cmbspd

Its been one month since setting my first reeftank, in an extra hurry to house a large hippo tang that came with my used setup. You can see the details in previous posts but here's the run down. Water chemistry is stabilizing and everyone is doing well. I'm a science geek so I had to make some graphs of my progress:



I graphed the main parameters for the first 21 days and you can how each parameter changed and stabilized to pretty decent levels. Don't worry, next time I'll post pretty pictures of the tank itself! Temperature started off way too low until I figured out that I had to replace my finnex heaters because the thermostats shut off about 15 degrees too soon. Now I get about 1 degree variation from day to night. Salinity is also now really stable. I installed a JBJ float switch to my topoff tank about 10 days ago and finally got it working properly so that my water level doesn't vary at all. I have a large enough water volume that I had to open up the unit and adjust the timing screw to allow the pump to run for a full 15min before shutting off. Now it works great.

Calcium and alkalinity are both at good levels now, although the ratio is a little skewed toward alk. The initial increase in alkalinity is likely an artifact caused by my switch from the awful red sea test kit to salifert. The increase in calcium is the result of me dosing CaCl (prestone driveway heat) over several days - thanks to all the reefers for posting so much great info on dosing, including the web calculators that it really easy. I will say that I was surprised how little chemical it took. I bought the big, but cheap bag of CaCl at Home Depot and I only used a total of ~20 tsp!

Finally, the nasties. I started my tank with liverock from two existing tanks so I didn't undergo a pronounced cycle. I never detected NH3 or NO2, at least at a resolvable level with the red sea test kits, but you can see a spike in nitrate and phosphate - a bit of a mini cycle. The drop in phosphate is likely due to my installation of a two little fishies reactor with some PHOSaR - PO4 literally dropped to undetectable levels in 2 days! Nitrates took more time. I performed three large water changes between days 7 & 14. Each was about 30-40% of the total system volume and you can see that they cut NO3 by around 90%. The cool part is that NO3 continued drop for several days following - either natural denitrification is working well or photosynthesis is sucking it up. NO3 has leveled out around 2-5ppm recently - probably because I'm starting to feed the tank a lot heavier.

The major alage cycles are all over too. The clean up crew grazed through diatoms, then something red and then a fuzzy green algae. Now there is just a thin film of green on some of the virgin rock. And, I've got TONS OF PODS. They have really taken off in the last week - the rocks and glass are covered with 1-2mm long isopods/amphipods. I can't wait for them to get bigger!

We (my girlfriend and I) just added our first fish from quarantine - two small Ocellaris clowns! The female promptly swam behind my foam rock wall so I grabbed a chopstick to shoo her out. My girlfriends swears that the ocellaris swam out the other side of the foam wall (about 2 feet)! I sure didn't think that I left that much room behind it but I guess its good for water flow. Now she is missing again so I don't know if she just decided to take a long siesta somewhere in the rock work or is behind the wall again, but she'd now got a lonely suitor waiting for her. I did check the drain and sump so I'm pretty sure she didn't take a ride...

Did I mention that I am utterly paranoid about marine ich? In my freshwater tanks I never worried about disease and never had any troubles because I think I always had relatively low fish loads in heavily planted tanks. Now I've got this gorgeous mature hippo tang - my biggest fish ever by far and a reputed "ich magnet". I watch his every move...uh oh, he just scratched against a rock...why is he hiding in the middle of the day...I think I see a white spot, nope just a scratch. I quarantine my fish, even though I feel like it really stresses them out, but I've only been FW dipping the couple of corals I've added and obviously couldn't have my liverock sit fishless for 6 weeks or "tangy" wouldn't have had a home. So I live in paranoia instead. But he is definitely healthy and eating a variety of foods. He'll even eat nori out of my hand!

Our next additions will be two bangaii cardinalfish and a foxface, but not for another three weeks. Next time I'll update with a full tank shot and hopefully the female Ocellaris's whereabouts.