1. a closed loop.
A way of getting more circulation or passing water through a 'process' outside your tank. Essentially, if you have one hose to a pump sucking water out of your tank and another hose putting it back in, that's a 'closed loop'. Closed loops can also be meticulously hard-piped out and in. The midpoint can be, for instance, a Phosban reactor (removes harmful phosphates: and yes, Virginia, if you have algae, you have phosphates). Your skimmer is a closed loop, of sorts.
2. dripping kalk
If you keep stony coral, you will need to supplement calcium. Since corals are hungry critters once they get to growing, you can go nuts testing and dumping supplement into your tank, daily. There are 2 ways around this. If you're a big (100g) tank with a lot of corals, you want a calcium reactor, ultimately. If you're smaller, a kalk reactor (a piece of equipment) OR a 'still kalk reservoir' are your ticket to freedom. Essentially, if you 'drip kalk', you use your automatic topoff to inject a freshwater solution of 2 tbs kalk powder (Mrs Wages Pickling Lime) to a gallon of ro/di water AS your topoff. It's pretty safe: overdose is fairly benign. And here's how you do it: you 'set' your levels of alk, cal, and mg to optimum, then set your topoff up to 'drip kalk' instead of plain ro/di. Myown system is a 32g Brute trashcan with rolled paper towel as a gasket around the lid and a piece of eggcrate grid near the bottom that serves as a shelf for my topoff pump. (the bottom of said can is mucky with undissolved kalk: a shelf is mandatory). Ask around about this if you think this is useful. A kalk drip cannot efficiently raise your alk/cal readings: you have to 'set' them with supplements. And it does not supply magnesium: you have to test and add that by hand, but it lasts a long time. I go a month without needing to add anything, easy.
3. supplements.
Basically, your weekly water changes handle all supplementation. Your salt mix is not just salt. However, if you keep stony coral, an alkalinity buffer, calcium, and magnesium are mandatory; they also come in 2-part form, or as above, a kalk drip can hold these levels steady.
4. feeding corals.
Fish poo, broken down by bristleworms, does that very handily. You don't need to feed corals. They eat fish poo, light, and chemicals from the water. A few corals with large mouths, like plate, etc, also appreciate more solid food. And non-photosynthetic corals like gorgonian and suncoral have to be fed a soup of nutrient, which makes them very hard to keep (and harder still to leave to a tanksitter).
Most corals, however, have internal hitchhikers: a variant of cyanobacteria lives in them and processes sunlight into sugars, and thus keeps the corals fed.
The branchy stony corals, the acroporas, prefer to eat only chemicals from the water (calcium, etc) and what their internal flora produce. They like their water pretty sterile.
The wavy-stony corals, that have soft bodies, like hammer corals, like slightly 'dirtier' water (still very clean and well-skimmed!) that contains floating bits now and again: cyclopeeze is good for this. THey also eat, probably, anything that gets sucked into their mouths, from copepods to, who knows? maybe ich in its motile stage. They're filter feeders. I have a hammer that started with 3 heads, that in 2 years has gotten, oh, 40 plus, and is the size of most of a soccer ball. A little 3-head caulestra coral is now the size of a softball. They've done this on fish poo, cyclopeeze every few days, sunlight, and a kalk drip.
Then the softie corals: they tolerate, even enjoy, water rich with nutrients, a somewhat (within reason!) heavier fish load is ok with them, and they both eat light, suck up chemicals, AND take in fish poo. They don't use much calcium at all: your water changes can handle them. As you could imagine, they're easier to grow--sometimes too easy. In the confines of a tank, with tank water, they sometimes grow like weeds. The more resilient mushrooms, green star polyp, and others---can become a plague. But you can sell the excess if you're canny about NOT letting them onto your structural rock.
HTH
A way of getting more circulation or passing water through a 'process' outside your tank. Essentially, if you have one hose to a pump sucking water out of your tank and another hose putting it back in, that's a 'closed loop'. Closed loops can also be meticulously hard-piped out and in. The midpoint can be, for instance, a Phosban reactor (removes harmful phosphates: and yes, Virginia, if you have algae, you have phosphates). Your skimmer is a closed loop, of sorts.
2. dripping kalk
If you keep stony coral, you will need to supplement calcium. Since corals are hungry critters once they get to growing, you can go nuts testing and dumping supplement into your tank, daily. There are 2 ways around this. If you're a big (100g) tank with a lot of corals, you want a calcium reactor, ultimately. If you're smaller, a kalk reactor (a piece of equipment) OR a 'still kalk reservoir' are your ticket to freedom. Essentially, if you 'drip kalk', you use your automatic topoff to inject a freshwater solution of 2 tbs kalk powder (Mrs Wages Pickling Lime) to a gallon of ro/di water AS your topoff. It's pretty safe: overdose is fairly benign. And here's how you do it: you 'set' your levels of alk, cal, and mg to optimum, then set your topoff up to 'drip kalk' instead of plain ro/di. Myown system is a 32g Brute trashcan with rolled paper towel as a gasket around the lid and a piece of eggcrate grid near the bottom that serves as a shelf for my topoff pump. (the bottom of said can is mucky with undissolved kalk: a shelf is mandatory). Ask around about this if you think this is useful. A kalk drip cannot efficiently raise your alk/cal readings: you have to 'set' them with supplements. And it does not supply magnesium: you have to test and add that by hand, but it lasts a long time. I go a month without needing to add anything, easy.
3. supplements.
Basically, your weekly water changes handle all supplementation. Your salt mix is not just salt. However, if you keep stony coral, an alkalinity buffer, calcium, and magnesium are mandatory; they also come in 2-part form, or as above, a kalk drip can hold these levels steady.
4. feeding corals.
Fish poo, broken down by bristleworms, does that very handily. You don't need to feed corals. They eat fish poo, light, and chemicals from the water. A few corals with large mouths, like plate, etc, also appreciate more solid food. And non-photosynthetic corals like gorgonian and suncoral have to be fed a soup of nutrient, which makes them very hard to keep (and harder still to leave to a tanksitter).
Most corals, however, have internal hitchhikers: a variant of cyanobacteria lives in them and processes sunlight into sugars, and thus keeps the corals fed.
The branchy stony corals, the acroporas, prefer to eat only chemicals from the water (calcium, etc) and what their internal flora produce. They like their water pretty sterile.
The wavy-stony corals, that have soft bodies, like hammer corals, like slightly 'dirtier' water (still very clean and well-skimmed!) that contains floating bits now and again: cyclopeeze is good for this. THey also eat, probably, anything that gets sucked into their mouths, from copepods to, who knows? maybe ich in its motile stage. They're filter feeders. I have a hammer that started with 3 heads, that in 2 years has gotten, oh, 40 plus, and is the size of most of a soccer ball. A little 3-head caulestra coral is now the size of a softball. They've done this on fish poo, cyclopeeze every few days, sunlight, and a kalk drip.
Then the softie corals: they tolerate, even enjoy, water rich with nutrients, a somewhat (within reason!) heavier fish load is ok with them, and they both eat light, suck up chemicals, AND take in fish poo. They don't use much calcium at all: your water changes can handle them. As you could imagine, they're easier to grow--sometimes too easy. In the confines of a tank, with tank water, they sometimes grow like weeds. The more resilient mushrooms, green star polyp, and others---can become a plague. But you can sell the excess if you're canny about NOT letting them onto your structural rock.
HTH
