Spec III Reef ! First salt water tank from the start!

[brahma04]

[brahma04]

That drag with 10 head and 4-6starfish was 20 bucks. I thought it was a pretty good deal. They said i need to dose call mg etc if I want to add anything but softies. Is this true for you Brandon? What are you dosing if anything

[brandon429]

Dosing additions are the fine tune choices of the reefing world and I see them as optional and proportional to water change preferences. Success is seen in not dosing and dosing too.

 

Great planted tank I'm a moss liker!

 

So much acropora sps filled up my vase it was 100% opaqued out blocking light to everything this will happen with or without dosing because I changed water a lot and fed heavy. If i had to change less water/lower work on the tank (or extend out work intervals) then dosing will accomplish that and skimming, gfo or any others would balance out the export/waste binding part.

 

The dosing of two part I was doing wasn't for coral growth it was to keep the system purple with coralline but I'm not sure I want all that scraping work in 2.0 version I'm kind of liking not much scraping work and a tad less coralline. Not dosing much any more just water changes. The only doser I ever used was c balance but I never bought test kits to know the levels

 

I formally apologize to reefdom for breaking stern rules again, for dosing two part as a guess amount for ten years and never testing to see what the params were heh. In hindsight, I'd say it was a heck of an eyeball run

 

Google up Maritza the vase reef when you can, her work in picos showed me even dosing isn't required for highly diverse stony corals in these small tanks simply because our large water changes outpace uptake by the corals and systemic calcifiers

[brahma04]

I want to put something cool in my tank other than mushrooms and zoas .The loss of my hammer coral (a baby new head IS growing) made me worry about what this tank can handle. "I wouldn't add anything but softies" from the LFS has me double checking my additions. What could i possibly add without having to dose? What did you have in your tank you really enjoyed eyeballing? Id really love something like montipora, acans, or duncans.

[brandon429]

All of those

 

I had em packed in wall to wall

 

My coral grows the same whether dosed or not, only the coralline gets thicker when dosing. Corals care about mass feed and export, and decent params, more than they want elevated params calcium and alk and sparse feeding. It takes min two months sustained CPR for the corals to show you new mass muscles

 

All sw mixes provide decent params or they will cease to be sold. Take instant ocean for example. Debated in quality. Runs more reefs than any mix and for decades, instant ocean the cheapest mix you can buy will run any of those corals, Maritza the vase reef works exclusively with io

 

**my own vase is lfs pre made water every known salt brand made, they change with each bulk batch bought. My reef is never on the same mix for a year it's changing always, through 100% water changes I'm not even acclimating to a new brand at all **

 

All reef problems blamed on IO if moved into my house into tiny vases would reverse as I would just increase feed and water changes, spot kill any algae with peroxide as the tank is drained, and produce frags. Being hands off is where the problems come. Forcing your reef to expect drains makes it rise to the occasion

 

Now my colors weren't awesome it was about frags and mass, and not testing, plus I had fluorescent lighting not much pop there. There are certain dosers and elements that in the presence of low controlled nutrients will fine tune certain colors but nothing special is needed for your tank unless you want to change water less. Changing 50% of the water weekly is shown in the sticky here in this forum from el fab to run all the corals we keep specifically without dosing for three years, but his sandbed limited his tanks lifespan. We now see a trend in problem tanks and the hands off sandbeds of last decade. a few yrs at best then invasion issues will make a challenge

[brahma04]

That tank of yours is wild man. What an interesting journey it must have been and now to the new chapter. Ive read a quite a few of your posts around the web. I believe fw planted nanos as well

[brandon429]

thank you for letting me post in your thread im preparing to link it back to r2r for new tank starters to see how much it will help to start with live rock of this quality and keep it clean the whole way.

 

 

if your reef turns out to never have a crashed sandbed, and that pristine rock remains algae free via forced exclusion as the algae is coming soon as the first little green test spriglet, then my reef will specifically live longer because of your tank and your feedback--all we post and read comes full circle for our tanks. Most of our challenges are the same in this niche of the hobby.

predicting and heading off challenges before they even show up seals the deal, biologically anyway. We still have to get lucky with home power outages, weather, it's always apparent some luck is involved for the hardware aspect

 

 

[brahma04]

as I was increasing my light, slowly lowering it closer to the water every other week it seems as if i am also increasing my algae/ diatoms, I'm guessing this is normal? I keep stirring up the sand bed which seems to keep the bloom down to a minimum in the sand but the rock work is looking brown.

I never had a bloom in the beginning, I'm guessing with a cycle that took almost a month to fully complete this also could be normal? Any suggestions?

[brandon429]

It ranges between tanks, that growth. im getting light brown im having to scrape off the walls only due to upgrading to that kessil, from power compacts since 2001. So literally my tank is going from low maintenance, to always scraping brown stuff off the walls and no change in nutrients or any cycling, just the light. If its not light for someone else, its some other minor variable but the key is the reliability of guiding a tank...you just keep removing it during each work session, making your rock and tank free of it, and eventually it stops.

 

For those who do not guide, it may not, but nonetheless having to manually guide a new tank is spot on par. (or a tank with major hardware upgrades apparently)

 

-this is also the point some choose to use gfo in a filter, or biopellets, or an ATS, many things. A few days lights out can reduce or stop that for you, some do blackouts. not me, I just reef as normal and step up export until it subsides naturally. El Fab in the sticky above chose a refugium mini, tis ok to diverge here with the -goal- being less hand guiding with the same outcomes. that's the fun in what we do...in the end, repeated removals have the final say that's for sure. My own work will phase out over the next month or two as a totally new illumination system causes its own adjustments, im not worried at all.

 

 

Partial access:

 

so one trick that mega-old pico reefs can utilize is the total takedown cleaning. as often as you like or need...what we have done so far here is all partial work and that's ok too...but total export takes this stuff out of the tank, its harder guiding. Involves simply holding sensitive creatures and your rock in one container, and using clean saltwater to literally rip clean your actual reef such that theres nothing in there but sand, bacteria, no silt, and no invaders.

 

For sure they'll come back a bit having been reseeded from the live rock, but each of these actions is cutting the community down and it will comply after X number of these forced events. lowering your light levels a bit, and ensuring your makeup water is zero TDS is solid prep.

 

if it helps, the trainwreck thread linked on page one has devolved into them changing out the sandbed 100%, and still having the invader because the rocks were never guided clean. I tried to repeatedly offer cleaning assistance we do in those threads I pmd you but was rejecto...no prob each has a different journey.

your early sandbed invaders were directly predicted and with a little easier light levels and forced repeat removals, I bet by two mos more it stops and goes to normal glass growths we all get not constantly, but as the indicator of water change time if the current level of changes had been lacking

 

Next up is green hair algae, and again you have two starkly competing schools of thought:

1. Leave it, part of the cycle

2. Remove it when it's a baby Audrey II why would anyone purposefully farm alien plants you eventually don't want wrecking your tank? It's not only not part of a cycle, I love when people leave it in as a total baby growth because it turns into this need by aquarists of all tank sizes:

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2082359

 

 

Six years of one thread condensed into this statement:

The masses clearly aren't doing the right thing when it comes to algae or crazy means wouldn't be in that much demand, normal means would work. Every tank in this thread has a common factor: they brought in X, left it in till it became a challenge, then we were tasked with burning out a full blown Audrey II plant instead of a tiny little sprig. See your first GHA for what it has the potential to be, not what it currently is. My pico is algae free forever.

[brahma04]

So how do i go about removing this algae off of the rocks? short of taking a tooth brush and physically removing it (doesn't sound like a bad idea) what can i do, GFO, lower the watts, physical removal and repetition? sounds straight forward to me.

Now here is some news, I'm upgrading to a Fusion nano 10! (wife wants fish, wife gets fish lol) It's cycling with sand and some new live rock. When i go to make the transfer, should i take out the live rock I'm having trouble with and scrub the hell out of it? (that's my plan until someone says NO DONT!)

Thanks for all the help as always B-

[brandon429]

My opinions are subject to much debate the real secret is I don't type anything an example thread doesn't exist for in case my crazy notions get called out. It's ok to say seemingly crazy things if it's done to ones own tank x200 times and logged

 

I wouldn't scrub the stuff or the rocks, that invader is non holdfast and will remove where a creative jet of water removes it. Hard scrubbing is literally descaling benthic creatures we use to evaluate the quality of the live rock by how dense they are. Old school pico aquarist rock clearing detritus technique:

 

Makeup bucket of 5 gallons saltwater same temp/salinity as display tank. With hand, submerge one non compliant rock into container and swirl hard, really hard. Swirl many times and that's one clean rock. Use a powerhead underwater to jet it additionally if you want

 

Put rock back and let the swirl bucket still, photograph the detritus that settles and post it so that people who aren't being as detailed can see what even clean rocks will store. Live rock produces detritus, along with your other animals from the benthics that grow on the live rock. Live rock being cleaned out is a secret life extender that increase porosity lost to plugging, you can never ever harm live rocks by power rinsing you merely extend their life free of algae.

[brandon429]

the degree to which id love to see a pic of your forced compliance tank is tenth degree

 

 

 

the art of maturing a pico reef is becoming less hands on over time, not as a start. hows this Fiji pink beauty doing