Water Chemistry

Hello everybody!,

So this Christmas I decided to treat my reef with a needed piece of equipment: the AquaMaxx Biopellet Reactor. I got the XL reactor as it was only an extra $40 or so and for when I upgrade to a larger system in the future. I went with the AquaMaxx brand mainly due to Melev's advice/review and bc I was impressed with AquaMaxx's quality, price, and customer service. For pellets I went with Ecobak, for no reason in particular, getting the 1000ml package.
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I let the tank run for about 5 days and didn't see anything being picking up on the tests, at the LFS.
So I decided to pick up some fish..
A Little Cherub Angelfish, approx. 1.5" and a Yellow Watchman Goby, approx. 1" and a Candy Cane Pistol Shrimp.

The first night the Cherub found a hiding spot and went to sleep. Nothing to worry about there.

But the Yellow Watchman constantly tried to jump. Thankfully the tank came with a glass cover and he was ...

It has been a while since the last update to my aquarium and things have started to go really well. Unfortunately most of my time has been devoted into settling into a new job but I have managed to keep up with my aquarium maintenance and I have even added a few fish. Unfortunately, most will agree that I have overstocked just a bit which has affected my water quality and aquarium in a few ways but not too drastically that it cannot be resolved with a little engineering and a few more pieces of ...

For the past three months, my reef has been suffering from elevated phosphate levels. I've never had such a roller coaster, with the numbers rising and then falling as I treated to drop them again. Last night I did a lot of water testing.

a) First I tested the 215g reef to check the levels.
b)Then I checked the 400g that is full of water, sand and live rock to know if the parameters were close enough for livestock transfer and to ...

I recently purchased a Hanna phosphate meter to test my reef as I was having some algae issues that I haven't had. So after testing I found out I had a high phosphate issue readings of 3.4 or higher each time. So I thought I would address it first by liquid control using Phosphate RX which I purchased from marc which I've had good luck with in the past. So I dosed the RX as directed which is 38 drops after that I waited 24hrs to retest and not feeding tank to not alter the test readings. Well me ...