Tank Entry

I spotted something interesting, so I grabbed a Top Down Photo box and my Nikon and get a few nice images tonight. This first image is why I wanted to take a picture. These frags are growing and swirling together. There are three montiporas co-mingling at the moment.

This is one of the Montipora that lost all its color 13 months ago that I discussed in the Prodibio presentation I recently gave at MACNA. That entire presentation is on Youtube ...

I've been talking about building myself a new frag tank system for about nine months or more. I'm just about to commence that project in the coming weeks. The corals that are in the tank right now are demanding more space, and it's pretty awesome to see. The tank has become dominated by a few species, and they are literally growing up the walls and out of the tank. It's becoming a "frag tank" in the singular sense, instead of a tank filled with dozens of frags.

Here's a bird's eye ...

My reef tends to make noise, but not enough to be an issue. However, the past few days my skimmer has been way too loud with the sound emanating from the air tubes used to venturi air into the pumps. I ran several cups of heated RO/DI water through them, but the suction sound was annoying!

Only one of the two pumps was the source, so I removed that pump to clean the impeller, tubing and the nipple where the two connect. I was expecting salt creep to be the obstruction. ...

The 10th of the month snuck past me, so here's the update a couple of days later.

While I was away for MACNA, essentially all went well with the reef and anemone cube. The first night, of course around 1 a.m. in Washington D.C. I started getting notifications from Reeftronics that it couldn't communicate with my reef's Apex controller. Did a power outage occur? Not that I know of. I got a couple more texts, and the next morning I was up around 8 a.m. and had another text telling me ...

I recently had an alkalinity swing creep up on my reef. Normally I like to keep the tank around 8 dKH, and yesterday I noticed the duncans in my frag tank (part of the same system) were closed up. One bad habit I've developed over the years is to watch the corals for indication of problems instead of water tests each Saturday like I used to perform. I need to get better about that. I did a quick check with my Elos Alkalinity test kit and was shocked when it hit 21 dKH. So I tested again, and ...