Sk8r's Reef Rebuild

[mountainraised]

This is a great success story Skar. Its refreshing to see people recover from their losses, it was unbelievable to see on craigslist the volume of people selling all their gear and tanks after "The Great Wind Storm of 2015".

 

[Sk8r]

Enough flow: if your livelier fish have to dive and bob to maintain place, it might be. (THere are certain fishes, however, that do not thrive and cannot feed in that much current.) Also, fluffier corals don't like a flow that doesn't let them feed, or that blows their tentacles too much.

 

[Sk8r]

Yep, that windstorm was something. I've lived many years in Oklahoma, seen a lot of wind, but wind coupled with big shallow-rooted evergreens up here in Washington is something else. In our area, two-foot diameter trees were going down, sliding off rooftops and bouncing off cars in the driveway. Or across the road blocking traffic. Not all the roofs have been fixed YET because of the backlog---and it's coming up on one year.

 

[mountainraised]

For sure, I was very thankful that (when living in CDA at the time), we didn't get as slammed. Our home was right next to the Forest Hills graveyard which was chalk full of big ponderosas.

 

[Sk8r]

And, just to make things interesting, I had a food mishap (my theory, involving a frozen cube and a spill of olive oil on the kitchen countertop) which led to 3 days of madly foaming skimmer---if you have a fairly potent skimmer, you can have a real 'event', which means your sump starts producing foam. I thought I had a really bad problem until I googled 'skimmer foaming' and saw what a bad case looks like. Mine was piffling, 3 days of bubble overflow. I don't know whether anything I did helped, but I attached a very, very fine filter bag, and used another as a receptacle for foam I scooped out after setting the skimmer to 'run dry skimmate', (a laugh.) It was a mess. Today, it is behaving like a skimmer again, and pulling skimmate. Note to self: do not allow that to happen again---ever.

 

[Darth_Tater]

My skimmer did that this weekend! But luckily only for a day. Had to put a rock on top of the cup lid because the foam kept pushing it up.

How are the damsels doing?

 

[Sk8r]

Fat and sassy. I'm trying to figure the lighting situation for corals, just running a few tiny beaten-up frags (poor man's par test) to see what's happy. i'd just gotten a new light kit when the blackout hit, and I've spent the last while just getting the chemistry back in order. But we're making progress: we know now not to put poci in with Mr. Stripes; and we then found that some of our snails eat montiporas. Those are now gone---so is the montipora. And I dropped a frag into the rockwork, lest it seem that things always go smoothly if you've been at this for years.
Fat and happy seems to describe things. And I have a mystery filefish. Ms Domino didn't like her, there was an altercation; I haven't seen the filefish since---BUT the aiptasia are all having their tentacles nibbled off and I don't know why. My rockwork is a massive maze of holes and tunnels and arches. I may have a filefish in there somewhere.