Guttersnipe
Well-Known Member
Hi reef2reef! What was your aha moment with keeping sps and how did it happen?
Sps aha moment
- Thread starter Guttersnipe
- Start date
- Tagged users None
Shirak
Valuable Member
When I figured out that my LED uv and violet channels should be run at roughly the same % as rb and b because there is only one of each of those diodes compared to 3 for each of the two blue channels so you automatically get the proper intensity ratios between them... it was a palm to forehead moment..
Not starving them to near 0 no3 and po4. Higher nutrients and higher feeding with slightly higher flow pH and temp worked a treat. In the sea, the water tests near 0, but they have permanent access to fresh incoming food all the time. Not the case in our glass boxes
When I put corals in a shallow tub outdoors for the summer... growth and color just blew my mind even in a very short time. Also, when we went to the Coral Sea and watched some collectors work for the day - most of the assumptions that people make about where their coral came from are totally wrong. Both made me learn that these things evolved to work in nature and being most like nature still works the best.
Pretty hot. Had a chiller that had to run quite a bit - the whole thing was plumbed into a larger system. That was not the biggest issue. I had to pick a lot of leaves and bugs out all of the time AND the thing evaporated so much water that the salinity would change when I refilled the system with RO and you could not miss a day (ATOs were trash then). I wish that I had at least a screened greenhouse to put over it. I have not done it since.
C. Eymann
2500 Club Member
Getting flow dynamics right, back in 2002 when I first started keeping acropora, the only propeller style broad flow pump available was a $500 Tunze which a kid like me at the time couldn't afford, so I was using big Rios and maxijets to "fight" eachother to produce random indirect currents that weren't too harsh, it was kind of an art form getting the flow right with such limited means.
Once I found that sweet spot of pump placement/correct flow, that was my "ah hah" moment and started keeping sps/acropora successfully.
Once I found that sweet spot of pump placement/correct flow, that was my "ah hah" moment and started keeping sps/acropora successfully.
When I went away for four weeks. The glass was covered with green algae, but once I scraped it off, I saw that my SPS had better color and had grown more than at any point up until then. That's when it dawned on me how much I play around in my tank and all my tinkering to "make it better" ultimately reduce the stability of the tank. Since then, I've tried to keep my hands out of the tank as much as possible 
