What Is Something That Is Overrated In The Hobby?

[Reefkeepers Archive]

Gunna go ahead and disagree with you on this one. They come in red, green, blue, orange, purple etc. They also will encrust over rock work and they have much softer tissue which makes them fun to watch, especially when feeding. I like favias too though.

Micro lobophyllia

 

[Aquariumaddictuk]

I'll kinda/sorta add another(albeit with a caveat because I do own some)high end chalice e.g the Bugatti & rainbows etc.
Beautiful but dreadful ROI until they get going.
I guess you could argue they are a great investment piece once fragged but god some of them are slow growing.

 

[MDAquatics]

I'll get hammered but here it goes. Fleece rollers and UV.

Oh couldn't disagree more. I don't have a lot of skin in the game with UV and saltwater but they have been heavily successful for me in freshwater setups. As far as rollers go....theres nothing worse than dealing with filter socks all the time and changing floss regularly isn't much better. It's part of the deal in this hobby and come with the territory, but give me a roller that eliminates that and I'll take it any day of the week.

 

[jimfish98]

Who needs a dosing pump. Been doing it manually on my LPS dominant system for months, maybe eventually but not required

Congrats, you don't mind dosing and doing it manually. I don't care about dosing, see no need to dose, and don't dose. Hence my response being dosing in a thread about what I think is overrated. Nothing you have or will say is going to convince me that I need to jump on the dosing train with you. You enjoy buying the additives and spending that time on that. I prefer to spend my 20 minutes a week maintaining my two tanks and use the extra time to feed them and sit back in my office chair all day watching them swim while I put in my 8 hours at work.

 

[Reefkeepers Archive]

Congrats, you don't mind dosing and doing it manually. I don't care about dosing, see no need to dose, and don't dose. Hence my response being dosing in a thread about what I think is overrated. Nothing you have or will say is going to convince me that I need to jump on the dosing train with you. You enjoy buying the additives and spending that time on that. I prefer to spend my 20 minutes a week maintaining my two tanks and use the extra time to feed them and sit back in my office chair all day watching them swim while I put in my 8 hours at work.

Does your tank have any LPS? The setup I have drops 1 dkh every other day with the corals I have, but hey, agree to disagree

 

[Aquariumaddictuk]

Congrats, you don't mind dosing and doing it manually. I don't care about dosing, see no need to dose, and don't dose. Hence my response being dosing in a thread about what I think is overrated. Nothing you have or will say is going to convince me that I need to jump on the dosing train with you. You enjoy buying the additives and spending that time on that. I prefer to spend my 20 minutes a week maintaining my two tanks and use the extra time to feed them and sit back in my office chair all day watching them swim while I put in my 8 hours at work.

So just to clarify-do you think you will start dosing?

 

[jimfish98]

Does your tank have any LPS? The setup I have drops 1 dkh every other day with the corals I have, but hey, agree to disagree

It's not agree to disagree if you are still posing questions and putting out information to change my mind.

 

[brandon429]

Aquabiomics testing

 

[jda]

BRS Videos and articles, anything printed on the bottle of a supplement or product, ICP testing and chemicals rebranded for reef use. Most folks with YouTube channels. Build threads where people show me boxes, unboxing and routing cords and stuff.

 

[7of9]

BRS Videos and articles, anything printed on the bottle of a supplement or product, ICP testing and chemicals rebranded for reef use. Most folks with YouTube channels. Build threads where people show me boxes, unboxing and routing cords and stuff.

I actually love the cord routing pictures or videos. I'm a network engineer and something about some good cable management just scratches my brain in the best way. So, just send those pics to me!

 

[jimfish98]

BRS Videos and articles, anything printed on the bottle of a supplement or product, ICP testing and chemicals rebranded for reef use. Most folks with YouTube channels. Build threads where people show me boxes, unboxing and routing cords and stuff.

YouTube channels for sure. Dime a dozen for FW systems and eventually they become a circlej__k where they all make the rounds at the same place or visiting each other to bolster views. The fake excitement is cringy.

 

[The Roaming Reefer]

Complaining about prices and “high end” goods. Money funds innovation. If something is out of your price range, it doesn’t mean that it’s overpriced.

 

[jimfish98]

Complaining about prices and “high end” goods. Money funds innovation. If something is out of your price range, it doesn’t mean that it’s overpriced.

I think its more of a "the mark ups are unreal". Noted a few pages back that I wanted to buy some Caribsea LifeRock. At the LFS it was $175 with me carrying it out the door. Online I got it for $120 with free shipping to my door. If UPS charges about $36 to ship a 20lb box, assume mass shipping discount, probably $20-25 to ship. The vendor I got it from is netting about $100 from the sale and still making a profit worth their time and effort to literally move rocks. The mark up at the LFS shop then looks insane. Now with multiple vendors merging product lines, single companies are controlling the pricing a lot more and setting their own standards for pricing. When Product X and Product Y are similar priced you don't think its expensive until you realize Company Z owns both.

 

[exnisstech]

Oh couldn't disagree more. I don't have a lot of skin in the game with UV and saltwater but they have been heavily successful for me in freshwater setups. As far as rollers go....theres nothing worse than dealing with filter socks all the time and changing floss regularly isn't much better. It's part of the deal in this hobby and come with the territory, but give me a roller that eliminates that and I'll take it any day of the week.

UV has done absolutely nothing for me in two tanks. Correct flow not under sized etc. I can buy years worth of reef diapers for the price of a good but still may fail fleece roller. Pull the diapers toss em and drop new ones in easy easy. But what works for one doesn't work for all that's what's nice about having options.

 

[brandon429]

reef diapers can't help with dinos and algae, UV can though? UV may be preventing your tank getting an outbreak

 

[Northern Flicker]

Softies: Zoas, leathers, xenia, GSP, etc...

The "no water change" flex. Extremely overrated.

Rimless tanks.

LPS under blue lights that glow. Not hard. Just takes some blue light and money. Not impressed. Sorry not sorry

Who is overrating softies? Lol

I agree with the LPS comment

 

[The new fish on the block]

Aquabiomics testing

Just curious if you have an opinion on their live reef rubble. I have been thinking about buying some to add more biodiversity while I cycle my new tank.

 

[brandon429]

for sure. my opinion is this: never trust anyone's external evaluation of your fish disease safety protocol.

common pet store live rock is of equal value, smashed into rubble...because I would fallow prep it were it going into a marine fish tank I owned. a small section test of any substrate does not speak to the totality of that substrate, ab testing is selling people on a % likelihood

if I bought AB's rock rubble labeled as no disease, I'd then fallow prep it just to be sure.

same thing with Dr. Reef's qt prepped fish, best in the industry. if I bought fish from him, they'd then go into at minimum observational qt in my own home where I ensure all variables, sourcing from Dr. Reef and his initial preps is simply more prudent % likelihood success than buying from a fish store. until AB is able to sample the vast majority of an aquarium, vs .5%~ or less in my opinion, I think the hot words "dna" are doing the bulk of the sales.

I'm also skeptical because I have a large thread of ab's on hand where he says that caribsea live sand doesn't have any functional bacteria

yet in Taricha's currently running experiments forum thread he tests it as active, better at ammonia control out of the bag than some brands of cycling bac.

I don't keep marine fish, they're a hassle lol. but if I did I would never need a dna test of anything to reef with them for decades. it's a big huge massive fad in my opinion.

 

[jda]

If you want biodiversity, then IPSF.com has mud and critters for sale. This stuff has a long track record of happy customers.

 

[brandon429]

I don't think the technology is useless however. it's just a fad sales event for reef aquarists in my opinion.

where it's useful: in the old days pre dna testing, scientists had to take a sample, plate and incubate it out on selective agar in several steps, tease out colonies to identify clades present in a sample, and the technique was rife with cross contam risks etc- this is how we did it at the beef processing plant I worked at in the nineties. nowadays you can run a water droplet through that rna sequencing and get a real spread of clades present, percentages, with much tighter controls for studies

the ability is evolving and one day beyond today I think it will have implications useful for aquarists, so kudos to Eli for getting in first. as of 8/23/23 I deem it a total fad for aquarists though, I would never trust it to screen out or in something.

if we can't even know whether or not common sand can perform nitrification using dna testing then we're in the old west still.