crazy nice close up picts

Awesome tank build Klein. Thanks for updating so often and sharing your experiences with everyone.

Kien

That brain is gorgeous...great picture. :mrgreen:

Thanks! Those are not my brains though, they are Coleus' :wink: You missing those brains yet?? :lol:

Cooking up a storm
 

Well, since I did up a little write up about how I made fish food I figure maybe I'll do one up demonstrating how I mix Randy's Two-Part for dosing Baking Soda (Alkalinity) and Calcium (From littlesilvermax).

Alkalinity
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1. The first thing I do is go out and buy baking soda of course. Easy enough. You can get 2 kg (4.4lb) box from just about any grocery store for roughly $4.99. That comes out to like $1.13 a pound. Not bad.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116003

2. I then spread the baking soda out on a sheet and bake it in the oven at 350(F) for about an hour (or more).

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268115959

You can't really over bake this stuff. Randy has a couple of recipes. One that calls for baking and one that does not. Obviously I am using the one that requires baking.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268115852

3. After I've baked a batch (i'll usually do like 6 - 8 kgs at a time), I store it in a huge tub.

4. Okay, so on to the mixing. To make up a gallon (3.78L) of this stuff requires 2 1/4 cups of baked baking soda and 14 1/4 cups of water.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116047

I put my water into a pot on the stove and turn the stove on low to warm up the water. This helps with the dissolving

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116090

I then pull out my trusty fish blender. This also helps with the mixing A LOT! Trust me! Otherwise you are stirring by hand, very very briskly for a long long long long (did I mention long?) time..

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116204

Even with the blender you still don't want to poor it all in at once. Instead I tap the cup of baking soda on the edge of the pot to drop in a little bit at a time while blending/mixing/stirring.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116301

After a few minutes I'm all done and just poor in into a 2L storage bottle. Easy peasy!

Calcium
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Mixing up calcium additive is more or less the same approach, except there is no baking involved! To make a gallon of additive I mix 2 1/2 cups of calcium (purchased in bulk from littlesilvermax/chemmaster) with 13 1/2 cups of water. I don't even heat up the water when mixing up calcium actually. Just dump both water and calcium together into a container, blend/stir/mix with my hand blender and not long after I'll have 1 gallon of calcium additive ready for dosing.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116506

Fish toys, gotta love 'em :-)

Here we have the fancy schmancy Vertex UF-15 Media Reactor. Great for tumbling oh.. say.. some NP bio pellets perhaps? :biggrin:

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116939

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117015

The inlet and outlets are 3/4" so I needed to get a couple of adapters in order to hook the inlet up to a maxijet 1200 and to get the outlet to bend back into the sump. It is a fairly sizable reactor that can go in or out of the sump.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117034

Bye bye phosban reactor, hello new hotness.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117099

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117138

One mod I did perform was to cut the stock sponges in half. They were really really thick! I shaved them down to about a half a centimeter in thickness. If I had enkamat I probably would have used that, but sadly I do not have any enkamat :(
And here they are tumbling the day away..

Kien

Is that a little mad scientist going on or exotic chef? :wink:

I missed them dearly, so try to set up the cube tank as fast as I can but for some reason, it seems like the most difficult task for me :-(

both? Muahahahahha! My wife keeps accusing me of making up meth :neutral:

Well, things are look like they are back on track with the SPS colonies. It was definitely the carbon, or rather the lack of carbon. So ya, I had forgotten to run my carbon for two weeks and that's all it took for the really sensitive colonies to go south. They started to bleach pretty bad. Looks like I caught it in time. Carbon has been back online now for about two weeks and the bleached bits have started to regenerate. Luckily I did not loose any colonies.

Out of this I have gained a new appreciation for carbon and its benefits in an SPS reef. As we all know SPS (and other corals) like to conduct chemical warfare. Our reef tanks are literally filled with chemicals that we can neither see nor test for. How do we keep that in check? In the ocean dilution keeps this in check but we don't have that benefit in our tanks unless we do a lot of water changes. It is my belief that carbon aids us in this department. It helps to trap and clean up those nasty chemicals. Some corals are robust and are able to deal with these chemicals but more sensitive corals are not. I think this is why when these sorts of things occur we'll see some corals react while others are unscathed. I think the quality of the carbon is very important too. I've read a few cases now where bad carbon has been suspected to be the cause of mass SPS decline. I don't necessarily think that this is due to the impurities in the carbon, but perhaps more so the fact that the cheap-o carbon just does not have adequate absorption capabilities. That is, not all carbons are created equal. Some cheap ones may only last a week while it seems the general consensus is to change carbon out once a month.

Anyway, these are my theories based on my recent experience :-)

I would have to agree with you more than slightly, brother:wink: