kien's 150g Room Divider Mixed Reef & Stuff

[kien]

Today Tony was gracious enough to lend me his Nitrate meter so that I may test my nitrates and see how them lentils were doing. They have been running in my Two Little Fishes reactor for a little over two weeks now. Lots of mulm production but so far no clogging. I suspect something is consuming it in the filter or they just eventually dissolve enough to escape the foam filter that's in the reactor. Anyway, two weeks ago prior to running the bio lentils Tony and I did a reading and we got 8 ppm. Here is the reading I got this evening..



It appears as though something has reduced my nitrates in half. I have not added anything else to the tank other than the bio pellets. I have not done a water change since installing the bio pellets. I usually do weekly water changes but put off the last one out of curiosity, so it has been two weeks since my last water change.

All other parameters in case you're interested:

Specific Gravity: 1.026
pH: 7.9 to 8.3
Alk: 8.5 dkH
Calc: 420 ppm
Mag: 1400 ppm
Temp: 79-81
Phosphate: tests out to zero

I dose Alk (Baking Soda) and Calcium (from Littlesilvermax in bulk) but nothing else.

I have only been running half of the recommend amount of bio pellets but this weekend will ramp that up to full dosage. Zero nitrates here I come!!

[kien]

The topic of nitrates might be a good seque into the process of food production and distribution in my reef.

This evening I had to make up a batch of my special Seafood a la Kien and I already had my camera out snapping pics of the nitrate monitor so I figured I'd snap some more photos and document this process in case anyone was curious. I know I'm always curious about what people put into their tanks.

So to start out, I like to buy two or three bags of mixed seafood. Here we have a bag of scallops, shrimp and a seafood medley which consists of octopus and clamy things.



I fill up a blending cup with the three parts of frozen sea foods. Let it sit for a bit and thaw..



Then grab my trusty hand blender and blend away!



The trick here is not to over blend because you don't want to turn it into a V8 cocktail. Rather, you want nice chunky bits that the fish can consume. It takes a bit of practice to get the blending just right. I usually count buzzes. About 5 or 6 buzzes will do the trick.

After blending you get something that looks like this.. [insert mad scientist laughter here]



I then take my trusty reusable coffee filter and strain out what water I can.





After that I'm left with a nice mushy fish meal and place it in a bowl. I also like to add PE Mysis to the meal so I'll thaw out a few chunks and rinse it in the coffee filter as well.



I then add the two together and inject with a healthy dose of Garlic extract.


Stir the whole concoction and voila! Seafood a la Kien.



I like to serve in portions and these handy ice cube trays are the perfect amount.



My reef gets a shot of Formula 1&2 flakes every morning at 10:30am via an automatic feeder. I do the evening feed by hand by grabbing a fish cube out of the freezer and thawing it in some tank water. Every other day I strap a sheet of nori to a rod and throw that into the tank as well.

Seafood a la Kien is also great of target feeding LPS

[kien]

Here's my 2 year old son doing the evening feed.

[lastlight]

Bookmarked for the day I need to make some food thanks for sharing man. Love the fishcubes and the pics of your son lol.

[Delphinus]

Awesome stuff. Interesting how it seems to be pretty consistent for everyone measuring with the N/P pellets that it seems to half the amount in two weeks (two week half life).

[kien]

Here are my finned friends that hang out in the reef.

[kien]

Feeding time!

[tgrover]

Very, Very helpful!! Tim

[kien]

Everyone seems to be updating their threads these days so here's mine

Aside from a few new corals (more on those later), there are actually a couple of things that I have changed. First, when I read about Dez's approach to salt I thought that was a brilliant idea so I have adopted it myself. Since December I have been performing water changes with 4 different salts. My water changes are done 10% weekly and each week I do the water change with a different salt brand. Currently I am rotating between regular Instant Ocean, Reef Crystals, Seachem and Red Sea Salts. Once one of those buckets runs out I'll probably buy a completely different brand to replace it. Honestly, I never did have any problems with using regular IO for the past 6 years but I do like the philosophy behind this approach. It is sort of like mixing all of the salt brands out there into one giant bucket and using that giant salt mix Anyway, so far so good!

Secondly, lorenz0 thought that maybe I should run MORE bio pellets so I have added another bioPellet reactor. I now run two vertex-UR20 reactors daisy chained together.



And that's about it.







some coral p0rn to follow..