najluni15 Posted June 5, 2012 Share Posted June 5, 2012 I have my reef angel and can say Roberto has some of the best customer service out of any company I've dealt with. The support from the company and forum on the company website is amazing. Theyll write the codes for you. It takes a little bit of learning to write code but the generator that you can download is way easy. Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 6, 2012 Author Share Posted June 6, 2012 I have my reef angel and can say Roberto has some of the best customer service out of any company I've dealt with. It's amazing that you can email Reef Angel and get a response right from the guy who makes the product. Roberto certainly has made a great name for himself. New tank pics... Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 6, 2012 Author Share Posted June 6, 2012 Before & after pics - about 6 weeks in between. Full tank shot: I've rearranged everything a few times... still not happy. Any suggestions welcome. Link to comment
Psychosis Posted June 6, 2012 Share Posted June 6, 2012 Move the large rock in the middle to the left, merge the rock on the left with the stuff on the right, and cover the sand bed with plate coral. Win win win. Link to comment
najluni15 Posted June 6, 2012 Share Posted June 6, 2012 Nice coloration. I agree on the Reef Angel. Something about having the product designer/owner responding to any questions is a great feeling. I had a PWM cable that was bad and he mailed me a new one no questions asked when I told him I was going to sodder the connector back on. I live just a few miles south of him and got it the next morning. It was amazing. Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 6, 2012 Author Share Posted June 6, 2012 Move the large rock in the middle to the left, merge the rock on the left with the stuff on the right, and cover the sand bed with plate coral. Win win win. Yeah I really love the plate coral. With the blue lights on the orange glows so bright it looks electric. Feeds well and is growing well. I,ll rearrange my rocks next water change. Nice coloration. I agree on the Reef Angel. Something about having the product designer/owner responding to any questions is a great feeling. I had a PWM cable that was bad and he mailed me a new one no questions asked when I told him I was going to sodder the connector back on. I live just a few miles south of him and got it the next morning. It was amazing. Thanks. I received my dosing pumps in the mail this week. Will try programming them this weekend. Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 14, 2012 Author Share Posted June 14, 2012 Programming reef angel is dead simple now. The setup wizard guides you through each outlet and has lots of options. Dosing pumps added and programmed in about half an hour. After several weeks with biopellets I'm starting to understand how to adjust them. I started out running the pellets recirculating, but then turned the recirculating off and ran high flow through the reactor. I don't know why I changed it but at some point I did and forgot about it. Over about 6 weeks my nitrates were slowly rising. I started the biopellets at 0 no3 and after about 6 weeks I was at 1ppm. I even had a very light patch of cyano that appeared at night but gone by the morning. I adjusted the valve to recirculate at about 75% and 25% to exit the reactor. The outflow is set very weak. Within 2 days nitrate dropped to 0.2. So I learned a bit about adjusting the bio reactor and I can sleep well again knowing my nitrates are no longer rising. Cyano hasn't appeared for a few days. Link to comment
revaltion131 Posted June 15, 2012 Share Posted June 15, 2012 I love your aquascape and how clean the overall image of the tank is. Grown out, this tank will definitely be an inspiration if it isn't already. Do have 2 questions for you, about your corals. Is the dark blue(?) acro colony on the far left a named piece or just a nice find? Second, is the large green one in the center of the higher shelf a psammacora? Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 16, 2012 Author Share Posted June 16, 2012 I love your aquascape and how clean the overall image of the tank is. Grown out, this tank will definitely be an inspiration if it isn't already. Do have 2 questions for you, about your corals. Is the dark blue(?) acro colony on the far left a named piece or just a nice find? Second, is the large green one in the center of the higher shelf a psammacora? Thank you for the kind words. The corals are only just starting to colour, I have a long way to go yet. The acros were all purchased brown. My LFS store gets a huge shipment and sells the acros for $60 the first week and they get cheaper as they get browner... I buy a 5 or 6 when they get to $10 a piece. Some are just brown, some have receding tissue, but at $10 who can complain. So if one goes blue, it's luck. Sometimes you can kind of tell, but not always. As for the acro names... no idea. The green one is monti digitata similar in shape to psammacora. Green skin, but brown polyps. I would love a psammacora but I've never seen one for sale. Link to comment
revaltion131 Posted June 16, 2012 Share Posted June 16, 2012 One of the LFSes I used in Ohio sold dirt cheap SPS for a long time because their lighting wasn't good enough to get it to color. Got one of my favorite pieces ever from them for ~$3. I sadly lost it in a tank crash. As long as they don't come in with pests, sure can't argue for $10, especially at the size those are. I saw an online site with a psammacora, but I can't remember which. I love mine; nearly killed it twice now. Easily the most resilient coral I've ever had. Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 16, 2012 Author Share Posted June 16, 2012 new bird's nest coral added yesterday Link to comment
Psychosis Posted June 18, 2012 Share Posted June 18, 2012 I love this build. I've caught myself randomly going through it repeatedly, this thread needs more love. Link to comment
Ecospire Posted June 18, 2012 Share Posted June 18, 2012 I love this build. I've caught myself randomly going through it repeatedly, this thread needs more love. Agreed. What are your plans for future stocking? Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 18, 2012 Author Share Posted June 18, 2012 I love this build. I've caught myself randomly going through it repeatedly, this thread needs more love. Thanks for the encouragement. Agreed. What are your plans for future stocking? I want to fill in between the acros with encrusting coral and interesting frag finds. Maybe some staghorn grown up from behind to hide the back wall. A small yuma garden off to one side... and more plate coral. I love seeing tanks with a good variety of colour. Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 24, 2012 Author Share Posted June 24, 2012 3 new frags from Fragbox.ca Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 26, 2012 Author Share Posted June 26, 2012 this tank is awesome very beautiful! Thank you for the kind words. The tank isn't going as well as it was before the biopellets. I had lower po4 and no3 using zeostart. Levels are OK, but not perfect. No3 is .2, Po4 is .04. I am getting thin algae growth on the sandbed and some rocks, but the algae isn't really thriving, It's like I'm on the edge of either a really clean tank or a disastrous algae outbreak. It's making me kind of nervous. The algae on the sandbed is white/clear as if it's dying. Some patches of hair algae are getting brown tips as though they're dying, some bubble algae are turning silver and dying... but they've looked this way for some time now and they haven't just died. I went through the first algae outbreak after cycle and zeostart killed all the algae. No3 was a solid 0. All the algae turned white / brown, died and fell off the rocks within a few weeks. Also, coral growth and coloration has slowed some. I had explosive growth before the pellets... now sps still growing, pe is great, just growing slower. I have a renewed appreciation for the work that goes into some of the beautiful sps tanks I;ve seen on this forum. Link to comment
revaltion131 Posted June 26, 2012 Share Posted June 26, 2012 Interesting to hear about the biopellets. My LFS is starting to play pretty seriously with them in some new set ups and I was following along with the effects they got as well. Besides the zeostart, were you dosing or using any sort of media to accomplish the same goal the biopellets are supposed to achieve? Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 26, 2012 Author Share Posted June 26, 2012 Interesting to hear about the biopellets. My LFS is starting to play pretty seriously with them in some new set ups and I was following along with the effects they got as well. Besides the zeostart, were you dosing or using any sort of media to accomplish the same goal the biopellets are supposed to achieve? I went through some stages. I dosed MB7 from start to speed through the cycle. After a few weeks I had a hair algae explosion. I added about 8tbsp of gfo in a reactor for 2 weeks. I also began zeostart and zeobak dosing. I continued zeostart for a few months until about a week before the biopellet reactor went online. While on zeostart, nitrates were absolute 0 using salifert test. I know that biopellets need nitrates to work so keeping my nitrates at 0 wouldn't work with the pellets - So I weaned off the zeostart. My nitrates rose, expectedly, and I just waited for the biopellets to start kicking in. They weren't working as well as I thought so I figured maybe the gfo was limiting phosphate - I removed the gfo. When Phosphate rose, the biopellets started working, Nitrate eventually came down to 0.2. I tinkered with the recirculation on the reactor and got the nitrates low, but phosphate remained high (0.05-0.06 on hanna). So again - I added gfo to reduce phosphate. I am no longer dosing MB7, only zeobak once a week. I am currently running gfo and biopellets although I know it's not the way it's supposed to work. The gfo has brought phosphates down but I'm concerned about nitrates rising when phosphate becomes limiting. Ideally, the biopellets alone should be dropping both no3 and po4 and that's my goal - I don't want to run gfo. My struggle is with the no3 to po4 balance. I read on this forum somewhere that people actually dose nitrate to get the no3 to po4 ratio inline so that removal by biopellet is more efficient. I have also read that users that put biopellets online day 1 experience less of the back and forth I'm experiencing. I'm not courageous enough to dose straight nitrate. The tank isn't too bad, but I haven't achieved the equilibrium I want for a stable tank. Most recent test is no3 0.2(or less), po4 0.03. Good, but when I take gfo offline, it won't stay there, I'm afraid. I'm obsessing a bit. Link to comment
revaltion131 Posted June 27, 2012 Share Posted June 27, 2012 These things take obsession to really get right, it seems, so I wouldn't worry about that! I could never dose straight nitrates. Have you considered purposefully overfeeding? Seems like a safer way to cause nitrates to go up. I guess the problem is that you'd run into the possibility of it causing phosphates to rise as well. Link to comment
uglyfish Posted June 27, 2012 Author Share Posted June 27, 2012 These things take obsession to really get right, it seems, so I wouldn't worry about that! I could never dose straight nitrates. Have you considered purposefully overfeeding? Seems like a safer way to cause nitrates to go up. I guess the problem is that you'd run into the possibility of it causing phosphates to rise as well. Yes - I have purposely overfed with that intention. But I think overfeeding is providing both no3 and po4. It hasn't help my phosphate. The theory behind straight nitrate dosing is that biopellets need no3 to thrive and when all the no3 is gone, they stop eliminating po4. The assumption is that they remove more no3 than po4 in some ratio. For the pellets to continue removing po4, after the no3 is gone, one must add straight no3 so that the biopellets can further remove po4. Another tank dosing nitrates. http://www.nano-reef.com/forums/index.php?...t&p=3542877 Redfield Ratios mentioned on nano reef forum: http://www.nano-reef.com/forums/index.php?...st&p=964035 Here is a good thread on carbon:no3:po4 ratios and their consumption. Very interesting read. http://www.fishlore.com/fishforum/advanced...e-nitrogen.html Link to comment
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