Looking Amazing Tony. Great looking coral and fish.

Things look awesome especially those acans! Those watchmen appear to be a lot more confident than the last time I saw them.

Everything looks fit as a fiddle Tony. I'm particularly envious of your Bellus pair; I've been looking for a pair for quite sometime now. Keep up the good work. :biggrin:

Looks great, I love all the fish pic's :thumb:

The males are apparently terrible shippers. Get two females and wait it out, thats what I'm doing. Just waiting for a second one as only one came in on the last order :biggrin:

Wish I could offer some advice on that but these guys came to me together out of a tank being shutdown.

The most fighting in the tank occurs among the angels. The male chases the female an awful lot to the point that I worry one day I'll find her outside the tank. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of damage done if he catches up to her, so I'm not really certain what is going on there. And then both the male and the female will have their individual spats with the potters, although like the occasional spat among the tangs (who aren't the best of friends but will tolerate each other for the most part), seem to only last a minute or two and then they go their separate ways.

Every so often I have seen the male do a display for the female however, and it is kind of neat to watch. He will swim sideways, occasionally flipping sides, and vibrate his tail. At least I think it's a display because he clearly looks for the female before he starts all this. I remember thinking "yeah right buddy, good luck with that. You are so sleeping on the fishy couch tonight."

Well I finally broke down and added GFO to the system this week, and the results so far are .. well .. astonishing. Or at least, suffice it to say, I'm not sure I understand what's going on.

On Sunday I added 16 Tblsp (1 cup) of GFO to a TLF 150 reactor. Being concerned of a sudden PO4 drop (as this is reasonably well documented to be stressful to corals and can cause tissue recession and so on), I started with what I thought was a conservative amount of GFO (high capacity GFO, sourced by Eli at CaCO3Reef). Established guidelines for HC-GFO seem to suggest starting around 8 Tblsp per 8 gallons (before eventually being able to double that) so for a system with 300 gallons you'd think you'd want 37.5 Tblsp, 1 cup is 16 Tblsp so this is less than half of that so here I was thinking I was starting off with "half of the half amount for starters."

Set the flowrate to the reactor to slow (estimate maybe 50ml/min). At 50 ml/min it is basically a slow trickle. If I have my math right, it would take about 16 days to fully turnover one tank volume at this flowrate.

I thought it would be fun to test the tank PO4 and the reactor's output of PO4 for the first little bit. Doing dual tests like this should tell me a couple things:
1) If the GFO is "working" at all
2) How fast the PO4 is dropping in the tank
3) When the GFO is expended and needs to be replaced.
.. All good things to know.

Soooo anyhow, here are the results so far:

Day 0: Tank PO4=0.17ppm Reactor PO4=0.15
(I thought, oh good, it's only lowering the PO4 a little bit, this should be a nice safe slow reduction.)

Day 2: Tank PO4=0.08ppm Reactor PO4=0.18
(I thought, huh? Ok, I did some bad tests here. Try again tomorrow.)

Day 3: Tank PO4=0.07ppm Reactor PO4=0.00
(Makes me think the reactor testing from the day before was the bad result.)

So um ... Wow? Does this even make sense? That GFO must be one heck of a PO4 scavenger if it has halved the PO4 in the tank already after 2-3 days at such a small volume and small turnover.

So far there is one coral exhibiting some slight tip burn. It is very minor at this point however. It should easily recover assuming it doesn't get worse first. The piece in question is a Cali tort which hasn't actually been blue in over a year now (it did phenomenally well in the first quarter of the first year and then has been struggling ever since. It is clearly a strong coral however though, because in this time any other coral that has shown the slightest bit of distress over the PO4 eventually RTN'd at some point.)

I'm really excited to see where the reduced PO4 levels should take me in terms of coral growth and colour. I hope this is a positive step for the tank. It would be nice, for example, to see the Cali tort start to look like an actual Cali tort again. :) Oh, the possibilities!

Holy crap Tony, I didn't realize you finally had water in this bad boy! I will have to read through your journal later and get up to speed.

Oh come on now Tony, you start things, and I have to follow! Now this? Reminds me of the BioPellet Days. Tagging along to see the overall results.

Hahahaha! Sadly I can't really tell if you're kidding or not. :p I know this is was one of the slowest builds ever (and the record probably still holds) but there's been water in the tank since .. um .. late 2010 or thereabouts. :p

I still use the biopellets on the small tank for now (which is just a fowlr). The nice thing is when I test the water in the tank, PO4 is zero, NO3 is zero, so they seem to do their job. Since the addition of the small doliatus the valonia in there is receding big time too.

Since going to larger water changes per week (about 16% now whereas before it was 8%) I've noticed an overall bounce to the tank that wasn't there before. The downside is my consumption of salt is way up (well, double, I guess, technically). It's not really something that's measurable or even perceivable in photographs but it is something I really notice myself when hanging around the tank: it just feels better.

But the PO4 wasn't going down. As you know I've been trying to follow the zeoheads advice over at zeovit.com but if after 18 months of zeovit and the PO4 isn't going down, I think it's fair to say it's not going to. They kept saying "be patient, be patient, be patient" but there's a limit to what I think one can tolerate. PO4 in small quantities is something needed for proper biology but too much of it is detrimental: you see it in inhibited growth, subdued colours, algae growth, etc. .. We've talked of this before but 2 things are becoming clear to me about zeovit:
1) Possibly more effective "per gallon" in smaller tanks (ie., less than 150gal) than in larger tanks
2) Possibly its strengths lie in "preventing PO4 buildup" as opposed to "actually able to reduce PO4 once it's there."

I still believe there are some benefits to the system so for now I plan to continue with zeovit, although at a much reduced footprint compared to before.

For me it's been a "journey of understanding" when it comes to PO4. I've finally figured out how to test it properly and get reliable numbers, and I think it explains a bit of what I was seeing. I just hope I'm not introducing too much risk for bringing it down so quickly after it's been so elevated for so long.

So yeah, you might want to consider adding GFO yourself. I'll see where this takes me but I think I might stick with keeping it for the long term, regardless of whether I stay with zeo or abandon zeo completely down the road.

Day 6, tank = 0.12, reactor = 0.12. Looks like I'm replacing the GFO weekly at least to start with!

it wont stay that way, i had to use a fair amount at first changing wekkly or bi weekly then it slowly got cut down, im at about a cup changed every 6 weeks now

Cool, that is a relief to hear!

its powerfull stuff and it works almost instantly at reducing phosphates, i dont think i would run a tank without it now after seeing first hand how fast and effective it is.


your corals will thank you with lots of growth and pretty colors :P

You've got many pretty fish in there now. I'm awfully jealous.
Lookin' forward to more pics for my ideas.

(Thanks Greg!)

Well.. second weekend of switching to GFO, so thought I'd test PO4 again.

Tank seems to be 0.09 now. GFO outputting also 0.09, so seems steady so far at replacing weekly. Still only 1 cup of GFO, however, which is like 25% of the recommended amount, so perhaps this makes sense. In fact the more that I think about this, I'm not sure what putting more GFO in the reactor does beyond lasting longer (ie., if I put in two cups would that mean it could last 2 weeks instead of 1, but the PO4 absorption remains the same in either case? If so then it just comes down to a question of how often does one want to refill the reactor.) The only thing I can think of is that if one could safely reduce the PO4 down to undetectable levels, then using more GFO maybe means you can have more flowrate through the reactor as well, thus increasing the reactor's ability to remove PO4 as it is produced ... however if you're already at or near zero then I'm not sure what additional benefit there is to doing that in the first place. In no scenario does one really get to leverage the GFO.

At least one can decisively predict the amount of GFO needed however, which is kind of nice. The only thing left to figure out is how many cups are in a lb. of GFO, after that I should be able to predict down to the week when I'm going to need more GFO.

One thing I am noticing with the Hanna tester however is that about every 2 or 3 tests, I get a total wingnut value. What is weird is that it produces the same wingnut reading every time. At least the silver lining is that if I see this value, I can pretty much just say "yep bad test", dump the vial and start over.

The Hanna tester "ULR Phosphorous" ("ULR" = "ultra low range") gives you a reading that says "ppb" (parts per billion) but what's important to note is that it is "ppb phosphorous". To convert to ppm PO4 (which is what most of us reef aquarists tend to think of for PO4) you multiply by 3.066 and then divide by 1000.

So my earlier reading of 0.08 corresponded to a value on the tester of 29: 29 * 3.066 / 1000 = 0.088somethingsomething which I just round up to 0.09.

When I get one of these wingnut values, the output reads, almost always, 55. There have been a few cases where it wasn't exactly 55 but close. So basically now if I get a reading of 55 to 59, I discount the reading, dump the vial, clean it out and start over.

What really tipped me off to this was that I got a GFO reading of 55 once which was higher than the tank. I would expect the value to be zero, or at least zero, or the same as the tank, but it should be next to impossible for the GFO to output higher than the tank. The whole reason we use GFO over other PO4 absorbers is that it's not supposed to leech PO4 once it is expended. On the second test it gave a zero reading, which made total sense.

I wonder how many others have this issue. Kind of weird.

Just wondering why you don't multiply by 0.003066 to start with ? :mrgreen:

Maybe Mindy will chime in about your usage and so on as I believe she knows lots about the HC GFO

Bahaha! I'm not kidding. I had no idea it was running now. :lol:

I'm not sure I see that Tony has a question...? He seems to know what's going on (besides the funky results from the Hanna checker lol).

I think you need to sit back and enjoy the tank mang.....this phosphate thing is gonna make you mental:razz:

Ah, mostly I was confused on the difference of using reduced amounts of GFO or not. Been using much less than the recommended amount at first but since the reactor outputs 0 anyhow. So I'm unclear of what's the point of adding more gfo at a time down the road, since the capacity to reduce PO4 can't really be any better than it is - except that "more gfo" should also mean "replace less often" .. but I'm kind of thinking it works out the same either way? Is the difference of 1 cup in the reactor, and 2 cups in the reactor .. the same as the difference of "replace every week" or "replace every 2 weeks"? Sorry I'm not a very good communicator so I have no idea if this makes sense or not.

I just used to test my PO4 every couple of weeks, if it stayed low all was good, if it went up a little, I'd change out the PO4. Currently I change it out about every 6 weeks or so whether it needs it or not (stopped testing). Most of my PO4 is tied up in caulerpa anyways :rolleyes:

I just removed my phosphate media reactor completely. It had been months since I changed the media, so it clearly wasn't doing anything and the tank is doing great.

But you have a fairly large macro algae refugium though, still, right? My guess is that is where PO4 is being absorbed if you are not finding PO4 to be an issue.

tony you want some macro??

I've done both caulerpa and chaeto in the past with reasonable results. Chaeto I didn't mind but it died out after I switched to NP pellets and I never started it up after stopping pellets just on account that I was convinced zeovit would take care of the PO4. Caulerpa OTOH was a freakin' disaster, it spread all over the display tank and I was never able to fully rid myself of it. It would literally hide in spots where I (and my tang) couldn't see it and that stuff is nasty, it'll totally kill off coral if it wants to. Doug claims anemones are evil, I say anemones are more on the dumb side and it is caulerpa that is evil - I swear it has a sentient malevolent intelligence to it, which is rather impressive for an algae.

For the moment I think I'm OK - thanks for the offer though! I haven't ruled out going back to a non-caulerpa-type-macro down the road, if I decide that GFO isn't for me or something like that..

Wordy update with tons of pics please.

Bonus points if you use 'pheasant balls'.

What Tony lacks in balls he makes up for with eloquent prose. Now where is he?

Driving the long trek between the north stores and his homebase in the Deep South? <-- My phone demanded deep south be capitalized to emphasize its very south-ness.

It takes me half an hour to drive to or from work which is an 8km distance. I hate driving in this city. And before someone goes all "well it's worse anywhere else, you should try Vancouver" I would counter with a "well, this is not Vancouver. We're not nestled right IN the mountains, and there is no ocean anywhere nearby. In fact most lakes in the vicinity are fake. I am reasonably certain that saying 'Calgary' is a Scottish word is a cover story and the real story is 'Calgary' is a Cree word that means something roughly translated as 'not even the trees live here willingly and yes it is going to take way to long to drive anywhere here'." That's what I would tell them.

Anyhow, I had typed in a nice reply with pictures but when I went to preview it I got the "Your token has expired" error. Pressed back and poof, there it was, the empty text box with all my typing effort nicely wiped out of existence. So I typed in "LOL, I got the 'Your token has expired' error message" and pressed submit and AGAIN got the "Your token has expired." Ahhh vbulletin, you quaint little piece of software, you..

Let me try to remember all what I typed in now and try again ... le sigh.

Adding GFO has been overall a positive move for the tank. For now, I still continue with the Zeovit regime but I don't really think it's doing a whole lot for me.

The downsides to GFO is that in the way that I'm using it, (just one cup's worth in a TLF150 Phosban reactor) it has to be changed out weekly. If I let it slip beyond a week, I notice a difference in the tank.

Even at only changing out 1 cup per week, the cost of GFO has been a bit of an eye opener.

As far as corals go, some things do really well for me. I have had a bit of bad luck in the past few months and have lost a handful of more finicky corals, which I hope to get around to replacing at some point.

Red Planet is one that seems to do well for me. I love this coral. I wanted a red acropora for so long, probably close to a full decade before I ever found one, and the irony is when I did find one, it turned out to be one the most resilient and faster growing corals I've ever seen .... which if you think about it is rather unusual for a coveted piece like that. Usually the favourites are the ones that grow the slowest and are the first to RTN or STN if something so much as hiccups in the tank.

Here's one side of it.
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps870d1d98.jpg

Blastos being another favourite of mine, here are 2 that seem to be growing well for now:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps3e97979c.jpg

My Rose split a little while ago and one of the daughters has been "bubbling" up like a new anemone. We all know this is a fleeting thing so it's worthy of a picture:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps0bda283d.jpg

(... plus I just did the overall placement with the clam and the corals all around it.)

And here are some fish:

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psd837e432.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...pscd61faa5.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps57197aa6.jpg

Looks good you got a nice collection of fish there

The stuff you did show looks like it has great colour man. I hear you on the cost of gfo I sorta wish I had my 5g pail of hc kicking around still. It would last me the rest of my reefing career!

Love the rabbit fish photo bombing the flame wrasse lol

so quite being so cheep and put more tokens in :mrgreen:

I would rather drive in cow town any day than vancouver though, even victoria is getting horable. what used to be a 20 min drive home for 15km, is now taking people 45 min and up. now kamloops I like. rush hour just adds 3 min on a 18km drive, so now it takes 15 min to get home from down town :wink:

oh the tank is looking good also, but what about a FTS?


Steve

I can't do FTS photos. I try, but they end up being very out of focus with no real discernible details. I thought maybe I could try a panoramic/stitch once, but after cropping and resizing it ended up being the same effect. Except that I had ghost fishes. Not sure what the trick is but I'll keep trying in the meantime.

Your trigger is just stunning! I love the anenome as well, beautiful colour.

Major photo update!!
 

I guess the reef is now two years old! Wow.

Anyhow, so over the holiday break, Kien and I traded some frags. He was kind enough to bring his camera with him and snap a couple photos. I'm so glad he did, I swear the guy is magic, I look at these photos and can hardly believe they are of my tank.

To start with, a couple FTS.. (please don't mind the masking tape, I'm still painting the basement.. Also the water is sort of cloudy in some of the pictures because my kid really wanted to feed the fish a clam from T&T while this was all happening, so there was a feeding frenzy in the front corner for a bit there..)

Anyhow with no further ado ... PICTURES!!

Front view..
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps84b00035.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psd03d2b55.jpg


Corner view.. I love this angle..
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps36332128.jpg

And from the side looking down the long way .. I also really love looking in at this angle:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psa84cf429.jpg

And, one thing that struck me lately in my own attempts in FTS lately (all of which have failed so far, it's a rather challenging tank to take a good FTS on) is that in my attempt to aquascape "differently and interestingly", I created a downwards slope of the base reef. I may, in fact, take it on as a project later this year to rescape it a little so that it builds up as you go further back). Anyhow, the bottom line is that you get a more interesting FTS view if you look from high up and aim downwards. Check it out:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps2d12fc34.jpg


And some scene shots of the various bommies in the tank:

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps841528a1.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psb4eca597.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psea550279.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...pse8221aec.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psce48b00d.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps72e0867b.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps6fa855d0.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps58a393ca.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psd14a054d.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...pse2adae8d.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...psfdaaa186.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps73877398.jpg

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/n...ps69f8bc94.jpg