Tony's Reef
Community Member
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2018
- Messages
- 53
- Reaction score
- 105
- What state or country do you live in
- Oklahoma
What's up everyone, my name is Tony and I have a problem. I have been addicted to Reef tanks for something over 10 years I think. Does it really matter after your first tank? I didn't think so.
I started out as usual, the wife talked me into letting her have fresh water tanks. Things lived, things died, but the color just wasn't there. So I purchased a 55 and made it a saltwater tank. I was going to just do a FOWLR tank, but you know how that goes. I had to have coral. Before you knew it, the tank was over grown with Xenia, Mushrooms and GSP. 3 things I will never have in another tank. Well, I have GSP but doing more to keep it under control.
My current tank is a little 90 gallon with a custom made sump I built. I set this up 5.5 years ago and it recently had a pretty severe crash when the sump cracked from me dropping the edge of my custom acrylic ATO res onto the bottom portion. Wasn't sure if I wanted to continue in this hobby once that happened and tried finding homes for everything in the tank.
It ended up getting so bad that I killed the massive colony of Plating Monti I had in the tank. Thick green algae everywhere and when I would walk by the tank in the morning, I would ask myself "why in the world do I still have this thing"...
I ended up sealing up the cracks, I purchased a new DC return pump and DC powerheads all of which are controlled by my Apex. My configuration in my apex is a little overboard as most would agree and now the tank is doing better than ever.
I recently took something like 20 heads to a local coral shop and picked up quite a few new corals for the tank, all of which are doing great. If you are interested I can copy a post from my website and post it here. Pretty sure just linking to my site is against site rules lol.
I was worried though for a little bit last weekend that something was wrong, and it was. My Calcium was at 550 and my KH was around 11, but my PH was still down around 7.7 to 7.9 on a good day. I don't have a test kit for Mg so I figured I would calibrare my PH probe. Once that was done and I had two massive low and high spikes in Fusion, it settled at 8.45.... So my PH was never low and I have since adjusted my Kalk to let the corals consume some of the extra calcium and kh lol.
Yes, I still use Kalk. It works for me and I have no more room under the stand for two or three part dosing. I just test and adjust the Kalk as needed. And I have multiple failsafes in place in case something goes wrong.
So that is my introduction. Hopefully I can start posting now without my posts being moderated. I have run and still run multiple forums (on xenforo just like this one) and it feels very weird for MY posts to be moderated and not being able to do anything about it lol.
I started out as usual, the wife talked me into letting her have fresh water tanks. Things lived, things died, but the color just wasn't there. So I purchased a 55 and made it a saltwater tank. I was going to just do a FOWLR tank, but you know how that goes. I had to have coral. Before you knew it, the tank was over grown with Xenia, Mushrooms and GSP. 3 things I will never have in another tank. Well, I have GSP but doing more to keep it under control.
My current tank is a little 90 gallon with a custom made sump I built. I set this up 5.5 years ago and it recently had a pretty severe crash when the sump cracked from me dropping the edge of my custom acrylic ATO res onto the bottom portion. Wasn't sure if I wanted to continue in this hobby once that happened and tried finding homes for everything in the tank.
It ended up getting so bad that I killed the massive colony of Plating Monti I had in the tank. Thick green algae everywhere and when I would walk by the tank in the morning, I would ask myself "why in the world do I still have this thing"...
I ended up sealing up the cracks, I purchased a new DC return pump and DC powerheads all of which are controlled by my Apex. My configuration in my apex is a little overboard as most would agree and now the tank is doing better than ever.
I recently took something like 20 heads to a local coral shop and picked up quite a few new corals for the tank, all of which are doing great. If you are interested I can copy a post from my website and post it here. Pretty sure just linking to my site is against site rules lol.
I was worried though for a little bit last weekend that something was wrong, and it was. My Calcium was at 550 and my KH was around 11, but my PH was still down around 7.7 to 7.9 on a good day. I don't have a test kit for Mg so I figured I would calibrare my PH probe. Once that was done and I had two massive low and high spikes in Fusion, it settled at 8.45.... So my PH was never low and I have since adjusted my Kalk to let the corals consume some of the extra calcium and kh lol.
Yes, I still use Kalk. It works for me and I have no more room under the stand for two or three part dosing. I just test and adjust the Kalk as needed. And I have multiple failsafes in place in case something goes wrong.
So that is my introduction. Hopefully I can start posting now without my posts being moderated. I have run and still run multiple forums (on xenforo just like this one) and it feels very weird for MY posts to be moderated and not being able to do anything about it lol.
nice tanks and thank you for taking the time to introduce yourself 
