ReefWreak's 29g SPS Biocube Adventure!

[ReefWreak]

Been a while, sorry. I've been super busy with work, basically enough time to throw a couple of pinches of food in the tank, make sure nothing is dead, and then go to shower and to bed. My alk is really really low (5.5) as of today, but my calcium is holding up at 390. I think the actual 2-part jugs are empty, so I just threw in an order from BRS to refill those.

Things are actually doing really well otherwise. I think that the colors in the tank are improving dramatically since I stopped the skimmer about 2 weeks ago. The only time I've run it was for one night, and it filled the cup with dark skimmate, so I cleaned it, and turned it back off again.

Setting up for a reefcrystals waterchange tonight. hopefully I have time to do it. Salinity is too high too, so I'll have to be cautious with that (1.028, though maybe my refractometer is out of calibration since everything looks really happy?)

That red alveopora has never looked happier. Fully extended nicely, bobbing in the breeze. All of the other corals are finally darkening in color as well. I've also been adding Acropower amino acids twice a week now this week, and will keep doing it going forward as well.

No more carbon dosing. I think I've been running zero nutrient for too long, so I'll let it rise slowly.

If you're starting your tank, and don't have much coral/clam bioload, then you should aggressively nutrient export through skimming and macroalgae. If you have fully grown in corals and colonies, it might help to let nutrients rise and see if you get better color out of your corals. I honestly think mine are outcompeting algae for nutrients at this point (to a small degree, they can still only take up so much nutrients).

 

[Kolkri]

Very nice tank.

 

[ReefWreak]

Lets see if this attached picture looks any better (and more reasonably sized) than the other one.

I manually forced my camera to do HDR mode, and I think the pic looks better as a result.

 

[ReefWreak]

Very nice tank.

Thanks! I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it, stragegizing on it, and agonizing over it.

 

[homer1475]

And I wish I could get my nitrates under control!!!

Using the red sea kit at the high end, I'm still well over 64PPM! Color is so dark red it doesn't match their color scale. :s

I'm clearly in need of something different because the NoPox is only creating a huge unsightly bacterial bloom that clogs up my reactor. No cloudy water or bacteria in the DT, it just sits in my skimmer, PH's, and reactor chamber. I've bee dosing 3ml a day which is what they give as a dosing regime. It intially cut my nitrates back to 4ppm, So I kept dosing at 3ml a day, and all I got was a rise in nitrates and a bad bacterial bloom. I've just recently(yesterday) cut my dosing back to 1.5ml per day per red seas instruction when a bacterial bloom happens. No Idea why mu nitrates are so high either? Feeding regime includes a pich of flake and a couple NLS pellets every day, and twice a week I feed a small cube of frozen mysis mixed with some reef chili and selcon to my corals, so I don't think I'm over feeding to fuel nitrates, I just have no idea at this point. I'm just going to wait and see now.

 

[CLR]

How did you set up dosing for your biocube ? Brs 1.1 ML pumps? Thinking of adding some just usually dosed by hand and curios of pumps and how to run them on this tank.

 

[ReefWreak]

Sorry in advanced for all of the text!

How did you set up dosing for your biocube ? Brs 1.1 ML pumps? Thinking of adding some just usually dosed by hand and curios of pumps and how to run them on this tank.

Yep, I have 2 1.1mL/min BRS dosing pumps set up. Page one, post number 2 has a picture of how it is set up. I have the lines run from the bottom of the stand up over the back of the tank, through the cutouts in the hood, then ghetto-attached to the inside, dripping into the tank.

For reference (personal and to share my experience), it's been about 7 months, and my 2 part is now empty, so I'm going for my second 1 gallon kit of BRS 2 part. I also needed to up my dosing, but I think I'm at 22mL/day of each solution at this point.

I switched from hand dosing to automatic dosing because of issues with being away for a week at a time (due to work or vacation) and wanting dosing to continue, but more importantly, I really wanted consistency in dosing and to spread it out multiple times per day. Right now it is split into a midnight/noon dosing schedule, so half at each time, but I really should start splitting it into 3 or 4 dosing times now that the volume I'm dosing is pretty big (for a nano).

So any other questions, you know where to find me

And I wish I could get my nitrates under control!!!

Using the red sea kit at the high end, I'm still well over 64PPM! Color is so dark red it doesn't match their color scale. :s

I'm clearly in need of something different because the NoPox is only creating a huge unsightly bacterial bloom that clogs up my reactor. No cloudy water or bacteria in the DT, it just sits in my skimmer, PH's, and reactor chamber. I've bee dosing 3ml a day which is what they give as a dosing regime. It intially cut my nitrates back to 4ppm, So I kept dosing at 3ml a day, and all I got was a rise in nitrates and a bad bacterial bloom. I've just recently(yesterday) cut my dosing back to 1.5ml per day per red seas instruction when a bacterial bloom happens. No Idea why mu nitrates are so high either? Feeding regime includes a pich of flake and a couple NLS pellets every day, and twice a week I feed a small cube of frozen mysis mixed with some reef chili and selcon to my corals, so I don't think I'm over feeding to fuel nitrates, I just have no idea at this point. I'm just going to wait and see now.

Nitrates are the traditional struggle of the saltwater aquarist. A few things to keep your head up about: If you're not getting crazy algae growth, and your corals and fishes look happy, then you're okay. Sometimes we lose sight of that.

Your tank looks great and healthy, and your corals look healthy, so all in all, I wouldn't worry about it that much. Good to be aware of, but if it's not feeding nuisance algae, then meh.

You are still aggressively skimming while carbon dosing, right? If so, something I would consider is taking a look at a bacteria supplement like Brightwell's Microbacter7 or prodibio biodigest. I think that bacterial diversity is helpful in a tank in general, but in this case also it should help bacteria to uptake nitrates and phosphates, then get skimmed out.

I would also recommend cutting back on feeding. What you described sounds like a :celeb1:-load of food. Really that's the easiest thing to me for long term reduction in nutrients, and one of the reasons I think my tank has done well. When I feed, pumps go off, fish know to come to the surface at the front, then I throw tiny pinches (8-10 pellets) of NLS small pellets into the surface so most if not all of them sink. Rarely does one hit the and bed (and if it does, there is a fungia coral right there to catch the food and eat it). When that pinch is eaten, I feed another. Maybe I'll feed 3 of those pinches a day.

Once a week, I break off a dime sized piece of frozen food, thaw it out in tank water, and pour the slurry into the tank, half of the slurry at a time.

Rule #1 about closed systems: What goes in must come out. If you're not having immense growth in corals or fish, then the food is going to something else, algae, bacterial colonies, or just staying dissolved as nitrates/phosphates in the water column.

I know you know this, but it's been my philosophy with this tank, and since the runaway GHA I had in my old nanocube, I'll always recommend aggressive nutrient removal from a tank before any other strategies. I've never seen a coral starve to death (and you should see some of the crazy "Ultra Low Nutrient" ULNS tanks in the SPS forum). And I think it works well. I've been starving the crap out of my tank the last 7 months. I know, because now that I've stopped skimming, and have started adding amino acids, I'm starting to get more green algae on the glass (clean every 2 days, instead of every 4 days to week between glass cleaning), and I can see the color of my corals getting deeper/darker (and in color, not just browning out). But it took a lot of starving my corals to get there.

Also, I've traditionally believed in rarely feeding corals if at all. LPS I get feeding, since you can see them consume the food, but then it's just more nutrient export you have to do, and they grow slow as crap anyway.

So TL;DR: Aggressive nutrient export, limit nutrients, until you hit zero and are stable at zero and corals are losing color from being starved (their health will not suffer for most species, alveopora is the first I've seen suffering in), then once you're stable and consistent with that, you can start slowly building nutrients back up to get maximum color and growth.

 

[ReefWreak]

Not too much to discuss. Things have been going well without a skimmer (though the bubble algae that was brought in on a frag has been spreading a little). Fishes are happy, most corals are happy, having some spare frags from usual "maintenance" i.e. me bashing my hands around to do small complex tasks, creating frags everywhere.

I read this thread today (pretty short read), and the link is direct to the conclusion, and I thought it was a good approach to getting rid of algae (or preventing algae at all), and is particularly applicable to us nano reefers.

Updated FTS from last week (trying to get HDR on my phone to work well to take better pics across the different layers of brightness):

 

[soulpatch]

not sure if its the lighting but you need some more green or blue to balance out the color IMHO. An oregon tort would look fantastic in there. And many some orange ricordea in the center just because...

And am I missing it or is there not a single acan in there? I am not sure we can continue to be friends if no acans... lol

 

[ReefWreak]

Oregon tort is the only coral left on my "list". It always has a place in my tank.

Funny enough, I have a little frag of "Pink Lemonade" from Cherry Corals (looks like a Tyree piece from their site?), and it has turned a beautiful bright blue/purple. I think it's in the shade of all of my other damn corals.

I also have some orange, though it's almost impossible to see. There are some nice orange with green mouth ricordias right in the middle, in front of the maze/brain favia coral.

Waiting for a few things to color up that are relatively new: nice Efflo from CC, my year-old red planet frag that hasn't done a damn thing except get taken over by zoas. My SSC that got knocked off the rock and landed in the sand and browned out...

I'm still adjusting upwards the dosing regimen from 2 part dosing. I'm up to 30mL per part per day and still can barely keep the alkalinity above 6.1. Also, I bought the KZ zeo nano kit during Black Friday, and I started dosing it last week, so only 2 doses so far. I don't want it to work, I want to waste my money on it and have it do nothing, but unfortunately the results have actually been good. We'll see how it goes longer term, but I really don't want to get hooked on buying expensive proprietary blends of whatever. We'll see how it goes long term, but within a week I'm noticing deeper coloration that I haven't been able to get with acropower alone or just turning the skimmer off.

I'll keep everyone updated. Maybe another macro photography day is in order. I still have some pics from the last one that I should share with you folks one of these days.

 

[soulpatch]

I nearly bought a tort the other day at the shop. Hard for me to walk away but I really want to get the new tank up and running before I go adding anything else. Plus like you said in my thread the extra water volume will make the need for dosing go away completly for a while till i stock up on corals. (Even though I have a ton of 2 part sitting in wait to be used.

 

[ReefWreak]

Plenty of time to use the rest of the 2 part.

Next time we meet up I'll bring some prisoners to swap for some acans. Actually I'll just give you some nice frags to start out with, since I can't even fit any more corals in my tank. (except the OT)

I'm just going to keep growing everything out for the next year or two and we'll see where we end up.

Unfortunately I'm already having problems getting people to buy corals, and I don't have anywhere to put the frags. I have one small frag rock that holds 3,and that's full, then I have like 4 more frags scattered around my sand bed. I may just have to do a magnetic rack at some point. But as we know, the LEDs don't light up the sides well, so I'll be stuck with brown frags that nobody wants.

If I had a calcium reactor I could always just bleach them then toss them in the calcium reactor to recycle the calcium and alkalinity like the Long Island Aquarium does.

 

[soulpatch]

Well once the large tank is up I can take some of those frags off of your hands and we have reefapalooza only a few months away. Some items on my must have are a few acros, strawberry shortcake, Oregon tort, some more acans, green slimmer, and a few other LPS items that I will decide about later.

 

[ReefWreak]

Dear friends. I thought I would share some photos with you. I liked them, I hope you do too. Thanks for reading and hanging out in the nano forum with me.

Some fancy Cherry Corals Efflo and Tricolor Bonsai

Purple Fuzzy:

Mr. Shrimp

 

[ReefWreak]

Also, hence the edit, I found out how to resize images shared from photos.google.com! How exciting!

The resolution of the image shows up at the end of the link as this: w800-h531. My original images were w2923-h1941, but because I modified the link to end in those numbers, it works! Hope this helps someone else out there to resize their photos from photos.google.com.

 

[homer1475]

While I typically don't care for SPS's(and admittingly know nothing about them), your tank looks amazing reef!

In the above photo's, not sure which is which, but I like the purple one with green polyps.

 

[ReefWreak]

While I typically don't care for SPS's(and admittingly know nothing about them), your tank looks amazing reef!

In the above photo's, not sure which is which, but I like the purple one with green polyps.

Thanks Homer!

Purple bonsai = purple with green polyps, purple fuzzy = purple base with white polyps that are fuzzy, efflo is the really tight solid growth piece with only small polyp stubs. And I think you know which one is Mr. Shrimp [emoji14]

It's funny when corals don't look that impressive in person, or on most pictures, but sometimes you just get the right shot at the right angle with the right light, and you get something beautiful. That's what happened with those shots. They were few of a whole folder of crap. And they don't really look that nice in person, the macro makes it look more awesomer.

 

[sahin]

Very nice. The bonsai has great colour :beer:

 

[ReefWreak]

Very nice. The bonsai has great colour :beer:

:dance: Cheers mate!

I wish the whole thing looked like that. Honestly, even to me, that photo looks photoshopped. It's not, but it looks it (it's straight jpeg out of the camera with auto white balance). The rest of the colony is more deeper brown, with that purple on the tips, and all of the polyps are that color.

I'm playing with the zeo nano additives kit, and the second time I used them two days in a row, I saw the rest of the body of the bonsai darken to a purple shade, so I'll keep playing around and see if I can cheat my way with zeo to bonsai bliss.

 

[Cincyreef]

Your tank looks amazing!