Slave sps tank

Beautiful shots, like Mhucasey said, I as well am very interested in your DIY trace and amino supplements, please grace us with elaborating on that more, it's obviously working very well for you.

It is base on the Balling Light formula but with a few extra things added of my own tweak

Bottle 1 - Reef Halogen - Bromide, Iodine, Fluorine
Bottle 2 - Reef Booster - Strontium, Barium
Bottle 3 - Reef Metals - Copper, Cobalt, Manganese, Iron, Zinc, Nickle, Chromium, Molybdenum, Selenium, vanadium.
Bottle 4 - Boron
Bottle 5 - Potassium
Bottle 6 - Amino acids, vitamins and electrolyte

What is still in a trial testing phase is selenium and vanadium as I am still not sure if I will incorporate it into my final formula.
Going to keep in trial till I am happy it is beneficial or a waste of money. :debi:

First 3 bottles 1, 2, 3 goes into the Alk and Cal (randy recipe 1)
Bottle 4 and 5 - into their own as it can be combined. Just need to work out how much potassium your own system use as it vary with different system.
Bottle 6 - That is on its own dosing line.

So basically you can use a 4 channel dosing pump and you are good to go.
Keeping sps corals growing and colourful. :strooper:

Ideally it doesn't make sense to DIY as it cost is alot more than what you would pay individual commercially available product - like the Aqua forest, RedSea, Fauna Marin, Tropic Marin. But over the long term say after 2 years.
The cost would break even and it is pretty much free.
This is base on a 400 L tank - which is common - The economical scale is even better as your tank goes up in size.
If it works very well, you can even sell some to your local reefer friends. :thumbsup:
 
Not much been happening....
Alk and Cal dosing have gone up again at a rate of 12ml daily every month.
Colours have continue to improve.
Up my dosing of trace elements to 100 ml per 5 liters of bottle.
That is a massive 50% increase and I am not mucking around.



 
Have anyone having trouble bringing their iodine level to 0.06 ppm?
Here is my issues - I am using potassium iodide crystal to dose into my tank.
No matter how much I dose like 3 times the NSW into my auto top off drum which empty every 2 weeks. This is ontop of what I am dosing with the trace elements (contain potassium iodide)
After that 2 weeks - I would measure my level with salifert iodine test kit. It reads 0.03 ppm.
I am at a lost why and what is using it up that much?
Can someone offer some insight?
 
I'm no chemist.. but I'd be careful adding that much iodine.
Why not try getting a couple different iodine test kits to cross reference yours.
Can't wait to see the new tank set up!
 
I'm no chemist.. but I'd be careful adding that much iodine.
Why not try getting a couple different iodine test kits to cross reference yours.
Can't wait to see the new tank set up!

Very slowly coming along.
Change of plan and decided get ATI sun power 8 x 8 watts non-dimmable.
Add to that my 3 x Rapid leds Coronas.
Hope the sps corals don't have a heart attack when I get it running. :blown:
 
2 weeks ago my blue squamosa clam spawn and made a mess of the tank.
Nitrate shoot up to above 10ppm and the phosphate almost crashed out.
Protein skimmer was going nuts for 2 days straight as it was trying to pull out the spawning material left by the clam.
During that time, I have noticed my PE extension of my corals was none existing after that 1 day because the corals was feeding heavily on the spawn. Immediately I got the Hanna phosphate checker out and tested the PO4.. It hit zero.. Immediately I started to dose 5ml of potassium phosphate which brings it to 0.05 ppm. 2 days later I only saw a small improvement and decided to dose 15ml more of my solution and bought it up to 0.20ppm.
As of Sunday I have checked the all parameters.
NO3 - 5ppm
PO4 - 0.14ppm
ALK - 8.3 dKH
CAL - 440ppm
K - 400ppm
Iodide - 0.03ppm

Corals still maintain their colours and no browning of any sorts.
Pretty sure is the higher level of my DIY trace elements that is keeping it colourful.
Certain with corals going brown when a swing in nutrients level go up fast because of lack of trace elements. But when you have abundant of trace elements, it didn't affect colouration of the the sps corals at all.
 
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After almost 4 months of no water change.
I have decided to do a 90% water change to reset all the trace elments back to default NSW.
While I have continue on 100ml of trace elements dosing - I feel there wasn't any issues if you dose it 50% higher than recommended.
Next batch of 5L randy recipe 1 will only have 65ml of trace elements added to it.
Tank is having really high nutrients while the renovation still going.
NO3 of 10 ppm
PO4 of 0.27 ppm
No issues with browning at all due to constant high dose of trace element.
Growth have slow slightly 20% less uptake of calcium and alkalinity.
Still grows quick despite that.
I will post some macro photos when I have time this weekend.
 
Boxing day 2016 update.
Been dosing my diy trace elements pro version for 3 months now.
Alkalinity and calcium uptake is now 180ml per day.
Before starting trace elements was 100ml and now 180ml.


<iframe width="854" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hNR1fbqi82Q" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
I have some top down photos update for the beginning of 2017.
Temporary new lighting have been used for about 3 weeks.
ATI Sun Power 8 x 80 watts with bulb combo in this order
Front (BP-PP-BP-ABS-PP-BP-AB-BP) Back
Aiming for the colours of 10,000 kelvin temperature as per ATI America suggestion.

Trace elements dosing have been steady - I have create a professional version and have been testing it for over 3 months since the normal version was created 6 months ago. :crazy1:



















To be continue
 
I think I'm blind Slave -- Did you post what your DIY trace kit is? Like the recipe and all that? 'cause I'm not finding it.
 
Man your corals look great. I am late on this but on the iodine/iodide level issue. Most test kits test for only one form of this, it exists in multiple forms so leads to a hard to test for condition. Randy Holmes Farley had a little write up on the problem way back when. Maybe it would come up on a google search.Anyway, whatever your doing just keep doing it, stuff is looking amazing.
 
Man your corals look great. I am late on this but on the iodine/iodide level issue. Most test kits test for only one form of this, it exists in multiple forms so leads to a hard to test for condition. Randy Holmes Farley had a little write up on the problem way back when. Maybe it would come up on a google search.Anyway, whatever your doing just keep doing it, stuff is looking amazing.

Thanks Scott,
I have worked out on the iodine / iodide level issues.
Always test for iodide is the most important one. ;)
 
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