Whoa! It’s been a LONG time since posting. Life got in the way and I haven’t had much time to post. Here’s an update:
We were doing quite well until we added the powder blue. He brought velvet, which we originally thought was Ich... needless to say we lost some fish which in turn caused nutrient spikes and we lost coral. We had a bad algae bloom which was pretty gross and eventually, we got things back on track. dang fish.
we ended up feeding a medicated food and adding a UV sterilizer which stopped the spread. But we lost our clowns, PBT and starry blenny. Everyone else survived and I would say, that’s a win. Thank God for healthy fat fish with good immune systems. We have added quite a few fish and our stocking looks like this:
fox face
Yellow tang
Purple tang
Exquisite leopard wrasse
Melanarius wrasse
McCoskers fairy wrasse
Blue head wrasse
Scotts
Purple fire fish
Flame angel
Splendid dottyback
Sand sifting goby
1 male lyretail anthia
3 female lyretail anthias
Copperband butterfly
2 mocha storm clown fish
Inverts:
2 cleaner shrimp
1 ******* coral banded shrimp that if I catch him I’m flushing him
Sand sifting sea star
Brittle star that we never see unless I bribe him with food
Variation of snails
10 nasarrious snails
Blue and red leg hermits
feeding:
Fish are fed 4 times a day pellets
1 time a day they are fed a combo of mysis, frozen copepods, rods food, algae, calanus frozen, emrald entree, and marine cuisine
1 time a day they get a full sheet of Nori
2 times a week we spot feed the LPS with reefroids
supplements:
daily dose of NoPox on auto doser using Apex (we are still dialing this in to find what our tank needs)
Auto dosing Red Sea 2 part using Apex based on Trident readings
we also do auto water changes. We tried doing 1% daily water changes and didn’t like the results. We instead do 20% every two weeks or as needed if the tank isn’t looking awesome. We have found having a water change at the push of a button LIFE CHANGING. It takes 2 seconds to do and has been a huge part of our success. We have a 300 gallon tank outside that houses water. We have it plumbed to drain out of our washing machine drain. My husband understands more, but it’s pretty epic.
We are still running our T5/LED combo using VERY old original hydras and, so far, things look great! Our hope is to upgrade to G5 radions, but, we are saving for those.
We have added a LOT to the sump and cleaned it up a lot. We switched out our skimmer to an Aqumaxx. We added a hang on refugium that is growing macro algae and pods. We also switched out the old/dying return pump with an apex return pump. We drilled our fresh and salt containers and our RODI system got set up to auto fill. We moved our GFO and Carbon reactors to the garage to clear up space under the tank and set up our whole Apex system. We hired a LFS to help us with the heavy lifting/drilling/plumbing etc and he helped a ton with our Apex configurations. But, we have really wanted to stay hands on and try to do things our self as much as we can.
Testing:
Our trident tests Alk, Calcium, Mag
Our apex monitors PH, ORP, Temp (we have three things monitoring temp), and salinity.
I manually test Phospates and Nitrates
parameters:
Salinity: 1.026
Temp: 77.5-79
Nitrate 30 (working on getting these down)
Phosphate .18-.22 (again, working on getting these down)
PH 7.9 - 8.1 this is the biggest swing we get and I am considering dosing Kalk to bring this up closer to 8.3
Alk 8.8-9.5 we tend to hover closer to 9.1 or so.
Calcium 430-460
Mag 1370
i would look into octopus
