My 280g Custom upgrade.....

[Floyd R Turbo]

Now for the little critter
I was cleaning my overflow box over the weekend and removed the black acrylic insert and found this guy growing between the glass and the insert. This is by far the biggest bristle worm I have seen in my system.

I bet there's bigger ones. I bought 400# of rock from a system tear down and didn't have any place to put it so it ended up drying out in buckets in my driveway, and when I got around to powerwashing them I found bristleworms in the buckets that were over 16" long and almost 1/2" in diameter.

 

[SPotter]

It ended up being a tasty snack for my six line and yellow coris wrasse! I was going to toss down the sink but decided to give him a chance at survival. It was a little cruel but since I have never seen my wrasses actually eat any worms I wanted to see if they actually do. It made it about half way down before the coris came out and then the six line joined in. It was like a tug of war and gone in a matter of minutes. Their bellies were so fat I thought they were going to roll over.

 

[SPotter]

Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!!!! I will have some updates soon.....bedn busy making some chsnges to my system.

Sent from my SCH-I510 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Dustin1300]

Merry Christmas Steve. Looking forward to the updates.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S3 using Tapatalk 2.

 

[nightOwl]

Same to you and yours. Sorry I am late... I am finally back to the land of the connected. We look forward to the updates.

 

[SPotter]

Updates

Updates

I hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season this year. My struggles with keeping sps have continued and while at one point I thought my tank was too clean, now I am struggling with rising nutrients. My no3 reached 25ppm and po4 crept up to .08-.10. I have some pieces that I picked up recently that are holding on but I decided it was time to make some changes to the tank.

LIGHTING
I decided to go back to my original intensity settings on my LED and work my way back up with that. I am thinking about trying out 2 or 3 250w mh pendants to see how much heat will be an issue for me since my fish room gets pretty hot in the summer already. I am not saying that LED doesnt work because there are plenty of tanks on here with them that are very successful. I think my fixture is too strong for my tank and when I start playing with the intensities of the colors, it throws off the spectrums which in turn are effecting the corals. So my settings now are 25% white and 45% all other colors except for green....I have that at zero. I dont like what green does to the overall appearance of the tank....it seems to wash it out a little too much for my tastes.

AQUASCAPE AND SAND BED
My original sand bed was about 2" and after doing some reading, looking at some other threads and talking to some other members, I decided that it was probably doing me more harm than good. So, over a 7 day period I pulled out more than half of the sand that was in my tank. Now there is nice thin layer across the tank that is just enough to cover the glass. I could not believe how much detritus was being trapped under the rocks....which is a good segue into the rocks....

I pulled all of my rocks out (not all at once) and dunked them in and out of salt water from the tank to try and knock some of the built up detritus loose. With that, I could not believe how much detritus poured out of the rocks. The rocks went back into the tank but need to be reshaped and right now it looks pretty messy. I havent done that yet because I am waiting to see if my po4 levels drop.

During this time I also did massive water changes in the area of 450g's which helped with reducing my no3 down to 2-5ppm but my po4 has only dropped to .06. I have been testing po4 in the dt and the output of my gfo reactor and changing the gfo when the output matches the dt levels which right now is about 3 days so I am burning thru gfo like crazy. I do another dose of Lanthanum Chloride as soon as my 10 micron filter socks arrive. My concern is that my rocks are loaded with phosphates and leaching back into the water. My last resort remedy if I cant lower the po4 levels will be to remove the rocks in small portions at a time, dip them in acid, re-cure for a few weeks in a brute and then replace. I will repeat this until all rocks have been dipped, cleaned and re-cured again.

I have also put the algae turf scrubber back online to help with exporting the nutrients.

POSITIVE THINGS....
So my two surviving Bangai Cardinal babies that were discovered the night of the hurricane have grown nicely and they now have about 7 little brothers or sisters in the tank with them. It wasnt long after the first batch was discovered that I noticed the male had another mouthful of babies....poor guy cant get a break and must be starving. I may have to take the parent out and keep them in my frag tank because sooner or later my tank will be all Bangai's. Finally, I am really excited about this part. I had lost my pair of Japanese Masked Swallowtail Angels over the summer and I lucky enough to find a female for a local reefer. Then shortly after that I was at my LFS and they had a tragedy in the store with the pair that they had. The male jumped out of the tank and before anyone noticed this, it was too late. So they gave me a really great deal on the female plus I had a 33% off coupon which made it even better. Normally a pair of these go for $500 and up and I was able to get the pair under $300. Now for the good part, after having them for about a month, the larger of the two has started to make the transformation to a male and it has been amazing to watch. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get any good pictures of him.

So, 2012 has been a very challenging year and there have a few times recently I was ready to throw in the towel and have a very large guppy tank. I am optimistic about the changes I have made and I am hoping that 2013 will be a better year for the tank.

 

[Adamc1303]

Keep it up Steve your doing a heck of a job!

 

[SPotter]

Keep it up Steve your doing a heck of a job!

Thanks Adam.....my wife even gave me a boost this past week and said that there's no way I can give up now.

 

[Adamc1303]

Give up? What are you crazy?!?!?!?! I just cracked my tank! the one piece euro brace which is why I purchased the darn thing and I haven't started yet. No way you quit. I started with a 90 gallon tank purchased at the LFS. A few months later I purchased some hamilton MH pendents. when I got an Elos tank I got the Elos planet fixture which was amazing btw it's a shame they don't make them anymore. Anyway to make a long story short I got the light and was so excited so I set it up and hung it in like 15 min. I put the bulbs in and especially with an open top rimless tank naturally put my hands in the tank to move this and that. anyway I didn't put the protecting glass on the fixture because I just mounted it so I first wanted to see if I like the bulbs etc.. I never knew the glass had uv protection I though it kept water off the bulbs. Anyway I am looking at my tank as my hands are inside for like 15 min and i see corals melting, I didn't understand what was going on. I take my hands out of the 78 degree water and I got a 2nd degree burn on my entire arm from my shoulders down! That's right my arm was being burned and I didn't even notice it. So yeah allot of dumb and embarrassing stuff happens in this hobby but at then end it's worth it. Imagine going to work in the winter and explain to people why your arm is burned. I look like a total dumb a$$. I really like your tank, do not quit and if you do I am not buying anything from you for any price even though your local because I do not agree with you quitting! Your tank inspired my build, I promise, you and prop frags.

 

[SPotter]

Now thats a crazy story and a painful one I am sure!!!! I dont think I could ever quit since it would be nearly impossible to get the tank out of my basement but I have thought that maybe SPS just arent for me and that I am better off with LPS or just fish only. I think part of the problem continues to be me and I am my own as well as my tanks worst enemy I think at this point my two biggest issues (besides me) are my lights and not being able to come up with a good configuration and phosphates.

 

[Dustin1300]

Steve, keep your head up. We all have losses and problems of our own, we just don't always share for the embarrassment. Like any other hobby or form of entertainment, we just have to have the expectation that sometimes your just throwing money into the tank and watching it wither away. I'm not 100% successful on SPS but sure wish I was but if this hobby was not a challenge it would be no fun. I just lost 90% of a large colony of Palmers Mille and pretty upset about that but could not ever make it happy in my tank.

My top horror stories to make you feel better:

- Nuking 80% of tank by leaving LMIII topoff of Limewater which caused major alk/PH spike killing off most of my SPS and flooding my dining room and ruining many things in basement below tank....
- Shocking myself with heater gone bad in QT
- Killing a few hundred dollars in fish in QT because of accidental Copper OD

We've all been there, we've all made mistakes but you're on the right track. Stick with a few canaries in your tank, figure things out and don't buy coral until everything is straightened out. Keep easier SPS and move to more and more difficult species. Your tank is still immature and you have things you're still straightening out, I have a feeling in 2013 you'll have better success!

 

[Newbie Aquarist]

I agree with Dustin. We as reefers always have our ups and downs. But what makes us real reefers are not the mistakes we made or frustrations we have, its the way we rebound and take the time to find the right solution and be patient enough to where we are back on top of our game again. Its all about time and patience.

How you and your family had a great Xmas. 2013 will be our new year.

 

[roni]

Steve,

I'll echo the others. My tank has definitely had ups and downs this year, including a 3 month period where nothing got done other then feeding due to work and some health issues. Things I've done are to really stop worrying about getting new pieces and working on growing everything I have and then getting back into a routine in terms of maintenance.

I've also started pulling my sand bed in the main display and spraying the rocks with a turkey baster occasionally, which may help limit those pockets of decay that seem to lead to elevated nutrients.

 

[SPotter]

thanks for the encouragement. Here are some pictures.....

before sand removal

this is the night i cleaned out the left side

cant really see it in this picture but the grey areas on the sand are detritus. it was caked on everywhere. looked like the ashes in my fireplace

Misc shots

Finally the after.....i had to blindly place the rocks back into the tank because it was so cloudy i couldnt see the bottom of the tank from the top of my ladder. I am leaning towards a more open look and will build 2 or 3 pillars. I will work on the final design once I make my decision whether or not I will dip and re-seed my rock.

Sent from my SCH-I510 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Adamc1303]

Looks good I like the left island the way you setup that rock to the far left.

 

[Newbie Aquarist]

Three islands sound cool. Maybe even tower islands?

 

[SPotter]

Looks good I like the left island the way you setup that rock to the far left.

That is a massive piece of shelf rock that probably weighs 20lbs by itself. I was thinking that If could figure out a way to leave it like that I could make that a monti wall and attach monti cap frags to it. In person everything looks very messy.

Three islands sound cool. Maybe even tower islands?

Thats what I am hoping to do but I have extremely large pieces of rock so it might be time to get the chisel and hammer out.

I think this weekend I will take some of the water from the tank and put it into one of my brute cans. I have an extra mag pump that I use to pump water out of the brute cans when doing water changes and I think I will use that pump to try and spray the rocks with the hopes of knocking out some of the built up junk in all of the crevices in the rock. Whatever rock that doesnt make it back into the display tank will go into the frag tank until I figure out what I want to do with the frag tank.

 

[Rotknee]

While we are talking change I have two words for you to consider: Mitras and BioPellet Reactor (ok...3 words :lmao

Glad to see things looking good. I'm looking forward to your new aquascape and set up Steve.

Congrats on your progress my friend!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!! 2013 is going to be a good one!

 

[SPotter]

While we are talking change I have two words for you to consider: Mitras and BioPellet Reactor (ok...3 words :lmao

Glad to see things looking good. I'm looking forward to your new aquascape and set up Steve.

Congrats on your progress my friend!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!! 2013 is going to be a good one!

Hey Rodney....happy holidays to you too!!! So I guess its safe to say that you are happy with the decision to send back the light you had and wait for the Mitras????? Do you have a thread....I would love to see some pictures.

 

[Rotknee]

I was very happy with the decision as the lights exceeded my expectations. Here are a couple of pics with my red planet. Note the pics are 30 days worth of growth.

November 27, 2012

Current (December 28, 2012)

I am looking forward to see what these lights can do long term.