So after tinkering with the skimz protein skimmer and getting it to work again, it hasn’t made any more weird noises and has actually started producing quite a bit of skimmate for there to be nothing in the tank. I just dumped out about a half a cup of dark green skimmate and cleaned it up. Within about an hour it made a new foam head and has produced a little more skimmate. I’m watching it as I type this. I’m pretty happy with this skimmer so far, the only thing that made me not like it the other day was the noises that it was making – but so far, so good. I don’t know why it wanted to do that for some reason. Anyways, I’m glad that it’s working properly now. I guess if someone wants skimmer pics, I’ll post them in a couple more days if there is some skimmate to be had. There is only two snails in the tank and I have been feeding a small pinch of new life spectrum pellets every day to keep the cycle going and to ghost feed, but it seems like a lot of excessive skimmate production just for that. I think a lot of it though is phytoplankton or hair algae spores, which is a great thing.
I ordered GFO from Amazon. I need to go to the hardware store soon and get the rest of the adaptors and the stuff to hook up the phosphate reactor. I think I might want to get the kalkwasser stirrer online too by the end of the month. The tank should start to be leveling out this next month and should be ready for some kalk to grow some wicked coralline algae in the oncoming months. I believe I might as well order two more of those 4” wide 14” long nylon or felt filters for the sump, so that I can have some extra so that I can wash the dirty ones. My goal is to have at least six so that four can be washed at a time.
I’m really not having any luck with pumps. The liveguard aquatics pump that I bought for my return pump still has that whirring sound. I’m considering replacing it with a Jebao DC return pump, so that I can control the pump and not have to worry so much about using the ball valve to regulate the water flow.
Another thing that I have to think about right now is trying to get a rainbow locline that is threaded for a 1” bulkhead so that I can drill a hole in it and it won’t drain so much water out of the system when the pump turns off. It makes me nervous how much the sump fills up when the power is off.
Apparently the LED light that I bought at Home Depot for the refugium is GREAT at growing hair algae. I’m pretty sure that it will be great at growing some macroalgae as well. I’m thinking about going with Caulerpa mexicana in the refugium so that I can just keep it pruned. I’ve never had any success keeping chaetomorpha algae.
Anyways, that’s just about it for now. I’ll post some pictures after I get my GFO and kalkwasser reactors online and when I start getting in some more interesting livestock.
