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.

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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.

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