Gris,
Funny you asked about the outside tanks. I just picked up a bunch of corals this week to try to work with. And I took some shots yesterday.
While the outside frag tank was originally intended for frags, I have a field of xenia that has flourished out in the sun. So all the brown bushes that you see in the tank is pulsing xenia.
Corals on the left side have been outside for awhile. Most of the corals on the right eggcrate have only been outside a couple of days.
The purple one in the center is super bright. This is under straight sun, no blue light added.
Everything bushy along the top of the pic is Xenia
The corals in the bottom left of the photo came out of a friend's tank that sold his house with a built in 225. These corals have been outside a couple of weeks. The corals are showing some nice green and the other is a pink prostrata.
This is my rock sump. It's filled with several hundred pounds of rock and the fluidized sand filter. This is where the baby Bangai have been growing out. The tank has a couple of different clowns, a yellow tang, a copper band and an abundance of Aptasia. I keep saying I am going to pull out all the rock and sun bleach it, but I always find some excuse to just let it keep growing. This has my cheato colony in it on the left side. THe chaeto clump is about 2' deep and almost 4' across and 1' wide. I am able to pull a 5g bucket of chaeto out every few weeks.
So thats the status of the outside tanks. I hope to have some photos of some nicely colored corals in the next few weeks.
On a seperate note, I recently was granted access to some cool equipment for testing water quality. The phosphates of the system came back at .14. I had it double checked and the test was accurate. I have the inexpensive Hanna Colorimeter and it measured .13. $60 vs $400k - Not bad reading.
I put some GFO online in an old Deltec Fluidized reactor and in a week had dropped the Phosphate down to .03.
But all the pictures taken in the past month, and all the coral colors were in a high nutrient tank.
I am interested to see what things look like in a month or so if I can keep the nutrients down.
Dave B