it's finally begun...

i sold the deltec kalk stirrer. i needed money and wanted a sealed unit so i could dose the tank directly and not have to gravity feed to the sump (mostly because my return pump runs hot and clogs up with kalk easy). but for the time being (can't decide if i want to make one or buy one), i've just been tossing kalk directly into my topoff. my tank has finally taken off. i went the past year with the deltec stirrer (along with a calcium reactor) with no coralline growth on my glass. within 3 days of taking the deltec offline and just dosing from a pre-mixed reservoir, i had specks all over my glass. and corals took off, growth and colorwise. pretty ****ed at myself for wasting a year on bad kalk...

i'm not saying the deltec was a bad piece of equipment, i think my problem with it i wasn't dosing enough through it, so that because it wasn't sealed it was going bad faster than i was dosing. had i been dosing more, it would have been fine (though still not remotely worth the $420+ they are new). i was doing ~8 liters a day via a litermeter.

these pics are under 10K bulbs, no actinics. i got some VHOs to add on, but have been too lazy to wire them up.

balibali.jpg


hotness.jpg
 
Two pictures thats all we get? Come on feed our addiction...for those of us who arent local anymore we at least want a FTS!
 
8liters a day!!?? geez, that seems like an aweful lot.

i'm going through about 1g of each of the alk & calcium mix per month (maybe a little more than a month).

your purple monster is looking pretty good!

i agree with jonathan, you are long overdue for some more pics!
 
Dont think that is his purple monster I am pretty sure thats a deepwater piece we picked up from Marvin.
 
once everything else gets used to the new 10K lights i'll get some more pics up. plus i want to restack all the rock, the way it's stacked now i can't cover the whole thing with just the 2 vortechs. kinda wish i had gotten a waveysea back when i had money.

yup, that's a random deepwater that we got from marvin. it's been through a lot, and has regrown from just 2 polyps. i'm kinda curious to see what other frags of it have done for the richmond kids, just to see what a colony looks like. the PM didn't make it. it never really looked right, and had some spots on it so i dipped it. when i hit it with the turkey baster a film (not just slime) came off the whole thing, which i've never seen before. it held two weeks or so, then receeded some and i trimmed it, then it went another week or two, had to trim again, then finally died. there's a store in virginia beach that has them cheap so i'm not too worried. too cheap actually, i kinda want to do some background checking to see if they really are the real thing before i grab one.

8 liters isn't that much, considering i have almost 14 square feet of surface area between the sump and tank, with 2 fans blowing over the display and 1000w of lighting all day.
 
that sucks about the PM, chris lost most of his too apparently.

when did you get the deepwater from marvin?
 
I got that piece when I was still in B-Burg sometime during my last semester I gave Matt a piece when I moved then I lost my piece during the move so it has been around for probably a little more then a year...correct me if I am thinking of the wrong piece Matt. But it was a ridiculously small frag that I originally gave Matt and like he said it was like two polyps.
 
matt,

how do you get all the kalk to settle out of your top-off. i've been cheating also and just mixing it in w/ my top-off, but it always has "flakes" floating on top.
 
the flakes on top are actually a good thing. that's formed by CO2 combining with the kalk. which is a bad thing, since this is what makes kalk go bad. but in this case, as long as you don't stir it up, it acts as a protective shield that keeps any more of the kalk from going bad.
 
not till this fall when i put it back up.

the sandbed started going funky (southdown sucks) so i pulled it out and things weren't happy with that so decided to break it down for the summer and stick all my fish and corals over at a few different people's tanks. it was perfect timing really. i'm going to be on the road alot this summer (maybe a month straight), i was afraid of summer heat now that i'm running 250s from 175s (which were hard enough to deal with last summer), and i've been wanting to cook my rocks for a while now (they are over 12 years old).

for kicks i'm gonna put a few freshwater fish in it for the summer. just some neons, hatchets, corys and few rams. not so many that i can't move them into a 40br when i go back to salt.
 
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