Stone's 225 Carbonate Factory

[Stones]

Thanks Brett. Yeah, the SPS are finally starting to show some serious potential and I'm hoping will get even more colorful now that I've swapped out the old bulbs.

As for an ULNS, I was running the biopellets but shut them down after I had a major plague of hair and turf algae. It may have been a huge coincidence but the algae has slowly died back after taking the pellets off line so its hard to say what caused the outbreak. The algae was contained mostly to ceramic reef rock so I figured the algae could have been pulling some phosphates out of the clay that was used to make the rock.

I'll likely try the pellets again here once the corals get used to the lighting spectrum. I'm not sure if they actually do anything as my phosphates were zero prior to starting the pellets and I didn't notice any increase in skimmer performance.

I haven't ever used any kind of bacterial supplement as I didn't feel I needed to. An oversized skimmer seems to really keep all my nutrient levels in check.

[Skimmerking]

TOTM

[Boomboy]

Originally Posted by asmodeus

TOTM

yeah i think so.

[Stones]

Thanks for the compliments everyone. My system is a far cry from TOTM though as it has alot of maturing to do. Most corals in there have only been in the sytem for 6 - 16 months max. Once it all fills in it will look alot more symmetrical and I'll post some FTS then.

[Azzkr]

How is the tank comming along you havent posted anything in along time??? I think its time for some new pics

[Stones]

Originally Posted by mike clarke

How is the tank comming along you havent posted anything in along time??? I think its time for some new pics

Hey Mike, sadly the tank took a bit of a turn for the worse earlier this year when I suffered a small scale tank crash.

For a reason that still remains unknown, I ended up with sky high nitrate levels (40 ppm) after not having detectable nitrate levels since I moved the remaining corals from my 90 gallon over into the 225 a few years ago.

I did do a precautionary interceptor treatment of the entire system prior to the Saskatoon frag swap as I had 2 or 3 colonies that were not looking 100% and I wanted to make sure that it wasn't red bugs before selling a bunch of frags, even though I never did see any on the affected colonies. I'm not sure if this is what triggered a chain reaction that somehow caused a nitrate spike or if this was simply coincidental but either way, the tank hasn't been the same since.

I've been battling to keep the nitrates down since late April and still have not got them back down to zero despite doing doubling or tripling the amount of water changes per month and firing up my biopellet reactor again. Last month I finally started noticing the biopellets shrinking in size and numbers so I'm guessing they are finally populated with beneficial bacteria and starting to work their magic.

I ended up losing about 10 small colonies and frags and had to frag up 3 of my largest acros in order to prevent STN from killing them completely. The majority of the remaining SPS have browned out somewhat but I can see the colors are finally starting to come back. A few of the SPS have actually never looked better which is really strange. My giant colony of Cali tort along with my red planet, two differnt color morphs of A. granulosa and a few other random ones actually look pretty amazing.

I also had a nice live rock collapse when my blueface angel and bariene tang got into a pretty good scrap and took out the zip ties holding my live rock tower together. Apparently UV resistant zip ties are not immune to going brittle from prolonged exposure to salt water. Once the first zip tie holding a shelf rock overhang in place snapped, 3 others followed suit and a 15 lb piece of rock came crasing down to the bottom. Both fish escaped with only a few minor scatches but a half dozen acros got really beat up and it took me almost 8 hours with the help of my wife to get the liverock all re-drilled, pegged with fiberglass rods and re-zipped tied back into the aquarium. Now there should be no way that the same structure can collapse as it all supported from the bottom as opposed to being held in place predominatly by zip ties.

Now that golf/fly fishing season has come to an end and my shotgun is in for repair after a significantly too short pheasant season, I'll get some pics taken next time I'm back in Regina.

[kien]

wow, sorry to hear of your woes man. Sounds like this year was a tough year for a lot of tanks. Good to see you're still plugging away at it though :-)

[lockrookie]

He is overly picky his tank at its worst is still amazing. I was over there the other day getting a couple frags and I can only dream to have such a tank.


Sent from my porcelain aquarium

[Stones]

Originally Posted by lockrookie

He is overly picky his tank at its worst is still amazing. I was over there the other day getting a couple frags and I can only dream to have such a tank.

Sent from my porcelain aquarium

Thanks Jeff, that acutally made me lol at my desk at work.

The tank could be in worse shape but it looks nothing like it did when I posted pics last August.

I'll post some progress pics shortly as the SPS have all gotten bigger, just their color leaves ALOT to be desired.

[Stones]

Well as promised here are some shots of the system from last week. I didn't turn the flow off so some of the shots aren't very clear and I couldn't quite get the white balance adjusted perfect so the pics don't quite do some of the colors justice.







Cali tort running out of real estate

Rainbow monti

My pride and joy, 10+" across Acropora efflorescens. I'm so glad I didn't loose this guy in my psuedo-crash