Learning/rebuilding from my epic fail

I delivered this tank and it was a B*TCH to put in.

But I think it'll be worth it, in the end, because in my two years of working with Matt, there's at least one thing he knows and it's SPS. I just can't wait to see it stocked up.
 
trueblackpercula said:
so looking forward to this build good luck
Click to expand...

Thanks, Mike! I hope I do better than last time

jroovers said:
Jeez... there isn't much that makes me squeamish but those euchnid worms are at the top of the list of the things that do! I think maybe you have some insights as to your past tank's successes - the KISS method of reef keeping!
Click to expand...

Well, Jordan, I just spent an hour thumbing out a million word essay on my phone in one of these little response boxes and just as I was going to press submit reply, my phone crashed and I lost it all...
Kiss, absolutely. And not getting caught up in so much marketing, and trying to change to change things out of desperation because you changed something else a week previous and now you don't know why your corals look horrible because you've tried 9'different products and 3 different reefing methods in 3 months..
I'll try again to do a detailed description of my tanks downward spiral.. Maybe from a computer this time..
 

Well the tank is getting there.. Tomorrow, I'll add salt and the add my live rock and let it cycle for as long as it takes..
 
.Chris. said:
I delivered this tank and it was a B*TCH to put in.

But I think it'll be worth it, in the end, because in my two years of working with Matt, there's at least one thing he knows and it's SPS. I just can't wait to see it stocked up.
Click to expand...

Yep... The old back wasn't too happy getting it down the stairs..
You know, there was a time when I thought I knew sps.. Back when I did nothing but slap a system together and get lucky..
Not sure what I know anymore.. That's what this build thread will be about..
 
Your old reef has become my new favorite!! look forward to seeing this current build come together it's going to be awesome I'm tagging along btw. :)
 
reefmutt said:
Yep... The old back wasn't too happy getting it down the stairs..
You know, there was a time when I thought I knew sps.. Back when I did nothing but slap a system together and get lucky..
Not sure what I know anymore.. That's what this build thread will be about..
Click to expand...

Well, I don't know squat, I'm flying blind with my tank and going to let it take me on a ride.

Maybe I'll learn something from this thread.
 
.Chris. said:
Well, I don't know squat, I'm flying blind with my tank and going to let it take me on a ride.

Maybe I'll learn something from this thread.
Click to expand...

i hope so..you and me, both....


so, this current system was only a slight departure from how i had been setting up reef tanks forever.. in keeping with the modern era of reefing and wanting to save money and heat issues i went with led lighting. ghl mitras- amazing lights period.
i kind of consider around 2010 to be the beginning of the modern era of reef keeping.. fully controllable systems, bacterial driven, led lit, bare bottom, minimalist scapes, information everywhere, numbers, numbers numbers..
from about the early 90s, when i started keeping a reef up until the around 2010, i like to call the industrial age of reefing.. mh and vho were just coming onto the scene as well as the concept of plenums and then dsbs for controlling nitrate.. before that, it was really the dark ages..
when i first read about plenums and denitrification in those old bibles; Advanced Aquarist and Reef Keeping magazines, (print editions.. gasp..) it was a game changer.. i watched my hair algae just disappear from my tank.. it was amazing..
when i finally set up that 300, i had a good plan for success.. (having set up two or three other pretty successful reefs in the 90s and 00s) huge tank, huge lighting, remote dsb, huge fuge, huge skimmer, huge flow and huge fish population for feeding the corals... simple enough.. it worked quite well and i spent waaaaay to many hours peering over the top of my tank studying every subtle nuance in colour from every one of my precious corals.
so, when i set up my current system, i went with dsb in baskets for easy partial exchange to keep the sand bed renewed but also mature at all times. i had a cheato fuge, very good skimmer- rlss bd10i, closed loops and tunze streams and my leds.
the tank did very nicely at first, but i had a couple of small issues. i had slow growth and i found that although many of my corals were colouring up well, some just didn't look the way i expected them to look.. was this lighting related or water chemistry related?
I pulled out my brand new po4 test kit (amongst all the others) and found that my p was around .1-.15 and n was 0.. i wasn't entirely unhappy with my corals, but knowing my p made me unhappy with my numbers.
having been out of the hobby for a couple of years and having not ever tested in my old tank, i suddenly had information to act upon which i never had in the past...
i tried to figure out where it was coming from.. my old live rock, reactor media, ro unit..too much food..
around this time i discovered a fantastically informative thread in the advanced forum called "dosing nitrate to reduce phosphate" i think i have learned more in that thread than in most of my high school years.. it was realy informative but it sent me on a course of tinkering with my system.. i tried adding nitrate by removing my fuge and then my sand beds, i began using tons of rowaphos, played with vinegar and biopellets, but never really kept to one method..
then i got into trace elements for better colour and amino acids and kz products and i completely lost track of all the changes i was making in my tank.. i added some t5 tubes back on the tank, watched p go up and down, n go up and down i watched some corals do ok and others rtn here and there, but nothing crazy.. somewhere around here, i discover another amazingly interesting and informative thread by Thales called "Guess the Phosphate Level" which in some ways is the antithesis of 'Dosing Nitrate to reduce phosphate" but in other ways they go had in hand...
then i decided to change all of my rock in the tank in hopes of removing the source of p and i also realized that i had added to much magnesium to my reactor media and had a magnesium level of about 1700-1800.. so i replaced the reactor media with a different type and replaced all of my rock just in time for a buddy to ask me if i wanted to go in on a big shipment of acropora since i had a fairly new and empty frag system waiting to be filled up....so what do i do?? its like in the horror movie where the sexy young girls decide that it makes more sense to go into the dark basement instead of out the front door to sunshine and freedom..
now i have a fragile and unstable system full of fresh acros and i am adding a slurry of products that are supposed to make my corals perfect.. well as they started to get rtn and stn, i pulled only a few out to give to my buddy but ultimately, they almost all died over a 3 week period.. i knew what i had done but it was too late to bring them back, they were in shock..i was in shock..
about a week after mostly everything was dead, i noticed the drip, drip,drip...
i almost put a hammer through the tank...
at this point, i took a serious step back.. dragged my butt to get the leaking tank back to Miracles and totally ignored my frag system all summer. when i finally got word that my tank was on its way back, i began to pay attention to my system again..
i added some all in one biopellets to the system, let them get going for a couple of weeks, then i began adding a mixture of vinegar and calcium nitrate that i had from my last failed dabble in n additions.. this time i had practically nothing in the system except some fish and a few corals. i got my n up to 2 ppm by adding cano3 along with the biopellets running and over the course of 3 weeks i watched my chronically high p drop down to .03 where it sits now.
the system is currently stable at those numbers. I've added a few sps frags and they are doing great as are the sorry bunch of corals that survived the epic fail..

well.. it felt good to get that out.. not sure how good it felt to read it all..
so, now the question is where do i go from here..
i think the days of blissful ignorance are over.... its like the philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest, without anybody there to hear it, does it really make a sound?
i wonder if my old 300 gallon tank had .15ppm po4 all that time but the system was big and stable, so the corals did fine..or did better than fine, did great..
ok i'll stop there with that question and go to bed.

more to come!
 
reefmutt said:
i hope so..you and me, both....


so, this current system was only a slight departure from how i had been setting up reef tanks forever.. in keeping with the modern era of reefing and wanting to save money and heat issues i went with led lighting. ghl mitras- amazing lights period.
i kind of consider around 2010 to be the beginning of the modern era of reef keeping.. fully controllable systems, bacterial driven, led lit, bare bottom, minimalist scapes, information everywhere, numbers, numbers numbers..
from about the early 90s, when i started keeping a reef up until the around 2010, i like to call the industrial age of reefing.. mh and vho were just coming onto the scene as well as the concept of plenums and then dsbs for controlling nitrate.. before that, it was really the dark ages..
when i first read about plenums and denitrification in those old bibles; Advanced Aquarist and Reef Keeping magazines, (print editions.. gasp..) it was a game changer.. i watched my hair algae just disappear from my tank.. it was amazing..
when i finally set up that 300, i had a good plan for success.. (having set up two or three other pretty successful reefs in the 90s and 00s) huge tank, huge lighting, remote dsb, huge fuge, huge skimmer, huge flow and huge fish population for feeding the corals... simple enough.. it worked quite well and i spent waaaaay to many hours peering over the top of my tank studying every subtle nuance in colour from every one of my precious corals.
so, when i set up my current system, i went with dsb in baskets for easy partial exchange to keep the sand bed renewed but also mature at all times. i had a cheato fuge, very good skimmer- rlss bd10i, closed loops and tunze streams and my leds.
the tank did very nicely at first, but i had a couple of small issues. i had slow growth and i found that although many of my corals were colouring up well, some just didn't look the way i expected them to look.. was this lighting related or water chemistry related?
I pulled out my brand new po4 test kit (amongst all the others) and found that my p was around .1-.15 and n was 0.. i wasn't entirely unhappy with my corals, but knowing my p made me unhappy with my numbers.
having been out of the hobby for a couple of years and having not ever tested in my old tank, i suddenly had information to act upon which i never had in the past...
i tried to figure out where it was coming from.. my old live rock, reactor media, ro unit..too much food..
around this time i discovered a fantastically informative thread in the advanced forum called "dosing nitrate to reduce phosphate" i think i have learned more in that thread than in most of my high school years.. it was realy informative but it sent me on a course of tinkering with my system.. i tried adding nitrate by removing my fuge and then my sand beds, i began using tons of rowaphos, played with vinegar and biopellets, but never really kept to one method..
then i got into trace elements for better colour and amino acids and kz products and i completely lost track of all the changes i was making in my tank.. i added some t5 tubes back on the tank, watched p go up and down, n go up and down i watched some corals do ok and others rtn here and there, but nothing crazy.. somewhere around here, i discover another amazingly interesting and informative thread by Thales called "Guess the Phosphate Level" which in some ways is the antithesis of 'Dosing Nitrate to reduce phosphate" but in other ways they go had in hand...
then i decided to change all of my rock in the tank in hopes of removing the source of p and i also realized that i had added to much magnesium to my reactor media and had a magnesium level of about 1700-1800.. so i replaced the reactor media with a different type and replaced all of my rock just in time for a buddy to ask me if i wanted to go in on a big shipment of acropora since i had a fairly new and empty frag system waiting to be filled up....so what do i do?? its like in the horror movie where the sexy young girls decide that it makes more sense to go into the dark basement instead of out the front door to sunshine and freedom..
now i have a fragile and unstable system full of fresh acros and i am adding a slurry of products that are supposed to make my corals perfect.. well as they started to get rtn and stn, i pulled only a few out to give to my buddy but ultimately, they almost all died over a 3 week period.. i knew what i had done but it was too late to bring them back, they were in shock..i was in shock..
about a week after mostly everything was dead, i noticed the drip, drip,drip...
i almost put a hammer through the tank...
at this point, i took a serious step back.. dragged my butt to get the leaking tank back to Miracles and totally ignored my frag system all summer. when i finally got word that my tank was on its way back, i began to pay attention to my system again..
i added some all in one biopellets to the system, let them get going for a couple of weeks, then i began adding a mixture of vinegar and calcium nitrate that i had from my last failed dabble in n additions.. this time i had practically nothing in the system except some fish and a few corals. i got my n up to 2 ppm by adding cano3 along with the biopellets running and over the course of 3 weeks i watched my chronically high p drop down to .03 where it sits now.
the system is currently stable at those numbers. I've added a few sps frags and they are doing great as are the sorry bunch of corals that survived the epic fail..

well.. it felt good to get that out.. not sure how good it felt to read it all..
so, now the question is where do i go from here..
i think the days of blissful ignorance are over.... its like the philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest, without anybody there to hear it, does it really make a sound?
i wonder if my old 300 gallon tank had .15ppm po4 all that time but the system was big and stable, so the corals did fine..or did better than fine, did great..
ok i'll stop there with that question and go to bed.

more to come!
Click to expand...

Glad I'm not the only one who's gone down this road of doom :hmm3: Many $$ spent and lessons learned. I too read the Thales thread and would not recommend anyone follow his lead. The big crash is coming, just a matter of time.
 
Really pleased to see you getting the reef back up and running Matt, your last display was just beautiful mate :)
Doing what you already knows brings success isn't such a bad way to go at the end of the day Matt, over thinking and over reacting to things has brought all of us undone at one time or another in this hobby.
No one has better colored acros now than were around ten years ago yet overall equipment costs are through the roof in comparison. Spend your money on frags you can keep colorful rather than equipment that exists due to speculation and theories, oh and this hobby's thirst for gadgets and all manner of potions lol. seriously, no other hobby spends so much time and money trying to attain levels that have never been proven to benefit the actual hobby. :uhoh3:

I shall be following your journal like flies on a moose Matt :thumbsup:
 
Wow, that old tank is just gorgeous! Once again proof that there is something special in that Canadian water supply, LOL. Best of luck moving forward and I will follow along with everyone else, should be very enlightening looking at those past results.
 
Following.

I don't have the experience but I'm at the point of PO4 paranoia, dropping it with vinegar, playing with Kalk, doing too many things at once to sanely track, STN and RTN on some acros.

Glad to hear you are going at this again and I'll be looking forward to the progress.

As far as Thales thread goes, he is not wanting anyone to follow him, he just wants to know why it works. IMO.
 
Wow that was a lot of things going on a lot of us have been down that road for sure..my tank as of now I tried to make it as simple as much as possible so I can keep track of what is going on without chasing some problems I probably caused my self..your old tank was beautiful man you got a lot to live up too..keep the update coming its gonna be great for sure..
 
M007 said:
Glad I'm not the only one who's gone down this road of doom :hmm3: Many $$ spent and lessons learned. I too read the Thales thread and would not recommend anyone follow his lead. The big crash is coming, just a matter of time.
Click to expand...

man, I don't even want to contemplate the money...

i'm not so sure the crash is coming.. that tank has achieved a certain ecological balance..
balance, I think is really the key to reef health and longevity.. there are so many different balances that need to be achieved, it seems.. nutrient balance, chemistry balance, bacterial balance and with the balance there needs to be stability, but I guess those go hand in hand. Each helps achieve the other but if one goes off, it can derail the other...
 
biggles said:
Really pleased to see you getting the reef back up and running Matt, your last display was just beautiful mate :)
Doing what you already knows brings success isn't such a bad way to go at the end of the day Matt, over thinking and over reacting to things has brought all of us undone at one time or another in this hobby.
No one has better colored acros now than were around ten years ago yet overall equipment costs are through the roof in comparison. Spend your money on frags you can keep colorful rather than equipment that exists due to speculation and theories, oh and this hobby's thirst for gadgets and all manner of potions lol. seriously, no other hobby spends so much time and money trying to attain levels that have never been proven to benefit the actual hobby. :uhoh3:

I shall be following your journal like flies on a moose Matt :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

flies on a moose.. eyes on an acro.. lol thanks biggles. You are so right about the amount of potions and gadgets.. but hey if one can employ those potions and gadgets and make them work for them, more power to them... but as you point out, they are clearly not always a necessity..
these days, it is hard not to over think and overanalyze, however... there's a test for everything.. and when things are gong bad, they are useful to a degree..
the potions can be useful, sometimes as well, i think..
 
tripdad said:
Wow, that old tank is just gorgeous! Once again proof that there is something special in that Canadian water supply, LOL. Best of luck moving forward and I will follow along with everyone else, should be very enlightening looking at those past results.
Click to expand...

i think its all the beer we drink... once metabolized by the kidney, it becomes very concentrated with amino acids and has a perfect red field ratio!:lolspin:
thanks for the compliment! i hope (plan) to hear it about my current set up in the future.
 
markalot said:
Following.

I don't have the experience but I'm at the point of PO4 paranoia, dropping it with vinegar, playing with Kalk, doing too many things at once to sanely track, STN and RTN on some acros.

Glad to hear you are going at this again and I'll be looking forward to the progress.

As far as Thales thread goes, he is not wanting anyone to follow him, he just wants to know why it works. IMO.
Click to expand...

100% agreed about Thales... just makes you think..

don't get caught up in the madness.. it drives you crazy when corals start to die and it is then when you make desperation moves, but really, by the time a coral is rtning, the damage is more often than not already done, I'm my experience..
what is your p? i had mine over .2 for quite some time, near the beginning, before i really started doing crazy things and the corals were fine.. it was me that was not fine.. now is the time to stop everything and concentrate on only one course of action..
knowing your p is a good thing but knowing it compared to n i think is even more important. this allows you to use one against the other when employing a carbon source.. i very much like the vinegar/kalk combo.. can be very effective at lowering p, providing you have a little n in your system
feel free to throw up your numbers if you want any help..
 
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