Hey Dan....thanks for checking in. The last few weeks have been pretty busy for me with the tank. I finally raised the white flag on the rocks and ordered 250 lbs of Totoka live rock. I had never heard of it before but after looking at pictures of it online and talking to the person I was getting it from I decided to pull the trigger. The rock came in two weeks ago and I immediately began to cure it.
Here are a couple of pieces close up.....
The rocks cycled pretty quickly and have been clear of nitrates for the last 4 days. I have been ghost feeding and doing water changes every other day on the rock bin. Most importantly phosphates have been testing at 0.
Now for the fish and DT...the DT has been at hypo levels for over 5 weeks with no signs of ich. I will begin raising the sg of the tank tomorrow so hopefully by the end of the week I will be back to 1.026 and start adding rocks. I picked up another 80g frag tank and will run the frag tank as a separate system with just frags where new coral additions will go before being added to the DT. The old frag tank will be converted to a live rock sump where whatever rock that doesn't make it into the DT will be placed into that tank. I'm also almost done setting up my fish qt tank. I had a 65g tank plumbed into the system that was basically a recirculating tank and was used for water changes. It was very difficult to access the inside of this tank to clean it and noticed that detritus was beginning to build up on the bottom. It was a nice feature on the system to have because I could shut of the return line for it, turn the pump on and in 5-10 mins have 65g's drained from my system. I also found that this made it too easy for me to skip some of my husbandry duties from time to time when it came time to do wc's.
Finally the light....I am going to lean more on the t5's and run the leds at a reduced intensity. So my lighting set up looks like this now. T5 bulbs....2 x ATI Blue +, 1 Purple and 1 Actinic. The LED's will run for 8 hrs a day with a 2 hr ramp up and 2 hr ramp down. Whites are set at 20% max and all other colors at 60% max. I borrowed back the par meter that I sold (thanks Henry!) and did some tests tonight. The light is hung 16" above the water and with all lights at their max settings I got the following readings....surface of the water 550, 14" below the surface/30" from the light 300 and finally at the bottom 26" below the surface and 40" below the light 125. These reading were all taken in the middle of the tank with all pumps off. I will play around with more this week and get more readings from the sides and corners of the tank. So, things are definitely moving in the right direction and I am getting excited about putting the first piece of coral back into the tank. One thing I am thinking about is not having acros in the tank. I am thinking about just focusing on monti's, birds nests, stylo's and poccilo's along with lps and softies. Im seeing too many threads lately where some of the most experienced reefers are having issues with acros.
Stay tuned for more updates next week.
