blasterman789
New member
I decided to set up a small 10 gal softie grow out tank next to my main mixed tank about 6months ago. I've always had good luck with zoa gardens, growing them out fast, and there's always cash to made at swaps for this stuff. Plus, they are quite pretty and cost next to nothing to maintain.
Rock came from my main tank and established super fast. Even with me keeping the water on the dirty side nitrate values stay at a trace so the bio filter is working great. MP10 for circulation....it's the same formula for all my zoa / paly gardens that have grown great in the past including the same lighting.
This tank though has been a PITA from the start. Nothing has grown like I expected it, and paly size and extension has not been the best. I'm not a beginner at this - I can tell when corals aren't feeling right by looking at them. Water changes, etc didn't resolve the issue. Tank basically looked like a lot of beginner tanks with anemic grown, stunted skirts on palys and poor extension....except I'm not a beginner. WTH? dosing a bit of kalk had no effect.
Out of pure random intuition I dropped a wooden airstone in the tank with a hearty pump on it and things improved greatly in 24 hours. A week into the added airflow and things looked vastly better. Just to prove there wasn't correlation going on I stopped the pump, and within 24 hours things started looking weak again.
We all know the trick of running our skimmer air intake outside a window to get a few ticks of higher pH. I would like to think that's essentially what I did, except for my airpump sits two feet below this tank, and an MP10 2" below the waterline should be able to do this all on it's own. Hey, if it works it works, but I see a lot of tanks in this state of reef forums and this might be the same solution.
Rock came from my main tank and established super fast. Even with me keeping the water on the dirty side nitrate values stay at a trace so the bio filter is working great. MP10 for circulation....it's the same formula for all my zoa / paly gardens that have grown great in the past including the same lighting.
This tank though has been a PITA from the start. Nothing has grown like I expected it, and paly size and extension has not been the best. I'm not a beginner at this - I can tell when corals aren't feeling right by looking at them. Water changes, etc didn't resolve the issue. Tank basically looked like a lot of beginner tanks with anemic grown, stunted skirts on palys and poor extension....except I'm not a beginner. WTH? dosing a bit of kalk had no effect.
Out of pure random intuition I dropped a wooden airstone in the tank with a hearty pump on it and things improved greatly in 24 hours. A week into the added airflow and things looked vastly better. Just to prove there wasn't correlation going on I stopped the pump, and within 24 hours things started looking weak again.
We all know the trick of running our skimmer air intake outside a window to get a few ticks of higher pH. I would like to think that's essentially what I did, except for my airpump sits two feet below this tank, and an MP10 2" below the waterline should be able to do this all on it's own. Hey, if it works it works, but I see a lot of tanks in this state of reef forums and this might be the same solution.
