Mits

I haven't updated my pics in a while, but I've been fighting with the tank a lot. I have had some issues with frags not growing, and even a complete lack of polyp extension in SPS with browning out too. On top of that I got a GHA outbreak. I thought I'd been doing ok, but it really forced me to take a long, hard look at the way I kept my tank. I had cheaped out on my test equipment, so I decided it was time for an upgrade. I replaced my years old swing arm hydrometer with a refractometer, and added a Hanna alkalinity checker. I'd been having problems with low alk for a while, the alk wasn't really the one I'd gone cheap on in the past. Over the past few months, I started an auto topoff with my reefkeeper lite using kalk as well, which seemed to help out with long overdue coralline growth. I'm sure the added stability helped as well, as I'd always let my sump evaporate way down before filling it up. I had several problems involving GHA, inverts having trouble, and corals losing color, and everyone I talked to said it sounds like phosphates. My phosphate tests always said zero, but I went ahead with adding GFO after having the false zero reading explained to me. I was worried when my hydrometer said I was only running at 1.021, which made me think I needed to start adding some more salt. Good thing I didn't! I decided to add the refractometer before taking such a drastic measure, and to my horror the SG was actually 1.029! I've been slowly lowering it over the past couple weeks, and it's now closer to 1.026. I'm planning on keeping it at 1.025. Finally, I was looking around Inland Aquatics in Terre Haute, Indiana and saw the simplest frag rack ever. I took mine apart to implement this, and found that my pvc supports for the old eggcrate were filled with detritus. It was like soil in a potted plant. I cleaned the whole thing out, put in the new rack, and everything is looking better. The day after the big cleanup/water change/rack replacement I noticed some limited polyp extension on my table acro for the first time! I looked over at my blue (brown) millie and saw the same thing! The color is starting to come back on the browned out sps, the water looks clearer, and hopefully everything is on track now. I can't believe how long I went thinking everything was ok, and ended up barely surviving a near tank crash due to laziness and cheap test equipment. Funny enough, the established fish seemed perfectly healthy through all of it. I tried adding a couple new fish a few weeks ago, but they didn't make it. I wonder if the high salinity was the culprit. I took a few pictures tonight, and the halides went out part of the way through. No FTS, but just a few quick shots of some coral.

This started out as a tiny frag with 3 different monti caps on it, two of them spiraled over the other one. It's always been fine, even when other SPS didn't make it. There's a superman monti to the left, and a small superman that I attached to the glass on the right with a magnet. It's starting to color up again and I hope to cover the entire back glass with encrusting montis.


Perc, Ocellaris and the RBTA. My old tank's first inhabitants, still going strong.


Scroll coral, starting to do a lot better. I have several frags of it starting to grow in the frag tank too.


Hammer. This has been the color since day one, now branching and sprouting like mad. Not quite the same as real life, I didn't take the time to white balance the camera.


A few acro/chalice frags. Not much now, but I think they'll really look nice down the road. The Chalices lost their color too, but it's slowly coming back.


Neon green trumpets right after the halides went out. Seemingly unaffected by tank issues too. Lots of frags growing from it.


Blastos, same story


Frag tank, old style, very dirty


Frag tank as of tonight. Had to use the flash so it's not the greatest pic


I'm really excited that my tank has recovered so well. I'm still fighting the hair algae, but I think I'm on the winning side now. I guess the moral of the story is to avoid going cheap on the important stuff. My reliance on a $5 hydrometer nearly cost me my entire tank. That's not the whole problem, but I could only imagine what would've been if I had started adding even more salt.