Ok it has been WAY to long for an update. The last year has been pretty crazy outside of reefing so the progress has been a little slower than I had hoped.
Tank hardware additions/fixes.
Pretty much all the equipment has stayed as is except with the addition of 2x Maxspect gyre XF250's. I removed the old hydors, there just was not enough flow midway through the tank or anywhere that was behind rocks. This made a huge improvement in flow. I run them on the OGC cycle at 40%.
I decided to get the new pumps when I was having issues with Cyano mainly in the lower flow areas and this did help. Along with changing filter socks more frequently and fixing the protein skimmer settings.
When I first set up the tank I had pretty much no idea how to run some of the equipment being my first reef tank. I had the protein skimmer tuned completly wrong. I had read the instructions basically backwards so it would never fill up. After like a month there would be 1-2 inches of liquid. This did not help the situation with some semi-high nitrates and high phosphates. After a while I kinda realized that was probably not how it was supposed to work and tweaked it with some help from videos and forums to get it working better. It is still a little picky, some weeks it will work where it fills in about a week to week and a half. Others it will overflow in one night with the same settings.
The chaeto has been pretty stagnant. It neither grows nor shrinks. I think the issue is the light I am using the Reefbreeders Fuge-Lite. I plan on getting a better refugium light soon.
Livestock
6x pajama cardinals
4x blue green chromis
1x yellow tang
1x coral beauty angel
1x flame angel
1x tuxedo urchin
1x pincushion urchin
5x hermit crabs
3x turbo snails
20+ small snails that came in on something even with dips and quarantines.
I have only had 2 casualties in the display tank and almost a 3rd. There was a copperband butterfly fish which did ok in quarantine it took him a while before I could visibly see him eat but he survived in QT for about 2 months. He did ok for a while in the display tank but would only eat frozen food. After about a month and a half he started to look thin and was not eating well. I believe he starved like other copperbands do. Woke up to one of the urchins eating him
.
I THINK the watchman goby I had in there is dead. I have not seen him in a very long time unless he is hiding somewhere in the back but I don't believe so. He did just fine and had him in the tank for about 6 months before he went missing.
The other fish that I thought was a casualty was one of the chromis. One day it went from 4 to 3 and I never found him anywhere. A few weeks later I found him swimming in the overflow box and managed to undo the plumbing and get him to suck down the emergency overflow into a net. He is just fine now. Little buddy was a runt and managed to fit between the weirs.
The school of chromis would be bigger but I had an issue ordering last winter and shipping was delayed with weather and half my order was dead on delivery. My next stocking, which should be, in the next few weeks will be more chromis to have a nice flowing school.
Corals
Toadstool
Finger leather
2x Cabbage leather varieties
Ricordia
Frogspawn
Peppermint coral
2x acan varieties
Torch
Duncan
Lobo
2x encrusting corals I am not sure what they are
Most of the corals seem to be growing. Some of them are still on frag plugs until I get more and decide where I want them permanently. The frogspawn went from 2 polyps to about 16 in a little over a year. The finger leather has gotten a little taller but way fatter and more fingers especially at the base, I ended up cutting off a finger to grow a separate one and it is growing as well.
The duncan is one of the newest additions and had 1 polyp when I got it and already has 5 additional polyps growing off the base. Everything is pretty steady.
One of the Acans got half eatin by something I am not sure if it was an urchin but one of the urchins was right next to it when 2 of the 3 polyps dissapeared, could be a coincidence? The other Acan has gone from 2 polyps to 4-5 smaller ones starting on the sides.
Coral Casualties
Fan coral
Elegance
Hammer
The fan coral was one of my first corals and I believe I was just to inexperienced to care for it properly. The elegance I think was actually an Indonesian based on only being $50 and it did fine for a few weeks and just shriveled. It was alive for a few months barely so I tried to put it back in quarantine to see if that might change things and it finished it off unfortunately. I had some peppermint shrimp in the tank to preemptively stop any aiptasia but one of them went rogue and ate the entire hammer coral. I caught them using a water bottle filled with food to get them to come out of the rocks and banished them to the sump where they eventually died getting stuck in the last weir.