Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone.

I was on vacation and missed out on the great boxing day sales. But I did pop into Wai's Aquarium for the first time and must have spent two hours talking to Danny there. What a great guy and I can't believe I never went there before. This is now my favorite store in all of Calgary and he took all of my money :redface:.

We'll not much to report this time. I reduced my photoperiod to 5 hours only for the daylights and my corals are no longer pale. They are slowly coloring up. I'm in the process of mounting my corals within the tank so no photos for now.

I did finish mounting everything in the cabinet yesterday.

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I also decided against going full ZEOvit. I'm going to hybrid it as follows:

Carbon Dosing - Vodka + Microbacter7 & ZEObac + Fozdown (when required)
Coloration & food - Iodine, AA, CoralVital, Pohls Xtra, DT's phyto & Roti-Feast

Also going to feed my clownfish a balanced mix of frozen food

Thank you :angel:

Your tank looks great! Like sphelps, I can't believe that one photo showed 30 mins after transfer! I love the rockwork. I think oolite sand in an SPS tank is a terrible idea, but I hope it works for you. If all else fails you can siphon it out and add a coarser sand. My fav for an SPS tank would be the Caribsea Special Grade, although I prefer BB. :D Check out Fauna Marin Balling Light for dosing...works well for SPS.

I like how you mounted your dosing pumps, Are they right over your sump and where do you keep your dosing jugs??

Very nice! Love your aqua scape!!

Nice job at keeping the inside of your stand clutter free!

You got 7 dosing ports.. what else will be be using these for?

^^ Thanks for all the positive comments. :wink:

Thanks Mindy. That is why I chose to paint the bottom of the tank with the sand color. Every 3 days, I need to get in there and shove the sand back to cover the glass in the front. I sort of hate Oolite sand. But then again, I didn't want to vacuum it so stirring it up twice a week isn't too bad. I only went with this sand because I had it already.

I'm trying to grow lots of bacteria (carbon dosing) which is why I need the sand bed in the first place. My previous 90 gallon was bare bottom and looked awful with my aquascape. It doesn't look good if you have lots of open space.

But who knows, maybe I'll siphon it out and go with something else.

Thanks for the tip on the balling. I was reading Iwan Lesser's journal again recently. Now to dream big again.

Hey Larry, I don't have anymore room for your awesome corals. :cry: The dosing containers are the standard 1 gallon jugs of Bionic 2 part. Each jug sits inside the drawer. I just pull the drawer out, turn the container upright and then refill. Nice and easy and out of sight. The dosing pump is at the top left corner of the stand.

If only my ATO reservoir would sit inside the tank, that would be a bonus.
ZHasan - I actually bought 14 dosing pumps for some weird reason. Yes I'm a strange guy. Now I'm down to just the 7 which I'm only using the two for ALK and CAL. I think those other ports will be spares and won't be used at all. With my water volume, I can't dose anything else. The vodka is 0.3ML per day (Bubble Magus can only do a minimum of 1 ML at a time), and everything else is 1 drop here or there. I don't need to dose MG with my IORC.

Update
I'm finding it hard to keep my parameters steady with IORC. Using this salt at 10% WC each week, I'm barely dosing anything. I decided to mix 50% with H2Ocean.

I also double checked my light timer and apparently I was only on a photoperiod of 4 hours for the full lights. :redface: The purple/blue acroporas are browning out fast. I changed it back to 7 hours.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-m...2/IMG_4357.JPG

Just to explain the sump a little bit. I have a 200 micron sock on the drain. I replace this once a week. Then I have the carbon on the hanger so that I can knead it daily (yes I like to cause needless work for myself). It is swaying because I have a Hydor 1400 pump in there keeping detritus from settling (that is sand you see at the bottom).

Then there is the protein skimmer, ATO, temperature controller, heater and return pump. And dosing pump tube holder.

Starboard is another option. That's what I'm going to do when I setup the new tank. I'm totally done with sand in SPS tanks. My tank used to have lots of open space, but the corals have grown in so they draw the attention away from the BB (there's a bit of sand at the back). My tank is painted on the bottom too.

You don't need a sandbed for carbon dosing, I'm not sure how that myth sprung up. As long as you have some rock (or even bioballs haha) you will have plenty of bacteria.

But then I think you need to have at least 1 lbs per gallon? I like the minimalist look so I try to go for as little rock as possible. The good thing about sand is that it can always be removed later on. :mrgreen:

Happy New Year 2013 Canreef.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-J...0/IMG_4373.JPG

Tank looks great, very nice and clean!
Whats your lighting schedule like and what do you use?

Thanks. It is a TEK T5ho x 6 bulb, no fans so passive. 2 bulbs for 10 hrs, 4 others for 9 hrs. I used to use Ati, but now testing KZ and Giesseman bulbs.

It looks like all of my existing images from my journal got lost. Not sure how to get them back again. :sad:

Here is an update on the tank. It still looks the same as before, but more grown in. I am experiencing an issue with a slow tissue necrosis. If you take a look at the green staghorn acropora, you can see how bad it is getting. Also some STN from the base of other corals moving upward. Not sure why this is occuring as the dosers are maintaining Cal + Alk at the proper levels. Phos and No3 are at 0. If all the SPS continue to die, I think i'm done with SPS and will stick to LPS and softies.

I removed all the Oolite sand (you were right Mindy, I hate it). Never again will I have a sand bed.

In January, I had purchased and was dosing some zeovit additives. They worked really well until I ran out. I found as soon as I ran out, cyanobacteria took over (which lead to the removal of the sand). I've been battling with it since. Acropora colors were very deep in the blues and purples. However, when I stopped dosing, they all disappeared. Zeo additives used were Coral Vitalizer, Bacteria, Pohl Xtra and Amino Acid.

I have been managing my aquarium with regular 5 gallons water changes per week (still on treated tap water). Also dosing Vodka (very small amounts) and had occasionally used lanthium chloride (foz down) to get phosphates to a true zero (hanna test kit ppb) when I get lazy and don't defrost the frozen mysis cubes. I don't like lanthium chloride and don't recommend it. It doesn't do a true job of removing phosphate and you are constantly battling with it (this is with 2 years of continual use on this product on 3 different tanks). I think I'll try GFO instead as I know that will work. Knowing that the phosphate will be remove constantly verus the constant up down up down.

Also made some changes to the fauna in the tank. I got so bored of the pair of clowns (Chizer & Bunoi) who are now 8.5 years old. They kept hiding in their little cave making babies. So I added a blue regal tang (Dory), lawn mower blenny (Fatso), tail spot blenny (Shinobi-eye-you), scooter blenny (Mushu), 2 green gobies, 2 yellow gobies, 1 purple firefish (purple thingy) and 3 peppermint shrimp (there is a mated pair).

The backwall never gets cleaned so that the blennies can feed off of them.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-t...4807.JPG?gl=CA

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Victor your clam is doing great. :)
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-A...4812.JPG?gl=CA

This is why he is called Shinobi-Eye-You
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Here is the STN. It's not necessary from the base going up. It's just random from the middle of the colony and then streaks upwards towards the tips in a straight path. Then it branches out and grows out from there. It's almost as if it is bleaching and then eventually dies out.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-8...4815.JPG?gl=CA

And here you can see other colonies that are very healthy. It's strange.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-r...4816.JPG?gl=CA

Here is a picture of my old 90 gallon from last summer that I just found. You can see the growth comparisons as they are the exact same corals.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-S...3850.JPG?gl=CA

Thanks Larry (Cuz) for all the SPS. They are the same frags I got from you last year. Although I wish I knew what your growth secret was to those sexy colors.

The pink stylo is off the hook what a beauty! Bet you're glad to be rid of that sand what a nightmare to deal with. Fts looks great too hope your stn sorts itself out.

Hey Brett. Nice to hear from you again. Hope you and the family are doing well. I see you have been busy with another build again. Lol what did I say huh? No such thing as final build.

I don't have a stylo coral. It's actually a pink birds nest.

things are great here just trying to round up scraps of summer free time so i can keep the tank looking decent lol. i found my 'forever tank' which sounds lame but yeah it happened (at last).

I always get Seriatopora and Stylophora mixed up :redface:

Well I regret this comment now. I no longer recommend this store and will not be going back.

Sorry to hear man just read your post. On a side note I must say the clam looks amazing.

There is no numerical "need to have" amount for live rock. The amount you need is whatever is required for the rock to process the ammonia produced by the fish. This amount is actually very little. Have you seen the "bonzai" SPS tanks? They use very little or no rock in the display tank and put the rock in the sump instead. It doesn't matter where the rock is in the system for it to do its nitrification job. I can't find any pictures...maybe I'm not remembering the name they were using for those tanks. I thought they called them bonsai. More recently bonzai is a term that is used for crazy rock formations with a small footprint and long glued together outcroppings.

Hehe... :p

really nice and clean arrangement.

The pink coral - is that a ORA Ponape Birdsnest?

Unfortunately not.