’m assuming that’s from high nitrates or the imbalance. Who knows. Constant puzzle over here!

 

[QuickrdenU]

So this is a pretty cool thing I just noticed. If you have a camera with night vision pointed at your water drums, it can actually “see through them” so you know how full they are. Maybe I’m super late to the party with realizing this but it’s pretty cool!

 

[QuickrdenU]

We have a gorilla crap in the sump. Daughter woke me up at 6am saying that it crawled into the tank…. we’re gonna catch that SOB! No wonder my snails have been dying.

 

[QuickrdenU]

Our Atlantic Blue Tang has finally begun changing color at about 1.5 years old. Pretty cool.

 

[Zreef]

So this is a pretty cool thing I just noticed. If you have a camera with night vision pointed at your water drums, it can actually “see through them” so you know how full they are. Maybe I’m super late to the party with realizing this but it’s pretty cool!

That's pretty cool to know and I really like the external gage glasses lol I've just been holding my 1k lumen flashlight to them to tell water level lol

 

[tritonpower]

who's your most aggressive tang? I added a desjardini tang to the tank and my blue tang is beating it up. I didn't know they were that aggressive. He is a big fat tang. He tries to mess with the orange shoulder but that tang is the biggest and he doesn't stand for it.

 

[QuickrdenU]

who's your most aggressive tang? I added a desjardini tang to the tank and my blue tang is beating it up. I didn't know they were that aggressive. He is a big fat tang. He tries to mess with the orange shoulder but that tang is the biggest and he doesn't stand for it.

Idk. They all seem pretty chill surprisingly. Maybe keeping them fat helps… haha

 

[jayteerq]

Wow! This setup is beautiful! I just purchased a used 200ext and want to make my sump look like yours!