it has been a really neat upscaling test to apply actions used in that vase to much more complex reef tanks.
it's astounding how tenets like ammonia control/basic cycle functions in reefs/ don’t change much when working with a 1 gallon vase with no fish to a -> 1000 gallon tank with sixty+ fish...all of us are stacking copious degrees of high surface area rocks right in the middle of a display, bioloads v dilution are pretty close constants among reef tanks regardless of size, we push water across the stack of rocks to a high degree 24x7 so the resulting ammonia command is within a very tight group down to the thousandths ppm nh3 across nearly all reef tanks I've ever seen on a seneye machine regardless of size or layout details.
reef tanks trend towards the same basic ammonia control because of how we all copy build designs from one another.
if someone has a reef tank post-cycle, it's running ~.001-.006 ppm nh3 99% of the time (if they have a calibrated seneye to see this detail) and that's an incredibly tight range to wind up with whether we're talking about a tiny vase reef or a large zoo display reef. it's amazing how scaled + linked our tanks are regarding ammonia control...that specifically means there are new care boundaries we can push to get better lifespans out of post- cycle reef tanks and this science is how I got that tiny reef out to year 17.
if we're able to enact deep cleaning on reef tanks and never lose control over a cycle, that means we can take new directions from years prior where everything was a touchy/crash risk since API would output .5 ppm ammonia just by any common tank interaction such as moving a rock to the other side of the tank as a rearrangement.
pure control over the reef tank cycle translates into ability to span decades in lifespan, that tiny vase above is a test model reef.
back when API ammonia ruled the cycling game, we were trained by it to think that reef tank cycles ranged wildly tank to tank so our care methods were restricted, this reduced the lifespan potential of reef tanks because our actions were limited across the board. Any type of ’stuck’ reef tank cycle we see doesn’t come from seneye owners, those posts come from api and Red Sea ammonia kit owners 99% of the time and this really means something to the advancement of reef tank cycle control science.
what free ammonia does and by when in a reef tank is highly predictable now due to the emergence of highly accurate digital ammonia test kits- seneye- we now cycle thousands of reef tanks online without any testing at all: that's no testing for ammonia, nitrite or nitrate, and I have the results on file in massive work threads running 8-9 years apiece collecting hundreds of reefs for pattern truthing and outcome tracking.
we know how long ammonia takes to stabilize in a common reef tank cycle per # of days the tank has been running, there isn't a need to test the traditional cycle big three params any longer (this eliminates misreading test kits and stumbling from the reef cycling process)
We factor the type of cycle arrangement against an already known timing date for ammonia control to set in…the keeper adds the rocks, adds the ingredients for the type of cycle they want, and counts the number of days and it’s cycled. (Ever notice how all cycling charts in books or online have a nearly exact ten day ammonia drop date, across all charts? that’s for a reason. Can anyone search online and find me a seneye cycle that wasn’t done by day ten? I’ve been looking for seven years for a mere set of two and can’t find them)
this is the evolution of reef tank cycling just like all other aspects of reefing have evolved since 2000, the end result is a super old pico reef
to take an expensive or very old full size reef tank fully apart and wash out all it's sand, wash it's rocks, and put it all back together without killing any corals or fish is a direct example of cycle control utilizing the new discoveries. because all reef tanks are linked in cycle ability by the ratios they copy in every setup, we can predict what a cycle will do even before the reef tank is built, or while it's running, without any testing, and we can implement cleaning steps that don’t harm the cycle and buy years of additional lifespan time for home reef tanks in distress
any seneye owner is absolutely welcome to audit the method and post their readings at any time, I love me some seneye ammonia readings from reef tanks.
