kien's 150g Room Divider Mixed Reef & Stuff - Page 17

kien · #**161** 11-04-2009, 06:29 AM

Well, tank is coming up on the 3 month mark so I figure this would be a good time for an update.

First up are some toys. A few weeks ago I ordered one of these display panels for my Profilux. It is nice to be able to glance accross the room and see what the tank is up to.

I also got one of these LED moon lights. What's really cool about it is it lets me program in sunrise/sunset (red lights), moon phases (blue lights), and lightening storms (white lights).

Finally, I also added a 3 pump dosing station to my rig. Profilux makes two versions of these, a standalone one and one that hooks up to the controller itself. I got the one that hooks up to the controller since I have the controller.

I wasn't sure how many pumps I wanted at first but after doing some research I decided all I really needed were 3. Alk, Calcium and Magnesium. Turns out I really only needed two. More on that later.

Delphinus · #**162** 11-04-2009, 06:37 AM

That LED thing is KIT! Have you set it up yet? How does the sunrise/sunset look?

lastlight · #**163** 11-04-2009, 06:46 AM

That View2 is one sweet piece of hardware! Christmas came early eh? I was going to get the stand-alone doser with 3 pumps later on too. Curious as to why you need only 2...

kien · #**164** 11-04-2009, 07:03 AM

So even though I've had the doser for a little while now, I have only just recently started to dose. I am dosing Randy's Two Part, Baking Soda for Alk and Calcium from Littlesilvermax. I also ordered up some Magnesium from him but haven't dosed that yet.

To figure out how much I needed to dose I simply propped up my chemistry to the levels I wanted (8 dkH, 420 calc, 1350 Mag.). I then tested the big 3 (alk, calc, and mag), once a day to see how much the tank consumed. I did this for 3 days to come up with an average consumption rate. Looks like I use about 144ml of Alk in 24 hours. I dose this at an interval of 6 hours, 12am, 6am, 12pm, 6pm. I consume about 200ml of Calcium in 24 hours. I also dose this at an interval of 6 hours, 3am, 9am, 3pm, 9pm. I have yet to figure out how much magnesium I'm consuming as it doesn't seem to drop that much at all. So I'm currently only dosing the two parts via the doser and will probably just manually dump in magnesium whenever (unless I can figure out the actual depletion rate).

Current tank parameters are:

Specific Gravity: 1.026 (ish)
Alk: 8.5
Calc: 420
Mag: 1200

Ammonia: 0
Nitrate: 0
Phosphates: 0
(can't seem to get a reading for any of these on my test kits. Might start trying a different set of test kits soon).

Runing Rowaphos (gfo) and carbon in two phosban reactors. Media changed once a month.

25 gallon water change once a week. I briefly toyed with the idea of doing a water change every other day. That didn't last long!

kien · #**165** 11-04-2009, 07:07 AM

aside: I just finished watching the new "V". Wow, I think I'm in love! And the show's not bad either.

kien · #**166** 11-04-2009, 07:22 AM

Okay, now that the boring stuff is out of the way..

Over the past couple of months I've picked up some frags, colonies, watched some frags grow out to colonies, some frags do absolutely nothing and witnessed a coral go through an identity crisis.

Okay, so let's start with the old..

Here's a Christmas Millepora that I got from Fooser back in August. The first picture is dated August 29th 2009. The second one was taken yesterday (i think).

..

Here's a blue polyp Acropora (forget where I got it from). First pic taken on August 29th. Second one taken yesterday.

..

A bunch of other frags and colonies are growing pretty good too but watching the frags grow out like this is the most obvious and rewarding.