Hey guys! Sorry, it has been so long since my last post (hopefully someone else is reading this). I will post my parameters and pics tomorrow.
What's new: I added a
D-Flow chamber 2 basket that properly flows the water through the entire basket. It seems to be working as intended. I purchased the plug for the hole in chamber 2, but it both didn't fit, and the new chamber 2 basket plugs the hole on its own anyway. I moved the rocks around and updated my ATO from the piece of trash I made myself. I had added a scarlet skunk cleaner shrimp (I don't remember when but it wasn't today, just for the record). I also added 3 trochus snails which have eradicated the dinos from the sand, glass, and rocks. I also attribute the Destruction of the Dinos TM to the dosing of OceanMagik from
@AlgaeBarn . This is a solid product, and the tank is going insane right now. The Mexican fern, as pictured in my previous post, has branched out to insane levels, and I'm going to end up taking it all off the rock and planting it in the sandbed to have like a kelp forest kind of feel. That's everything that's new.
Inhabitants updates: Daxter is taking frozen krill (when he isn't a primadonna), and when he decides he's too good to eat frozen food like the rest of us, I take a ghostie out of the death row ghost shrimp breeding tank I have set up, and he eats that, talk about picky. My cleaner shrimp Jacques (... my wife picked the name she's a die-hard Disney fan) is doing great. I originally added him because I noticed what appeared to be ich on the damselfish. Within a minute of being in the tank, he pulled the damsel in and started cleaning him, and in just a day or two, he was totally cured. Hooray for natural solutions!!! The damsel (Jackson) is still just a damselfish doing damsel fish things. The hermits like to climb on the Mexican fern macro and live life on the edge, then fall to the sandbed below.
The crisis: Today was absolutely insane, and I'm delighted my tank is on my desk, or this would have been a tragic day and not just a chaotic one. While installing the D-Flow chamber 2 baskets I followed the instructions and turned off the return pump and ATO. After installation, I felt that the water level was steady and plugged the ATO back in. The water level was very much not steady, and the ATO proceeded to do its job and dumped a ton of water into the tank to the point that the display part of the tank was quite literally bulging with water. I immediately unplugged the ATO and tested the salinity. It was around 1.022 or something. All I really saw was that it wasn't what I wanted and that it was low and went in to try not to let my tank die mode. I siphoned out about a gallon or so of water, tested the salinity again, and added 1/2 tsp of reef salt into the return pump chamber. I let it sit for an hour and hoped for the best. I tested the salinity again, and it had returned to 1.024, exactly where I wanted it. I got lucky this time; please learn from my mistake if you add the chamber 2 basket (which I 10/10 recommend as the current filtration method of the 13.5 is useless), give it some time before you turn your ATO back on.
Anyway, that's the update for today; as I said, I'll add pictures and post my flowsheet tomorrow. Let me know what you think!
