OP
OP
Sarah24!
2500 Club Member
Hello,
Umm sorta I guess would be a good answer lol. I dose alk and calcium daily (have to). I was at 1 tablespoon of each every two days. Now I dose 2.5 tablespoons daily just to keep the alk at 9 and calcium at 440. Mag I just started, when I tested and was at 1250 from the lfs. So I bought the redsea mag concentrated liquid version and burned the instructions (umm twice). Tested today or about four days later and I’m at 1400 which is right there for sps. I started very low so 20 ml day one then 30 day 2 then 40 day 3 then 50 finally then now I’m good so I’ll stop and retest in four days.
I have import export problem so I have to carbon dose, which now I’m back down to 15 ml a day and here soon 10 etc. which this is a daily must or will crash the tank.
Now trace elements I don’t normally do water changes mainly because well it wasted time on my tank. Now with that said I don’t suggest every one jump to my method. I’d rather do the water changes but doing 80 gallons a week and I still had 40 ppm nitrates was killing me.
Now I feed daily, but only five of the frozen little cubes for 15 fish. None of the food will last 15 seconds in the water before they gobble it up. I may need to boost my clean up crew to help break it down faster. I use filter socks and wash every two days, and then micro fiber pads right before return pumps, and twin uv skimmers.
I have strongly considered using the redsea color group as well and what ever else I’m missing for trace elements. I will stick to redsea for some things but if their instructions are anything like on their liquid magnesium they are so fired. So far corals grow like crazy, and doing good so I’m making slow changes because I kinda don’t wanna crash what I have. I don’t think my s300 eshopps skimmer is handling the work load. It’s the only one that would fit and says bioload up to 300 gallons heavy up to 200. Well I’m at probably 200 roughly, and with out carbon dosing I’d be 40ppm nitrates constantly.
So options, move everything to the 425 and start over, with a massive skimmer where id go 300 gallons over. But moving and transferring tanks I just hate. If the 240 wasn’t doing so well I’d just take the risk and do it. However, it is doing amazing (yes it has some minor problems) but for 16 months old it’s outstanding. The tank still probably needs to mature a little more. With that said, I will have to bite the bullet and just manage it. I don’t have enough room to swap skimmers or sumps out at all. I have no room to add a doser or not alone the bottles needed. As a point of fact lol @saltyfilmfolks i did clean the calcium reactor today but still won’t fit. Heaters, uv and skimmer take up a lot of space and I run twin returns. I have thought about doing a four stage canister filter. Been chewing on it, have some chambers for catching stuff and carbon media etc. yet that is simply an idea, and kind of a bad one. I really need to research it more, but wow this became long suddenly. If I ever get married my spouse will fall asleep on me. Anyway I do swap out like 15 gallons to 30 gallons to help with some trace elements but I have to dose.
I use fuel just to help the corals on some things but I feed them marine snow when hungry but stopped when the cyano blew out of control. So now I will either do that or reef roids for the corals. Boosting the alk to 9 or even 10 may not be such a bad idea, because it has really helped my sps. Now some softies and lps hate the low nitrates, so I wanna see if I can manage between 5ppm and 10 ppm with no darn cyano. I have found that 95% of my tank does better with some of that waste in there.
@NY_Caveman lol yes my hair was tied up and kinda thrown into a sloppy bun. It failed miserably and as I had both rocks in both hands lol hanging over the side with one foot on my step ladder, my hair just fell out into the tank. I looked like a wet dog that was sprayed with a fire hose. Then I had to put the rocks back lol and stupid fish thought I was seaweed and kinda yanked on it, (gonna serve them with chips soon). I didn’t have a towel handy well a big one. So I kinda ran to the laundry room and about fell down the hallway. Grabbed a towel and wrapped my hair up in it and then cleaned my floor up. Oh then I had the towel still wrapped around my hair and I had to move the rocks, stupid towel falls out and lands in the tank. That was fun (yeah let’s do that again). Not only was my hair soaked once again, but err so was the towels. I then went for blanket I had on the couch. Dried off, (couldn’t outside was pouring rain,) but then cleaned again but had rocks and coral back in place. Took forever to get everything out of my hair, and some reason really dries my hair out. So it took forever to recondition my hair. I was close to shaving all my hair off lol oh I was close. Love it but some days doing work on my tank with it, really makes it just hard.
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