Water Chemistry

So with all that has been going on, I've been a tad lax on measuring all the water parameters in my system. I'll check this or that (alkalinity, temperature, salinity), but not everything... over time, I've been losing some SPS while others seem bulletproof. My numbers aren't horrible, but nitrate has skyrocketed somehow. I'll be doing a couple of big water changes over the next two weeks. Alkalinity has had some huge swings over the past 60 days, which is why I thought the SPS were reacting ...

I have decided to abandon the Oceanic Salt that I have been using since my 150g tank has been set up. I have found that the calcium levels are just too high for my tastes. It is staying up at around 460-470ppm, even with my calcium reactor turned down to bare minimum drip and bubble count. Oceanic is known to have high calcium levels, so to bring it down I am switching to a new salt that has come onto the market in the last year. It is Seachems AquaVitro Salinity. The unique thing about their ...

Ok, trying a new experiment since I am going all SPS. Trying to take the system to low nutrient and feed Oyster eggs, amino acids and the like. I just dumped all of my GFO out of my phosban reactor and added a can of the Warner Marine EcoBak ULNS pellets.

As you can see I trimmed some embroidery plastic mesh sheets to make a circle to replace the sponges on the top and the bottom. Word is that the sponges gets clogged up with the bacteria and what not.

Then it says ...

I started a blog on my local club site about using bio-pellets but I thought I see if more people are using them here. I haven't used them long, I only started 9-5-10, but I think I have already seen some positive results. When I started my phosphate levels (on a hanna meter) were 0.29ppm. I have the pellets in a bulk-reef supply reactor that seems to be working fairly well. At first I thought I was going to have some issues with clogging since the pellets stopped tumbling for several days. ...

Well basically this starts out with me being out of work and trying to keep a SW tank running, I think most of you can imaging how that goes. So what happened? Lets start with the things I knew. I knew that the RO cartridge was almost at the end of its useful life, I knew that I no longer trusted my TDS meter, I also know that I am silly broke right now but I also know that I go back to work shortly and that brings us to the "what happened". Well I thought that I might be able to stretch ...