We all have our weaknesses. Some of us have been in the hobby forever and crash and burn. Some of us are noobs and excel ~ you’ve got $$$
I’ve been off and on for 20 years and I can say that lighting is my biggest weakness. I don’t own a PAR meter. I run T5s and LED, but have no idea about how that affects my reef. I feel like a champ in the area of nutrition and parameters but I’m a loser when it comes to lighting.
What area do you wish to improve in?
Hi scottR , I have a white Aqua marine Reef 400 with sump skimmer, uv filter, phosphate reactor and refugium, for me I have been in the hobby for 3 years and have always had an issue with just my Nitrates from day one they have never been consistent, may be, am I still feeding too much! even though I feed mainly once a day, flake and pellets for the fish every other day, frozen food like Mysis and brine Shrimp
3 times a week sometimes substituting with blood worm or krill, I also rinse the frozen food with RO water to reduce any Nitrates that maybe introduced into the tank. Corals I feed 3 times a week with either Reef Roids or coral smoothie, I have 2 clown fish, royal gramma, 5 blue damsels, a carpenter wrasse, yellow watchman, pistol shrimp, cleaner shrimp, cuc and 3 tangs, yellow, blue hippo, Naso tang, which I feed nori sheets which I split into 2 x 4 inches which are fed, one at 11.30am and the other at 5pm. When feeding, I switch off my wave pump and return and I can see the fish eat everything in a couple of minutes especially the tangs, I spot feed the corals so there would be less spreading all over the tank. Nitrites and ammonia I can honestly say I would not have to check them , but I do only randomly.
I did have hair algae in the beginning and managed to get rid of it. Now what puzzles me, even though my Nitrates are high 40ppm I have never had any algae problems, but I do get a little detritus any suggestions would be well appreciated, by the way my lighting, I have recently bought the Orbit Marine 36”-48” IC Loop pro dual Led System w/Hub-Current USA it’s amazing it gives you the par readings from the surface down to the bottom on line. The light has a 24 hour ramping from dawn, dusk, daylight and moonlight spectrum. You can adjust the white light intensity as well as the blue, also you can add weather patterns and choose a percentage of when you want them on and for how long during the day. The cloud function, virtually starts scrolling from one end of the tank to the other also adding random lightning, it is pretty cool.
You can find the lights on Amazon.com if you are interested or you can just have a look, they have a video on there.
