From time to time, something tiny catches my eye. This guy less than a 1/4" was holding onto the side of a Hammerhead AlgaeFree cleaning magnet. It's a chiton, totally benign/reef-safe. You'll usually see many of these on the rockwork after lights out if you look closely enough. Using a tripod, remote flash, remote trigger, delayed countdown, macro lens with extension tube... this was the best I could get. And it was quietly moving, hence ...
For years, I've been running Vortech pumps on my tanks. The driver for each pump has to be installed somewhere dry, safe from splashes, drips or worse. Velcro pads have held them to the woodwork, but they didn't stay there forever like one might hope. Over time, the glue on the back of the strip would let go from the surface of the wood, and I'd resort to using more velcro after struggling to remove the old sticky stuff the impeded a decent bond. ...
It's been nearly 400 days since the 400g was restarted, and overall everything is vastly improved from where it was about 90 days ago. All the color has returned to the corals and new growth is readily apparent. One nuisance I was observing was this strange brown patchy stuff on the substrate which looked worse than diatoms but not enough to be dinoflagellates. When I cleaned the area between the sandbed and the glass to get that nice clean white look, the next day it was instantly ...
Sometimes running a reef tank is like raising a kid. You do everything you're supposed to and they still misbehave and don't even grasp the concept that it will do itself in in the process. Two days ago, it was time to dose Prodibio. The water looked good, the corals vibrant. I added the proper amount of each vial, including their new Coral Vits vitamin additive. That stuff has a citrus-like smell to it. Once it hits the water, the sound of the reef changes as it pours into the ...
Today's wordy blog is about Sunday's power outage. We had a rainy weekend, but nothing that would suggest power would go out. About 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning, everything went dead. As usual, I was awake but winding down. UPS' were chirping, the Vortech pumps were providing flow from their battery backups, and I lit a couple of candles and filed a report with the power company. The recorded message was that power would be restored at 6:30 a.m. so I took a nap. Around that promised ...
Recent Comments
