ReefWreak's 29g SPS Biocube Adventure!

[Hope_L]

I hope you are keeping enough for multiple water changes when you cant get to a store for a couple days....

I dont let my water sit for 24 hours when I mix. I mix then heat it while it is agitated with a power head. When it is up to temp I put it into the tank. Preferably one woudl allow it to sit longer so that it could fully blend but the time it takes to get up to temp is long enough for crystal clear water for me...

I keep about 5 gallons on hand. Also not getting to the store for a couple days would only be an issue if the store actually closed due to a natural disaster or something along those lines. I live directly behind a grocery store that sells RO water so even if there was a blizzard and I couldn't get my car out, as long as the store was open, which in 10 years I have never seen them close for more than a few hours, I could still walk over and get water, it wouldn't be fun to carry back but it would be possible. But, usually I just get my jugs filled up at my LFS. This is all temporary as well. We are planning to get an RODI unit and set it up in my basement.

 

[Hope_L]

You don't need to let it age. Honestly it's probably a holdover from when salt didn't dissolve as quickly and cleanly. You just didn't want salt crystals to make it into your tank and land on a coral and burn it, or not have dissolved yet, so when it's fully dissolved the salinity is higher than you expected. I run my water to fill the bucket (or at least my 5g fill line), then heat it, usually overnight, though it doesn't take that long, I just don't have time to constantly attend to it. Then once it's up to temp, I add one cup of salt at a time, give it 10 minutes to dissolve, do the next cup, etc until the salinity measures 1.025/6 / 35ppt

There are a number of holdovers from the olden days of reefkeeping that I still do. Most of them are wastes of time, some of them potentially dangerous, most of them somewhere in between.

Great info!!! At least now I know I'm not making a huge newbie mistake! I swear you guys are golden! I didn't mean to hijack your thread with questions but I definitely appreciate all of yours and soulpatch's responses today!

 

[soulpatch]

You don't need to let it age. Honestly it's probably a holdover from when salt didn't dissolve as quickly and cleanly. You just didn't want salt crystals to make it into your tank and land on a coral and burn it, or not have dissolved yet, so when it's fully dissolved the salinity is higher than you expected. I run my water to fill the bucket (or at least my 5g fill line), then heat it, usually overnight, though it doesn't take that long, I just don't have time to constantly attend to it. Then once it's up to temp, I add one cup of salt at a time, give it 10 minutes to dissolve, do the next cup, etc until the salinity measures 1.025/6 / 35ppt

There are a number of holdovers from the olden days of reefkeeping that I still do. Most of them are wastes of time, some of them potentially dangerous, most of them somewhere in between.

You should mix when the water is cold then heat it. It disolves better and not participate that can happen when mixing in warm water.

 

[soulpatch]

I keep about 5 gallons on hand. Also not getting to the store for a couple days would only be an issue if the store actually closed due to a natural disaster or something along those lines. I live directly behind a grocery store that sells RO water so even if there was a blizzard and I couldn't get my car out, as long as the store was open, which in 10 years I have never seen them close for more than a few hours, I could still walk over and get water, it wouldn't be fun to carry back but it would be possible. But, usually I just get my jugs filled up at my LFS. This is all temporary as well. We are planning to get an RODI unit and set it up in my basement.

RO water from the store is just that RO. It takes out the larger particulates but many of the items DI resin would take out still exist and as such you can have issues with the tank like algae or other types of nuicances.

This is right up there with test kits and refractometer for me. If you dont have them you really shouldn't fill the tank...

 

[Hope_L]

RO water from the store is just that RO. It takes out the larger particulates but many of the items DI resin would take out still exist and as such you can have issues with the tank like algae or other types of nuicances.



This is right up there with test kits and refractometer for me. If you dont have them you really shouldn't fill the tank...

I use RODI water from my LFS in my tank, and I keep extra on hand. I was saying if I had an emergency before I get a RODI unit for my house I could go get RO water from the store. That would have to be an extreme situation and worst case scenario.

 

[Justintegra]

I initially filled my tank with fresh pre-mixed RO/DI water from the LFS here. Turned out the water they gave me had over 100ppm of nitrates and was loaded with phosphates, ammonia, and nitrates as well. I have everything under control now except for the nitrates, which I am still battling to get down.

Moral of the story is test everything, and don't trust anyone's water but what you make yourself. Not even the LFS.

 

[ReefWreak]

I initially filled my tank with fresh pre-mixed RO/DI water from the LFS here. Turned out the water they gave me had over 100ppm of nitrates and was loaded with phosphates, ammonia, and nitrates as well. I have everything under control now except for the nitrates, which I am still battling to get down.

Moral of the story is test everything, and don't trust anyone's water but what you make yourself. Not even the LFS.

Definitely sucks that that happened (and probably happens more often than we give credit for). The good thing is that just like you're experiencing, it's not a show stopper for more advanced aquarists, but I can see where if you were starting your tank up, and were having all of these weird algae blooms and your nitrates never went down, how it could be really frustrating and discouraging.

FWIW I do occasionally use distilled water from the store if I need a quick gallon, or if I just need a gallon container and I'm not going to drink or throw away the water inside. I should test the TDS of the distilled, and people have complained that there is a chance of getting copper in your tank from it coming off of the condensers in the distillation process, but whatever, I haven't had a problem and I've used it a number of times.

 

[ReefWreak]

I thought I would put together a growth shot of the Hawkins Echinata over this month (August 2015). Kinda neat to see it put together like this. I'm lazy so this was all really ghettofied and done in paint, but what the heck.

Sorry the colors aren't as nice as when I took the pics with my SLR. I basically take growth shots weekly from my cellphone, which auto-uploads them to google, then I can usually easily post them here. Otherwise with the SLR it's a bear, and I have to do some color correction and other things, but the pics are definitely much nicer. Just a lot more time, which I don't have too much to spare.

 

[homer1475]

I tend to mix my water the night before. Dump RO/DI in a 5G bucket, add 2 power heads, a heater, and dump in the salt(I have it so I know almost exactly how much salt I need). Next morning I do my water change. I've also mixed up water, let it sit for a few hours till ti was clear and tank temp, then used. I don't think either way is wrong, but at least with RC, it seems to mix better when left to mix overnight.

I remember using instant ocean back in the day, that stuff always left salt behind in your bucket no matter how long you left it to mix. Now a days the salt is made better and mixes much faster and more thoroughly.

 

[Hope_L]

I initially filled my tank with fresh pre-mixed RO/DI water from the LFS here. Turned out the water they gave me had over 100ppm of nitrates and was loaded with phosphates, ammonia, and nitrates as well. I have everything under control now except for the nitrates, which I am still battling to get down.



Moral of the story is test everything, and don't trust anyone's water but what you make yourself. Not even the LFS.

Good point! For now I will just have to test the water because I don't have my own unit yet. What would cause all those issues in fresh pre mixed water from your LFS? By pre mixed you mean it already had the salt? I just buy RO/DI from my LFS and add salt myself. Like basically I'm asking when I do get my own unit for RO/DI if a LFS can mess it up that bad how can I avoid those kind of mistakes at home? I still have a lot to learn, looks like I have some new homework to do!!

 

[Hope_L]

I thought I would put together a growth shot of the Hawkins Echinata over this month (August 2015). Kinda neat to see it put together like this. I'm lazy so this was all really ghettofied and done in paint, but what the heck.

Sorry the colors aren't as nice as when I took the pics with my SLR. I basically take growth shots weekly from my cellphone, which auto-uploads them to google, then I can usually easily post them here. Otherwise with the SLR it's a bear, and I have to do some color correction and other things, but the pics are definitely much nicer. Just a lot more time, which I don't have too much to spare.

Wow! That is beautiful!

 

[ReefWreak]

Thanks!

I spent the afternoon scraping Green Star Polyps from my liverock with a dental pick. Oh Joy. I did it instead of poisoning them because if I poisoned them, there was a high probability I would also kill my cleaner shrimp, and my wife didn't want any casualities. So I spent the afternoon with a dental pick scraping scraping scraping away, and she helped by pointing with a flashlight and doing the surveying. She learned a lot (more) too, since all of the usual suspects were coming out of the rockwork, including lots of pods, some bristle worms, and there were even a few sponges that we found.

I'm just hoping that the rock being out for 30-60 minutes didn't have any major casualties. The rock had a hammer, acropora, and montipora attached to it the whole time. We'll see, but I imagine most of them shouldn't have had any problems.

Lots of scraped away GSP. I hope it doesn't grow back even though I didn't get every single shred of minor purple mat... But I got a ton of it!

 

[Jesfromdax]

ReefWreak's 29g SPS Biocube Adventure!

FWIW I use Salifert, sometimes Elos, and I still use API for nitrate, nitrite, ammonia. It came with my tank, it's pretty cheap, and I feel at least for nitrate it's reliable, it's just not "high precision."

I think you're fine sharing kits. As long as you can test within 12-24 hours, you should be fine. The only thing you want (near) constant access to IMO is a refractometer, since you may need to make a quick emergency water change ASAP, so it helps if you can get saltwater made in an hour or something (my 5g bucket filled Sunday in about 1.5hrs; ideally you want to let salt mix age for 24 hours as well, but if it's an emergency it makes sense to ASAP).

I'm using API for Nitrates as well. Do you find it hard to distinguish between the different shades of Orange for Nitrate? I can't tell sometimes if it's telling me 10 ppm or 5 ppm.

 

[ReefWreak]

I'm using API for Nitrates as well. Do you find it hard to distinguish between the different shades of Orange for Nitrate? I can't tell sometimes if it's telling me 10 ppm or 5 ppm.

It's hard to put a number to it, but if I'm honest, I like the variability of it. I don't really want a titration that flips at the right number, I prefer the "spectrum" from the API kit. I'm always shooting for low-to-no nitrate, so as long as it's yellow or a shade away from yellow I'm good. The deeper in color it gets, the deeper in trouble I am (After my cycle finished, I've never had anything other than yellow, for better or worse. I think it's due to aggressive skimming and low fish load (even though I feed the fish reasonably well).

Chasing numbers is important to hit targets and get a firm footing in the hobby, but for nitrate, the number to hit is zero on nitrate. Once you get advanced you can shoot for 5ppm or more than zero and start to play with levels, but early in the hobby, shoot for zero.

 

[ReefWreak]

Also, RE: corals being out of the water for an hour or so, no casualties (yet). I think some of my acros will be mad because I didn't put the rock back in the same orientation, because any time I move a rock in my tank, it never goes back the same way again, so they'll have to adjust, but the hammer coral was fine, and I think the acros that were being bothered by the GSP will take some time to recover, but are generally much better off.

In this pic, you can see how the GSP was bothering this colony of GARF Purple Bonsai (or a maricultured clone of it :/ ) The entire tissue recession was under the waving arms of my GSP, but there was no GSP mat on it's skeleton, just constant shading and abrasion from the GSP arms.

 

[ReefWreak]

Also, some smiles from the euphyllia section:

 

[ReefWreak]

I just got my email that the digital edition of Coral Magazine is now out (fantastic publication btw, can't recommend reading it enough. Great info, beautiful photography), and I was quoted on their "Species & Secrets" section on SPS for beginners!

 

[ReefWreak]

Colors are coming back!

 

[rcamar813]

wow very impressive. Nice tank.

 

[ReefWreak]

Thanks!

I was able to visit one of the SPS gods of NYC/Long Island and came home with some excellent frags and had some great conversations. If you ever have the opportunity to sit down with someone who you look up to in the hobby and just "talk tank" it's probably the best thing you can do. Highly recommended.

I had the LED discussion/debate and my input on LED vs. other lighting. I think that I'm still okay with LED over nanos and MH/T5 over larger tanks, but I also think that LEDs are a lot harder to "get right" than MH/T5, so they may require more work and thinking. In a perfect world, I concede, that I would always choose MH or T5 over LED at this point, but there are just so many constraints on having a nano (starting with heat) and living in the city (starting with the cost of electricity), that I'm okay with my LEDs knowing the risks and drawbacks.

Anyway, I'll have some pics of the new corals. I upped my calcium drip because I'm asleep at the wheel here and thought that CA at around 340 was the ideal, but it's actually ~440, so I bumped up my dosing, and hopefully it'll mean more growth. I'm still okay with slow growth though, since honestly if my billion frags really do grow quickly I'll be screwed. I enjoy the colors of my super duper acros under my crazy LED lighting. And everything is still healthy and happy.

And one week later, still no signs of any GSP surviving. Hooray!

Also, the SPS god I met with said I might have gotten AEFW from someone I previously got frags from, so now I'm very nervous and looking like crazy for any signs of AEFW, but fortunately I don't see any. I've checked every coral for the bite marks, egg sacs, etc, and nothing. It could explain why my purple bonsai isn't purple (sometimes it stresses the corals out from showing their ideal coloration, they keep a brown color), but I still don't see any evidence of flat worms anywhere. I'll do more research on bellwether AEFW targets to see if I have an AEFW magnet coral that might be able to show some symptoms before other corals, but so far so good!