melev

The 10th of the month snuck past me, so here's the update a couple of days later.

While I was away for MACNA, essentially all went well with the reef and anemone cube. The first night, of course around 1 a.m. in Washington D.C. I started getting notifications from Reeftronics that it couldn't communicate with my reef's Apex controller. Did a power outage occur? Not that I know of. I got a couple more texts, and the next morning I was up around 8 a.m. and had another text telling me Reeftronics would cease polling the Apex. Hmm. I checked the video cameras from my security system, and saw nothing but pitch darkness from both. Still, the fact that the cameras were on told me the house had power. A couple of hours later, I checked again and the fish were swimming and the water was moving. I texted the tank sitter to check, and he rebooted the Apex when he stopped by to feed the reef and verify all was well. He stops by daily when I'm away just to put a pair of eyes on everything.

A minor nuisance I'm still encountering is the Calcium Reactor situation. As you know, I had a big alkalinity spike but I got that under control. Part of that spike was apparently a big consumption of Co2, because the 5lb cylinder was dry by the time I got home. I don't think it lasted a month, instead of working for about five months. It has since been refilled and the connection was checked with soapy water to assure it's not a leak at the regulator. I'm learning toward going back to the Milwaukee pH controller since it has always been reliable and move away from the Reef Fanatic that was recommended to me. Alkalinity yesterday measured 13 dKH, Calcium at last check was 450ppm and Magnesium measured 1300 ppm last week.

I came home with a new jar of Magnesium powder from Two Little Fishies, and will be dosing what is necessary to get it up to 1400ppm this coming week. Livestock seems good, and I need to do some tidying up in the tank.

In the video I released last week, I explained a trick to not forget your count when mixing up saltwater to avoid going under or over your target amount. The container when empty takes 11 of those blue buckets filled with salt mix. Since I still had some saltwater in the container (50g maybe), I guessed I needed to use 9 buckets... well, I guessed wrongly. Salinity is way too high, measuring 1.037 in the poly tank now so I'm going to have to remove some and water down the majority of saltwater so it is useable. Nothing happened, I just tested to see what it was and am reporting my results. No big deal.

I came home with some AccuraSea from TLF that I'll use to calibrate my refractometer in the future since it is 35ppt solution. Super happy to see that come to market, as it isn't sold as widely as one would hope.

Here's a fisheye picture of the reef today.