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Mark's 150 (NanoBox Retro)


markalot

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1 minute ago, specore said:

I think the most frustrating part for me is I still jump every time mine bites me.  It's not like it really hurts, and you'd think by now I'd be expecting it.  Yet it still seems to take me by surprise about 50% of the time causing me to flinch and splash tank water everywhere.  

I hear ya!  Like I said, I do not miss that!!!

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Beautiful tank and corals!  LOVE LOVE LOVE the bali slimer.  One of my all time favorite corals.  I used to have one in a 150, 300, and then moved to a 400 gallon tank.  Such a beautiful green and grows so fast.    Have you ever thought about a CA reactor to keep up with your Calcium demands?  I always had one on my larger tanks and the ease of use and once set, no more dosing.  In the long run, the cost investment of a reactor vs dosing will pay for itself over time.  Some people like to dose and I get it.  It's like driving a manual trans...I feel more in tune with the car when driving a manual.  Same with dosing vs reactor.

 

Just my 2 cents...but keep up the good work.  You obviously have a green "slimer" thumb!

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2 hours ago, specore said:

I think the most frustrating part for me is I still jump every time mine bites me.  It's not like it really hurts, and you'd think by now I'd be expecting it.  Yet it still seems to take me by surprise about 50% of the time causing me to flinch and splash tank water everywhere.  

 

My issue is I've had to fish her off the floor and out of the overflow.  It's not enough she just bite me, just has to jump and bite me, then bounce who knows where.  Talk about getting the crap scared out of you.  :D 

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2 hours ago, roll_the_dice said:

Beautiful tank and corals!  LOVE LOVE LOVE the bali slimer.  One of my all time favorite corals.  I used to have one in a 150, 300, and then moved to a 400 gallon tank.  Such a beautiful green and grows so fast.    Have you ever thought about a CA reactor to keep up with your Calcium demands?  I always had one on my larger tanks and the ease of use and once set, no more dosing.  In the long run, the cost investment of a reactor vs dosing will pay for itself over time.  Some people like to dose and I get it.  It's like driving a manual trans...I feel more in tune with the car when driving a manual.  Same with dosing vs reactor.

 

Just my 2 cents...but keep up the good work.  You obviously have a green "slimer" thumb!

 

I don't like having CO2 in the house.  I had a planted tank where I doses CO2 and it was nothing but trouble and then had a part fail and blow a hole in the wall behind the tank.  I paid a lot for the regulator as well, probably got ripped off, but my trust is gone.  I agree, those fears aside, it makes perfect sense.  

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1 hour ago, markalot said:

Hi Dawn, thanks for dropping by.  

 

Yea, it's fun to complain about the clowns but gets really annoying when I have work to do.  Mine have also started to lay eggs more frequently.  It used to be about 7 days between hatching and new eggs, now it's down to 4 or 5 days.  

Wow 4-5 days? Do they lay a new batch in a different spot? 

 

Btw, do your clowns live in an anemone? I find that mine aren't as bad once they were hosted, because their territory shrunk from the entire tank, to just the rock their nem is on, so they only bite when my hand is close to their rock. But having an anemone is a whole different PITA!

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1 hour ago, markalot said:

 

I don't like having CO2 in the house.  I had a planted tank where I doses CO2 and it was nothing but trouble and then had a part fail and blow a hole in the wall behind the tank.  I paid a lot for the regulator as well, probably got ripped off, but my trust is gone.  I agree, those fears aside, it makes perfect sense.  

 

I’ve was torn between going Ca reactor or dosing on the big tank. I decided to wait until I see the performance of apex trident to see whether I’ll invest into dosing+ trident or Ca reactor . (In the meantime, I’ll manually dose or grab a cheap jebao. 

 

Ca reactors take up a ridiculous amount of space once you get to these volumes, which sucks. Pretty sure I can’t fit a properly sized one. I guess that makes up my mind for me? 

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2 hours ago, Orangutran said:

Wow 4-5 days? Do they lay a new batch in a different spot? 

 

Btw, do your clowns live in an anemone? I find that mine aren't as bad once they were hosted, because their territory shrunk from the entire tank, to just the rock their nem is on, so they only bite when my hand is close to their rock. But having an anemone is a whole different PITA!

 

No, the female has been hanging near a tank wall since I bought her as a locally raised youngin.  She lays eggs on the tank wall and ignores everything, including the giant frogspawn below the eggs and the anemone I had in the tank for over a year.  Same spot all the time.

1 hour ago, HarryPotter said:

 

I’ve was torn between going Ca reactor or dosing on the big tank. I decided to wait until I see the performance of apex trident to see whether I’ll invest into dosing+ trident or Ca reactor . (In the meantime, I’ll manually dose or grab a cheap jebao. 

 

Ca reactors take up a ridiculous amount of space once you get to these volumes, which sucks. Pretty sure I can’t fit a properly sized one. I guess that makes up my mind for me? 

 

I'd say so. :)

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Wow, That is horrible to have a Co2 regulator blow.  I had great success with reactors.  Thankfully I never had one blow...or I would be gun shy too.   

 

Regardless of how you go about it...you have a beautiful tank!

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4 hours ago, roll_the_dice said:

Wow, That is horrible to have a Co2 regulator blow.  I had great success with reactors.  Thankfully I never had one blow...or I would be gun shy too.   

 

Regardless of how you go about it...you have a beautiful tank!

 

Thanks.

 

Here's the broken piece of Frogspawn for reference.  It's taller than the 40 gallon.

 

WZ1FOjJ.jpg

 

Xenia looks healthy doesn't it?  :rant:

 

The purple stylo growth is massive, big fat fingers.  These shots are LED only so the blues are over saturated.  It's a good purple, but not quite this bright.

fonRexw.jpg

 

 

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Gorgeous!  That stylo is awesome!  You're making me miss my larger tanks!  If you ever frag (or have an accidental fragging of) the slimer or stylo, let me know!  Would love to add them to my tank.

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skyscraper2290

So about 100 pages into your thread but had to jump to the end to see where you are currrently at. All I can say is WOW, this has to be my favorite tank on the forum and it has been awesome being able to go through your thread and seeing the ups and downs, how you handled certain situations, and the amount of helpful information that you have provided to everyone. Keep up the great work and looking forward to continue watching your thread, it really is an inspiration for a lot of people!

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I read through this thread and it has to be one of the most entertaining reads. Mark, your play by play of every little thing made me lol so many times. Somewhere after the rescape the tank went into auto pilot and took off. It looks amazing! I know you made several changes, such as adding live rock and mud, etc right before it took off. Do you have a guess what had the biggest impact?

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4 hours ago, bluecard said:

I read through this thread and it has to be one of the most entertaining reads. Mark, your play by play of every little thing made me lol so many times. Somewhere after the rescape the tank went into auto pilot and took off. It looks amazing! I know you made several changes, such as adding live rock and mud, etc right before it took off. Do you have a guess what had the biggest impact?

 

Thanks bluecard.

 

Me getting lazy and not touching it for a while.  I kept changing too many things and in fact many SPS do fine in non ideal but stable parameters.  I stopped testing PO4 and instead blindly started adding drops of PhosphateRx to help keep PO4 in check. After a few months PO4 was still low so it might have worked.  I also bought 20 dropper bottles from Amazon and put everything I dosed that did not use droppers into those droppers.  Everything is still drop based.

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At 3am the Apex disconnected from Fusion and won't reconnect.  It's a wired connection and I can direct connect from work so it's not an internal network issue.  I'm running older firmware because if it ain't broke I don't fix it.  I posted on their forums.   I don't see any announcement about end of support or maintenance so the answer will be interesting.  I know the first response will be to update firmware, which will only make me angry.  

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28 minutes ago, markalot said:

At 3am the Apex disconnected from Fusion and won't reconnect.  It's a wired connection and I can direct connect from work so it's not an internal network issue.  I'm running older firmware because if it ain't broke I don't fix it.  I posted on their forums.   I don't see any announcement about end of support or maintenance so the answer will be interesting.  I know the first response will be to update firmware, which will only make me angry.  

My hubby just ran into that with his Mac.  He buys and sells old bottles on ebay and he used i photo.  Well Macintosh has updated and no longer supports i photo!  Even though the computer is 9 years old it still works well and he was not happy.  In the end Macintosh did him right by giving him a new updated operating system that works with a newer photo app.  Dave had to buy some sort of memory devise to put all his i photo photos on and unfortunately we lost everything else on the computer but hopefully its good for another 9 years.

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Long text post, beware.  :D

 

I'm working up to a big change, probably starting this weekend or next.  The slimer is getting the boot and I haven't decided if I'm going to keep any of it or not.  Other acros may go as well in favor of more and more non acros.  Blue Stag might be gone, the newer to me blue tip stag might stay for a while longer. The Horrida needs some breathing room, I want to keep it.  Most other green acros need the boot.  One Katropora needs to go, which is a shame because I don't know of anyone around here who can take a huge acro.  I might just move #2 to where the slimer is now.  I would love to remove some Xenia infested rocks but last time this caused a pretty big tank crash so I'll just continue to tolerate it.

 

I have kept just about every SPS I've ever grown.  The birdsnest pile contains the green, the crazy, and now a good branch of the pink.  Bird of Paradise is on the sandbed in front as well as the always happy and growing blueberry digitata and the blue digitata that's in the 40.   

 

Slowly this tank will become more mixed and more fun (more flowies) to look at.  If it doesn't look good from the front it will be gone sooner or later.  

 

At some point I will spend some cash for a nice multihead gold torch.  I really miss he one I killed.  

 

One significant driving point for this change is I'm sick of the T5 heat.  The entire basement heats up when the 4 60 watt bulbs are on and the only reason I run them is so the acros color up well.  I am still unable to reproduce the good tank color I get with the Blue+ bulbs but I should be able to get close with a custom LED strip containing blue, cyan, and some green LED's.  There's an older thread on Reef Central where a guy had BML make a custom fixture to duplicate Blue+ and it worked to brighten up the tank and produce that nice non-windex blue.   For whites, I have an older fixture and I really need Mint, compared to Mint Lime and White suck, I can't even turn them on anymore because it makes the Xenia look like crap.  Xenia in the 40 has a nice pink hue, and under T5's it's nice and pink, but under Lime and/or white it's puke brown.  

 

I really wish BML or equivalent was still in business.  I need a 72" strip. :)

 

As far as making it myself, I can think of just about everything more fun than that, not interested in the slightest.  

 

Let's see if I follow through with any of this.  

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33 minutes ago, teenyreef said:

Gotta keep reinventing things and stay fresh! What about the Reefbright led strips instead of the old BMLs? Is the spectrum not what you want? 

 

Nope, it's just blue and white and incredibly overpriced.  

 

Trying to figure out this cool program.    https://www.osram.us/cb/tools-and-resources/applications/led-colorcalculator/index.jsp

 

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Oooo that smell.   

 

Unfortunately (or fortunately) one does not just get rid of a slimer.

 

Start

 

0VoFM1h.jpg

 

Bucket full

fUkZ1Df.jpg

 

gljuVao.jpg

 

Finished.

 

I had to put the Horrida back together, it broke while moving the slimer, and I still have a huge patch of slimer base which is not movable so it will return but I WILL KEEP IT TRIMMED.  I can;t believe how much brighter the tank is.   I also pruned Xenia and the daisy start polyps.  Happily the daisy polyp mats come up easily, a lot easier than the damn xenia.

 

rVPcsbV.jpg

 

FB8Mbcf.jpg

 

I'm not done but this is a good first step.  I cannot describe just how much slimer there was.  The tank water level in the sump dropped well over an inch.   I trimmed up some other acros as well to give more light to some of the lower acros.   The entire tank is brighter now, even the right side.  

 

Dropped the doser amount by 100ml.  I would much rather run too low than have a spike.  KH is 6.4, low again, but as usual the tank was looking fantastic.

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In exchange for the slimer ... and they'll give me more but this is all I grabbed for now.

 

9Z4te49.jpg

 

jwBjQsH.jpg

 

He is much more yellow than my last blenny ... and blue eyes is so damn cute.    Hopefully this is the start of another 5 year friendship.

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