First SW tank (some pics in here)

[Zer0]

Should be feeding them every day. Multiple times a day is a good idea for new fish.

[ZLogic]

Multiple times a day?  No worry of overfeeding?

[Zer0]

I wouldn’t worry about overfeeding unless your definition of feeding is giving them ridiculously large sized portions. You should be feeding them and watching how much they eat, when they start to ignore the food floating around them. Then base your feeding proportions on that, and feed them that amount multiple times a day. Your cleanup crew, if properly sized, should be able to consume any leftovers/scraps.

[ZLogic]

Quick update, mostly just for my own documentation.  Not much new to report, I've been slowly acclimating the new LEDs, I'm at about 24% on the whites and about 35% on the blues.  The ricordea mushrooms, zoas, and frogspawn have been doing great, everything else is still just kinda there.  Took off to minnesota for a week and came back and my chalice had totally bleached out, the candy cane lost all color up to the tips and then became overran with algae.  

 

I've really just been letting it go and age and haven't changed anything besides slowly increasing lighting intensity.  Still dosing Benepets reef food 2x per week.  My clowns are looking great, one is very obviously growing larger than the other so I'm assuming their splitting off into male and female.  The bullying by the bigger one has stopped and they're pretty much inseparable.  I picked up a bicolor blenny on sale for $18 yesterday, he's still pretty timid and with so much intricacy in the rock work he has a ton of hiding spots.  

 

At this point, my next steps will be to buy quality testing kits and installing pc fans with a temp controller.  Gets hot in this room and I don't have ac, tank temp gets up to 81-82F on hot afternoons and I'd like it to get no higher than that.  Not sure what corals I still want to add from this point.  I know I want another ricordea or two to go in with the others, I wanted a couple acros in the future, but I'm not sure if I'll have the vertical space for it.  I dunno, we'll see what comes in time, I suppose.  Open to any and all questions, comments, or suggestions at this point.

[ZLogic]

Been a while since the last update and not much has changed.  I did discover that my coral issues may have been of my own ignorance.  The Steve'sLED runs on two channels, one for whites and one for blues, and where i thought I was running 35% blues and 15%, whites, I had the two channels reversed and may have been cooking my corals.  The change in appearance on the tank when correcting that was also huge, colors popped so much brighter.  My frogspawn doesn't open up as big as it did under the brighter lights tho, I'm guessing just acclimating to the change, maybe I should've been more gradual.  Oops.

 

But the frogspawn has split into two heads and everyone appears to be doing great as far as I can tell, I have a cyphastrea and a monti that have been my first encrusters that didn't die in a week so that's exciting.  There's a new goniopora in there that hasn't extended too much since I got it, but he's not bleaching out or anything, just not extending.

 

I did install two pc fans for additional cooling as per a post here at nano-reef from 2016.  I've seen 101°F days, tank on upper level with no a/c and the highest I've seen is 81°F in the tank at which point I just propped up the lid a couple of inches.  I want to upgrade my flow, next wc I plan to increase the setting on the sicce 1.5 return.  But I also want to replace the global wavemaker I have with a more compact and more powerful one.  Looking at the jebao slw-10 or, if budget allows, a nero 3.  I've been using the Nyos testing kits, they're okay, better than API and I got them dirt cheap. 

 

Not planning on stocking anything else for a while, maybe in a month or so I plan on getting 2 or 3 rock flower anemones for the bare rock in the front right of the pic.  Also something to cover up the strip of epoxy on the arm of the rock in the front left, and finally I'd like to find a blue or purple digitata just to experiment with expanding horizons on corals I can keep.  Anyways, ya, that's what's going on.

[ZLogic]

The fans installed in the hood