Blog Comments

My reef runs from 79F to 81F throughout the year. Summer it is more stable because the a/c keeps the fishroom stable at 75F around the clock, so my tank only goes up 1 degree each day. In the winter, it's a little trickier. Spring and fall are wild cards since I seize those weeks to let fresh air blow through the house and fishroom, so I have to really be aware of what is going on with the tank's temperature.

My system starts shutting off lights at 83F. It is very rare for this to happen; I think it only occurred once in 2005 when I was installing my new sump and I had the probes out of water. The sensor got hotter under the MH lighting and shut off my lights, which surprised me. My first thought was that a breaker had tripped and it took a couple of minutes for me to figure out that it was my controller's programming.

Since you keep your tank a little cooler, setting it to 80.5F as your max temperature would be better, as you don't want a 6 degree climb before the lights shut off. 2 or 3 is tolerable by most corals.

You should be ok with a tank temperature increase. I run my tank in the 79-79.5 range and upto 80.5 on hot days with my MH. I don't have my controller turning off my lights until I reach the 82.5 temp mark.

I would expect the PH to be low due to lack of aeration and high levels of DOC's from curing. NO worries.

I should clarify, the tests were on my live rock curing experiment

PH is low.. if you have corals you should have it at 8.2-8.4

Thanks for the coments all. I did a 25% water change tonight and ran some tests on the water I removed: Ammonia 0, Nitrate 25ppm, Phos 1 ppm, pH 7.8. Any worries??

another way to test you LIve rock is to dump about a 1/4 cup of ammonia into the water
the next day your ammonia should be 0
if not your not done cureing.
If it is more than 0 then your not hurting anything you're just helping kick start the beneficial bacterias..

Some people raise the salinity to 1.040 for 15 to 20 minutes to avoid any uninvited guest into the tank. check your ammonia level and make sure you are at 0 before you add the rocks to the tank.

YOur on the right track. If there wasnt alot of algea etc on the rock then you wont experience massive die off causing the stink.