Krux

Still awaiting results on the 4/18 test but hoping so! I had a problem with my Trident and had to start testing on my Hanna testers for a week while I got it straightened out so there may have been some blips in my normal parameters. I don't automatically dose based on the Trident, but I do use it to maintain level numbers so I could be 5 or 10% off my usual levels. In general I follow the school of thought that consistency is better than swings to hit perfection. I did do some suggested trace element work using the Reef Moonshiners spreadsheet (specifically K) so we will see if any of those numbers moved into better lanes as I understand several elements are tied together. I really am just looking for two tests in a row with similar numbers so I can set a new baseline, then I can start trying to make adjustments to optimize parameters - biome will be the step after that.

Hopefully when you get the results back everyone can benefit from your findings - specifically how lower livestock impacts the stability of the biome. Very cool idea! I will be doing one in May now that my tank has mostly stabilized but I have so many variables: fish population swings, a live sand addition, tank dieoff and regrowth, UV and Ozone. My hope is to get a baseline and find some guidance on how to steer things and then do some monthly or every other month tests to see how the numbers move.

There were some great updates, but also a lot of the info from Eli's talk at Reefstock was included so great for folks who were sad they missed it!

Soz, forgot the link.

Keith is live streaming right now with Andy and Eli, be sure to catch the stream or watch it later. Let’s boost those views. I hear if we bribe Eli with corals and drive the samples to his lab we can move up in the queue… pro tips from watching the videos!

Welcome back. Nice job on the wire management under the tank!

is the top off for photos, or do you walk on the wild side with jumpers these days?

That will make plenty of room for this RSR 350 in my basement that I need to move to your house and plumb in to the system...

It was fun to see this pop up @PNWCustom while watching videos. 6:30 or so if anyone wants to skip to it.

Stunning work!

Welcome to the hobby and the club!

Also has the side effect of your truck looking like a happy vampire! Did those come with bulkheads installed? Research shows me that isn't always the case. If this was relatively recent, do you mind messaging me with what the cost ended up being? I am looking at the Grasham place as well as used setups and want to evaluate value as much as possible.

Any use for stainless steel storage containers? Once I saw the CO2 canisters it reminded me that I have several 5 gallon kegs from home brewing in my garage. They can be sterilized and used for liquid storage of some sort... Let me know if you have any interest, and look up Cornelius keg for more info. I have between 6 and 8 you are welcome to play with.

I was looking at these folks on Craigslist last week as an option. I plan to take my Subraru over there and see how large of a container I can haul home. Thanks for the positive feedback, I was skeptical about the posting.

Great question! Simple answer is that I didn’t have access to 150 gallons of water. The issue had been ongoing for 20 hours, and the earliest I would have been able to source that volume for a water change would have been another 13 or 14 hours in the future. Even if I had turned on the RO unit immediately, we did not have a container even remotely large enough to mix salt in, even the bathtub is too small. That said, I am making progress with my wife on her agreement to getting at least 100 gallons of water storage containers for installation.

Fantastic intel, thank you!

My wife worked diligently over the days we were away at the conference, sending videos and photo updates of all of the fish, colonies and frags. For the next few days all fish looked healthy and were eating well, and we saw a slow march towards a complete die-off of acropora and montipora. Parameters seemed to be holding according to the apex, but it was hard to get some of the visual clues we all eventually learn to pick up on - coloration, vibrancy, polyp extension, tissue development or retraction as those are observations she hadn't made before. She saw that some of the corals just "looked white" and some of them "looked like skeletons" which I was actually pretty impressed by - that is a distinction that can be subtle. To my eye an estimated 30-40% of the corals were lost. On Sunday white spot was observed on the first fish, our powder blue. Not certain if the main reason for this was the UV coming offline, or if it was the stress from the poisoning event. We increased feeding significantly in an effort to outcompete the crypto with calories. She also started to have a difficult time locating a few of our more shy fish, I didn't really worry her that this was a warning sign of crypto build up - they still came out to eat. I ran an ICP test as soon as I landed. I have no baseline as I didn't think to fire one off on Thursday. I do not know at this point what impact the chemical stripping of the water would have long term, but this at least would give me a chance to test the efficacy of the combination of three days running carbon, Chemipure blue, and some Cuprisorb. Initial results below - red is too high, yellow is too low for this particular sampling company: @steveweast and I were reviewing the results, he found it interesting that the things that were way above lethal levels are elements that people these days chase with moonshiner type methods... I can not however endorse UV bulb dosing at this time. Boron was double the desired level, molybdenum 3X, and vanadium almost 4.5X what it should be. Of note, I had admirable levels of Tantalum! High on 3 and low on 8. PO4 was scary low, but I chalk that up to the Chemipure blue. For reference and maybe to help give perspective to the excellent TVWD water supply, I have my RODI results below - my filter has read 0 in and 0 out consistently for years - I don't burn through filters (other than sediment filters due to old pipes) very quickly Fast forward two weeks for the next ICP result and there are some interesting findings. For the two weeks prior to this test I removed the chemipure blue as my manual testing when I returned showed PO4 at 0.0 on my Hanna. Having just gone through 10 months in my other tank fighting dinos I was not interested in zero levels. I also removed the carbon replacing the two with Purit from Brightwell which I expected would do a better job at removing the heavy metals. Vanadium came down to zero and now wants dosing, but I saw little movement on Boron and Molybdenum but both did trend down. I need to find a better product to drop these two specifically. Other metals also dropped as you can see below So now we are at 2 high and 9 low, with most of the low numbers where they were expected after running the Purit for two weeks. PO4 was back into a reasonable range but still low. I might swap over to Cuprisorb or some other witchcraft based substance @Lexinverts has suggested. I started doubling up on my dosing of KZ Flatworm Stop and Coral Booster - from the color and smell of the KZ FS I know definitively where my iodine input is coming from. I am also using a new product from KZ, Coral's Love which smells a lot like soup - if anyone has been thinking of dosing soup to their tank I would suggest this KZ chicken noodle/beef consommé variety that I seem to have as it is very pleasant. Livestock update as of last Monday - I was at one point looking at a 90% mortality rate on all stony corals with the only things that looked happy being some caulastrea colonies and a euphyllia (are torches still euphyllia?) which was good news as that is "the pretty coral" in our tank from my wife's perspective. I inherited an accidental rose anemone in some live rock I bought and it seems unphased. We had now lost nearly half the fish which really bummed her out - we had a pretty intense crypto outbreak which took our burbonius anthias, wild percula pair, royal gramma, bangaii, and the powder blue. We thought we had lost our lawnmower blenny but it reappeared late last week. Probably gone today by the time I get home will be our bluethroat trigger - it has been struggling for the last 5 days and has ceased coming out to eat which is very uncharacteristic for him (he does track the food when it floats by which is minimally hopeful). Totally healthy with no signs of crypto are our mystery wrasse, purple and yellow tangs, peppermint hogfish, and our quoyi wrasse. Who knows if the lawnmower has any white spot - Wilford is freaky mottled normally. I was able to replace my UV unit with another of the exact same size and model within the first week but I wasn't fast enough to save the more sensitive inhabitants. I began a twice daily H2O2 dosing regimen of 8mL to stave off the worst but I honestly can't tell if it helped at all - my ORP readings are exciting looking though. RIP Geoffrey you camera loving fool, you left us far too soon 💔 In the coming days I am going to try to collect a few photos of some corals that surprised me and may be making a comeback - guaranteed losses are running at around 45 colonies/frags. I didn't remove very many things from the tank in hopes a polyp or two survived but now three weeks later and covered in algae I have given up hope for most of them. The most dramatic resurrection was from my orange setosa, unfortunately all of the Fiji and nearly every smoothie in my collection have refused to survive. I am currently most sad by the loss of a red A. simplex/elegans that was like no coral I had ever seen before. @reefnjunkie is out of luck now, he was getting the first piece. TBC

I have a lot of info to post, so just starting the thread, but the night before I left for Reefstock earlier this month, something went awry. on Wednesday night my wife and I smelled an electrical odor coming from our forced air duct. We ran around the entire house and garage trying to sniff out the problem. After 15 minutes of searching we were unable to find any problems… off to bed. On Thursday morning I did my pre-dawn KZ dosing and left for work at about 530 am. when I got home from work at 7:30 that night and went down to feed the fish, several of my larger montipora colonies were bleached out. Remembering the odor from the night before I did another tank investigation. Everything was running fine. I did a full battery of tests with my Hanna checkers and they were within error margins of my Trident. No solution. After an hour of watching the tank, acropora started bleaching and I knew something was wrong. With the new tank I do not have nearly enough water volume for a large water change. I started removing equipment piece by piece and was starting to panic, at this point I decided flying out to Denver in 9 hours was a bad idea, especially since I had no idea what was going wrong. Kalk reactor taken offline, no issues. Ozone offline, no issues. MP40s offline, no issues. UV pump offline, no issues. UV unit was next - the power cord leading into the unit was hot, extremely hot. UV had been running, I could see the lights. Pump had been functioning, no flow issues. I disconnected the unit and rotated it to drain out the water. What came out was a sickly grey-brown fluid right into the sump… not excellent. Housing seemed sound, seals good, but the wire connector was ripping hot. As soon as I started disassembling the unit I could tell plastic had been melting and found the same smell from the night before. Took out the bulb and quartz sleeve which was full of water. How had the unit kept running with the bulb completely flooded? Inspecting the wire connector, it had completely melted, fusing to the bulb. We had found our problem. UV was plugged into the eb832 which in turn was plugged into a gfci, somehow nothing tripped… Final findings - a pinhole in the quartz sleeve had flooded the bulb which shorted but did not stop running. At this point I knew the damage was done, and while everyone in the tank looked fine, an impressive history of crashing tanks told me it would be a few days before the full extent would be apparent. I trained my wife on how to feed the fish and empty the skimmer and what to watch. I decided staying home, now that I knew what happened, would not really change the trajectory of what was going to unfold. Changed 20 gallons of water, threw in all the carbon and chemipure that I had, and went to bed. Needed to be at the airport in 5 hours and figured on taking a nap. TBC

NICE!

This double stack stand would be a great concept for people setting up quarantine systems in a compact footprint. You might want to set up a couple of tanks based on a simple QT equipment format and get some photos for your site - cheap lights, a couple 10 or 20g tanks, small HOB filter and heater, and some pvc is all it would take. Looks awesome!

I remember the video from when Jake came to visit you several years ago.

aye, that is an impressive usage rate!

It is

I agree completely.