280g Inwall

[fishytime]

Its really too bad about butterflies.....such a beautiful fish.....would love to be able to put them in a reef tank.....one question though....what are you doin puttin your GPS in the tank???

[Delphinus]

A mistake I made a long time ago! I *thought* I had gotten rid of all of it when I shut my 75g down. But it literally came out of nowhere again and by the time I noticed it was growing in spots in my 40g, the 40g had too many other things going on that I didn't care as much (caulerpa, aiptasia, clove polyps .. etc.).

The annoying thing is I see it cropping up already in the 280g. There's a frag disk with a few yellow polyps (which might have to be sacrificed to solve this, I'm not sure - at least I have a nice colony of them in another piece in a different spot) but the disk also has a few straggling survivors of some red/orange zoanthids which WOULD be worth saving. So I'll probably have to grab the disk out from its spot at some point and do some selective scraping. Actually I took a butylene torch to another frag I moved over a couple weeks ago to ensure the caulerpa was good and gone, other than the smell that worked out well so that might have to be the ticket again for this one.

[MitchM]

Tony,
Are you using bio pellets and anything else on your new setup?
Sorry if I missed that somewhere along the way.

Looks great, btw!

[Delphinus]

I am playing around with zeovit on this tank. I was running pellets on the old tank but haven't yet moved the reactor over. I will probably get around to doing so at some point this week now, but I have to reload it while I'm at it since it's gotten down pretty low in there.

I've run zeovit before so have a reasonable idea of what I'm getting into with that system. When the pellets first came out I experimented with an approach of using both and then settled on just using pellets. Pellets by themselves work not too bad. Although not quite as aggressive as the zeolite based nutrient limiting methods, they definitely do pull down NO3 (and PO4 to a lesser degree) if left to their own devices, plus the bacterial film that is continually shed off as a result of the pellets tumbing is a decent source of food for both corals and fish. What pushed me back into going full on zeovit for this tank however is water clarity. I just can't get over how clear the water gets on that system. It's a little more work daily but honestly that doesn't bother me since I look at the tank as much as I can everyday anyhow and feed the fish everyday anyhow, so it's a very small step to just say "oh ok I'll pump the reactor now and add a couple drops of this or that".

The alternative to get that much water clarity but with a more passive approach would be to run UV and/or ozone and a fair amount of GFO. Was running UV for a while on the other tank and that does seem to remove the yellowing compounds in the water but I was a bit surprised how often you have to replace the lamps. Well I guess it's no worse than the T5's or the halides but it's just yet another thing you have to budget to replace every few months.

[MitchM]

Have you considered Prodibio?

[Delphinus]

Not specifically but I hear it's pretty good. The one thing I'm not 100% sold on is the rock replacement. It's not that it's expensive per se (probably one of the cheapest elements of the whole system) but it seems sorta wasteful to send rocks to a landfill.

[MitchM]

Sorry, what rocks?
I thought it was bacteria, ect. dosing only.