11/18 update: Tomini is still very very skittish, rarely is swimming about, though he goes from island to island. The midas blenny also hides a lot, if you didn't know any better, you'd say the tank was empty. The cleaner shrimp are doing very well, and we are starting to get diatoms. I may be putting an order in for some diatom eating snails, trochus and nerites are probably on the agenda, maybe 10 of each.
No idea if the pods are populating, but I continue to dose 30 ml of phytoplankton daily...and with the diatoms showing up, I may cut that back to twice a week (not to mention I'm almost out, and continuing to order it is going to get expensive).
I moved the algae scrubber over off the holding tank, and it's fully seeded with algae, the screen is very thick at the moment and it's on the agenda to clean today, along with doing a 25 gallon water change.
My original plan was to run the ATI essentials program, but with having 600 gallons of IO Salt in my basement, I'm toying with running this thing with IO. I've been using Red Sea Blue, but at $76 for 400 gallons of IO salt, and $72 for about 150 gallons of Red sea...i'm thinking it may make more financial sense to run using IO, and the BRS 2 part to maintain an alkalinity at 9.5, calcium at 430. my last batch of IO made up at 11.2 dkh.
I'm still a ways off from that but I'm in the planning aspect. The downside to the BRS 2 part is adding the trace elements, which is another 4 head dosing pump, though, I probably could do it by hand every sunday night (in all probability for a long time, would be 1-2ml of A B C D).
