This weekend I filled up my new 200 gal saltwater mixing tank and let her rip. Took forever to fill it… going to have to upgrade that RO/DI unit soon!
The Kamoer autochanger is currently set to do 4gals/day water change. Been working flawlessly. It’s definitely got a high pitched stepper motor sound to it but I feel that’s the norm these days with those pumps. And when you’re water changing, you have the ability to pull old water/pump new water at the same time so that doubles the pump noise. I’ve set it to run during the day so I can monitor for a little bit but once I feel comfortable with it, it’ll be set for a night time water change while I’m sleeping peacefully.
Replaced the media in both Calcium Reactors, the Dastaco and the Reef Octopus on the backup system. Been burning through media lately which is a good sign.
I’m still recovering a bit of color from the nitrates bottoming out in the display but seems to be headed in the right direction. The backup system has been doing its thing lately and it’s a joy to see it get back to form after fighting dinos in it for 2-3 months over the Fall/early winter. Made a note to myself to take things slow even with frag/colony additions. I got carried away when I added the two new frag tanks to that system and stocked them almost immediately and I paid for it with months of dinos and dying colonies. Lesson learned! Acros, torches, Colorado Sunbursts, montis, mushrooms…all going nuts in that system. Waiting on the gonis and mushrooms to catch up.
My next steps include continuing to clean and organize the frag tiles/frag racks. Switching to all black eggcrate for the frags and placing eggcrate underneath the tiles of the colonies.
Also, I’d like to take my current ATO tank for the display that I use Kalk in and go to using it for only kalk addition throughout the day to stabilize pH and separate the topoff function from it. I’ll have a DOS dose kalk lightly during the day to keep up the pH and more heavily at night to balance the swing. To replace my ATO function, I’ll be picking up another 200g vertical mixing tank from a local today and installing it in the garage next to the saltwater mixing tank. This one I’ll fill with just plain RO/DI water and have two pumps installed in it to top off both systems, allowing me to have one giant reservoir for topoff for both systems and minimizing how often I have to fill up the 2 separate topoff tanks like I used to before. It used to be a once every 3-4 day event for the backup system which got annoying. Hopefully it turns into a once every month event now with the 200 gal tank of topoff water.
Proof of life as always!
