My 10 gallon reef office project

I use frozen mysis for mine too but I don't know how much good it is doing for my acans, hammer, bubble, or brain. Do you put them directly on them?
 
I turn off the filter and the koralia prior to putting the food in. One cube usually lasts me a week. I feed every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with a third of the cube. I slice it with a razor and just put my hand in the water and rub my fingers together breaking it all up as it defrosts in my hand and I put it all over the top of the tank. The mysis basically is just being sprinkled all over top of the corals. On Tuesday and Thursday I put a cube in a small plastic container with some tank water. And after I feed my fish, I'll spot feed each head on the acan, blasto, duncan, and hammer coral.

I'm not sure if this is too much or not. And once I get the cyclopeze, I don't know how I'll fit the cyclopeze into the mix.

This would make a good thread though.
 
First one is a meteor shower cephastria. Nice specimen.
Second is a duncan polyp with some type of acro behind it.
Third is another colored stick. I don't know the real name.
Fourth another colored stick.
Fifth, Looks like a cat's paw. Can't remember the name off the top of my head, I think it's a pavona of some type but not sure. There is also a mycedium chalice coral there. Nice looking specimen for sure.
Sixth is a birds nest with some crazy branches.

I wonder if you're going a little fast for all those corals, but it's looking good. If the tank crashes, it won't be because of the addition of the corals. It will crash due to a normal cycle and the corals may not survive it. It takes a while for a tank to mature to where it can support some of those corals. However I have hope that you'll be fine.

Good luck,
Aaron
 
Nope it's a meteor shower Cyphastria
meteorshower_cyphastrea.jpg
 
I agree that the coral additions are happening too quickly. Unfortunately it has been unavoidable. I'm not buying these coral frags. The only corals I've bought are the hammer, the zoas, and the duncan. Everything else I received in trade for a handful of snails.

Right now my focus is on lights. I'm in the middle of a dilemma.

I can replace the Odyssea stock bulbs with 4 Current T5 HO TruLumen bulbs.

1 - 420 Nm Blue Actnic
1 - 12000K Daylight Bulb
1 - 460 Nm Blue Actnic
1 - 12000K Daylight Bulb

or

I could buy one PAR38 BULB - The new 20K (7) LED Bulb with 80 degree optics.

I could run the PAR38 with the T5s or run the PAR38 by itself.

Any suggestions?
 
1)Meteor Shower
2)Cali Tort
3)Red Planet
4)Green Slimer
5)Pink Boobies-look-a-like
6)Pink Birdsnest
 
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New update

New update

I decided to purchase one PAR38 LED bulb.

The bulb is rapidled.com's 7 LED 20K bulb with 80 optics.

I plan to give this a try:

I will be using my same T5 fixture and using the PAR38 on a bending arm socket that attaches to the desk. I plan on positioning the bulb on an angle so it shines on 45 degree angle in the front of the tank. So some of the light will be shining through the opening between the T5 fixture and the rim of the tank. The rest will be shining through the front glass.

I attached a drawing I made in paint to illustrate what I mean. The picture is a little rough but I think you can get the idea.

Please comment and share your ideas, concerns, and of course, your $0.02

sketchoflightconfiguration.png
 
Do you not like the color of your lights as they are now or do you think the bulb will help the growth of some of those sps?
 
With such a shallow tank, I think you may be at risk of burning some of your corals with the PAR38 unless it's up fairly high. I think this may be true even with the 80* optics. Ask about that in the PAR 38 thread in the lighting/filtration forum, perhaps?

I have a bit of concern regarding the prospect of success with the SPS corals. It is so hard to maintain water parameter stability in such a small tank. High phosphates and nitrates may be the biggest hurdle, though, particularly if you continue to feed the tank so much.
 
iwishtofish said:
With such a shallow tank, I think you may be at risk of burning some of your corals with the PAR38 unless it's up fairly high. I think this may be true even with the 80* optics. Ask about that in the PAR 38 thread in the lighting/filtration forum, perhaps?

I have a bit of concern regarding the prospect of success with the SPS corals. It is so hard to maintain water parameter stability in such a small tank. High phosphates and nitrates may be the biggest hurdle, though, particularly if you continue to feed the tank so much.
Click to expand...

I didn't know that it was possible to burn corals. People do metal halide lighting over ten gallon tanks all the time. And I was told that I would have to do two of these bulbs in order to equal the light intensity of a 150watt MH. The information given may have been false though. I was told in the lighting forum that I may need 2 PAR38 bulbs to light the ten gallon tank. This is the reason I was gonna keep using the T5 fixture along with it.

How much do you recommend I feed the tank? All I have in there is the one damselfish and a bunch of snails. Other than that, just corals.

Let me know on everything please.
 
SaltSolutions1 said:
I didn't know that it was possible to burn corals. People do metal halide lighting over ten gallon tanks all the time. And I was told that I would have to do two of these bulbs in order to equal the light intensity of a 150watt MH. The information given may have been false though. I was told in the lighting forum that I may need 2 PAR38 bulbs to light the ten gallon tank. This is the reason I was gonna keep using the T5 fixture along with it.

How much do you recommend I feed the tank? All I have in there is the one damselfish and a bunch of snails. Other than that, just corals.

Let me know on everything please.
Click to expand...

Regarding the PAR38s, I was warned that when I put my two PAR38 12ks over my shallow frag/refugium portion of my sump, I'd need to be careful not to have them too low for risk of burning (too much light, perhaps too suddenly) my corals. I meant my statement to convey speculation rather than personal experience, as I haven't actually got my lights up and running yet. :) Mine are 40* optics, though, so I'm not positive how much difference that would make. There are still a lot of unknowns about LEDs, so I'm going to start with mine as high as they can go in my stand, and experiment from there.

A lot of the photosynthetic corals do pretty well with just light and catching residual food or organisms from the water column, so I'd be really wary of routinely spot feeding them. All that food has to go somewhere, and, unless you have some wicked flow, much of what's not eaten will not make it to your mechanical filtration. Instead it may come to rest somewhere in your rock piles, and may or may not be eaten quickly by your CUC. I'd feed just enough daily to give your fish a few bites (can it swallow the mysis?) and maybe target feed a few morsels to any shrimp you may have. Be careful with cyclopeeze - a tiny bit goes a LONG way, and most of it may never be consumed and end up decaying in your tank. I would thaw and rinse your mysis in RO water to remove the liquid in which it is frozen - I have read many times that it is likely laden with phosphates.

It is so easy to overfeed, and hard to resist the thought that a little bit might not be enough. I believe I pretty much ruined my 29g tank due to overfeeding.
 
iwishtofish said:
Regarding the PAR38s, I was warned that when I put my two PAR38 12ks over my shallow frag/refugium portion of my sump, I'd need to be careful not to have them too low for risk of burning (too much light, perhaps too suddenly) my corals. I meant my statement to convey speculation rather than personal experience, as I haven't actually got my lights up and running yet. :) Mine are 40* optics, though, so I'm not positive how much difference that would make. There are still a lot of unknowns about LEDs, so I'm going to start with mine as high as they can go in my stand, and experiment from there.

A lot of the photosynthetic corals do pretty well with just light and catching residual food or organisms from the water column, so I'd be really wary of routinely spot feeding them. All that food has to go somewhere, and, unless you have some wicked flow, much of what's not eaten will not make it to your mechanical filtration. Instead it may come to rest somewhere in your rock piles, and may or may not be eaten quickly by your CUC. I'd feed just enough daily to give your fish a few bites (can it swallow the mysis?) and maybe target feed a few morsels to any shrimp you may have. Be careful with cyclopeeze - a tiny bit goes a LONG way, and most of it may never be consumed and end up decaying in your tank. I would thaw and rinse your mysis in RO water to remove the liquid in which it is frozen - I have read many times that it is likely laden with phosphates.

It is so easy to overfeed, and hard to resist the thought that a little bit might not be enough. I believe I pretty much ruined my 29g tank due to overfeeding.
Click to expand...

Thank you so much for all of the great information. I will be careful with the PAR38 and use it sparingly and from a distance at first and use discretion until I find its "sweet spot".

As for the feeding, I will be rinsing the mysis in distilled water from now on and only feeding very little.

Do you think I'll be okay with feeding only mysis? I haven't bought the cyclopeze yet. I could just use that money for more mysis when I need it.
 
SaltSolutions1 said:
Thank you so much for all of the great information. I will be careful with the PAR38 and use it sparingly and from a distance at first and use discretion until I find its "sweet spot".

As for the feeding, I will be rinsing the mysis in distilled water from now on and only feeding very little.

Do you think I'll be okay with feeding only mysis? I haven't bought the cyclopeze yet. I could just use that money for more mysis when I need it.
Click to expand...

Are you sure the PAR38 is a good fit for your tank if you leave the T5s in place? If you raise it up to any height, you'll be mostly lighting the top of your T5 fixture and the outside of the tank. If you keep it low enough to shine most of its light through the gap, you'll probably have a very narrow beam of effective light in your tank, and likely over-light anything in that beam. Just food for thought. Remember, these are spotlights, and most people keep them kind of high.

No reason not to get cyclopeze - just use it VERY sparingly. I remember I used to dip the tip of the cyclopeze stick in my tanks water and see a cloud of the stuff come off. Unless you target feed a few specks, I just don't see your corals snagging the majority of it. I think people who can use it effectively are those with big tanks and a lot of mouths to eat it. And a really good skimmer to suck up the waste.
 
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