ChrisQ

Salmon Creek it seems judging from his profile.

Dang! with all the tank problems i have right now i mixed up 70g yesterday and was starting to prep for a big WC for a 140g system as i type this lol Oh well, at this point all i can do is hope for the best

Not to derail the thread but i too have been having issues with Kent salt. Out of a 200g box some bags mix really clear and some mix very cloudy and take a while to clear. Haven't ran any tests yet though. beautiful fish BTW!

A Lot of the club meetings are based on lots of that. Fragging demos, guest speakers, etc Great people too!

Before i realized just how out of control the nitrates have climbed to ( Lex has a very good point on getting a quality test ) i had been feeding San Francisco bay brand mysis and marine cuisine thawed and thoroughly pressed with paper towels removing as much liquid as i could and replacing it with Selcon and Kent's garlic. It still would mix up somewhat dry and i don't add any rodi or anything to it to thin it out so it comes out off my large syringe in pea sized clumps until a fish hits it breaking it all up. So i probably am feeding way too much. At this time i was running filter socks. After fighting with trying to lower my nitrates for awhile i stopped the frozen pulled the sock and only feed a little Ocean nutrition prime reef flake every couple days and my fish are pretty angry, fighting and harassing a lot. Battling the algae doesn't bother me as much as literally watching my first and oldest fish and corals unhappy and detaching from their skeleton and float away into a powerhead, last few months it was plump heads of acan colonies, last few weeks my hammer colonies, one head of a small torch all grown from frags. Even a blasto frag that was doing great but has lost several babies Day before yesterday one of two heads of frogspawn. All of these detaching from the skeleton and hitting powerheads. As you can imagine, something very strange (to me anyway) is going on and i'm getting desperate to save what's left.

I'm starting to really lean that way, would be nice to be able to see through it as well. Coincidently i have 3 perfect 40b's sitting here except none are drilled, no glass bits and no experience drilling glass. Also not sure how to plumb a 40b similarly to how the tray is plumbed. I guess my first order of business is to mix up 25g of water (tray holds about 20g) remove as much hair algae from the few rocks that are in the tray and toss the rocks in the DT for the flame angel and yellow tang to clean up and siphon the tray clean With the i.d. it's soft and tends to gather on mats of cyano like stuff that easily blows off. I will try and get better pictures this afternoon when the whites come on even if i have to cut the flow and remove a chunk of the "mat" and put it in a dish. Thanks guys for the input so far!

Wanted to get the opinion of the fine folks of PNWMAS on some options i may have. Long story short, after a couple tank crashes i lost about 85% of my coral so this frag tray is pretty barren. Lately i've been sticking some smaller rock in it in an attempt to help control nitrates (Not a lot of rock in the DT and none in sump) but this frag tray wants to now act as a fuge it seems, lots of hair algae growing, no CUC smaller hermits would get trapped in the molded "valleys" in the tray as there was no sand in there to level it out. One of the things i was considering was giving up on the frag tray (would be nice if it was deep enough for a Yellow Tang but only 5'' deep) any frags i had put in there to try and save from the higher flow and light of the DT would quickly become overrun with hair algae. Another was trying to use it to grow macros, but my first thought was a high flood risk. With the drains and making sure it can't "Dam" itself anywhere restricting flow. If i go with removing it, it's a fairly simple task, lots of unions! Easy to take apart move,service or if a critter somehow gets stuck in a pipe and dies, which brings me to the Nitrate problem. All fish are accounted for but i have some serious houdini rainbow bubbles tips. I used to keep them in the fuge section of my sump, it's feed from the return section with a mj1200 draining back to the return via 1'' pipe. So one day one of the splits decided to go walkabout into the return section(probably the same one that was riding my turbo snails around ) from the 1'' drain. This lucky/unlucky nem popped out the pipe about 2'' away from the intake of the DC12000, well sure enough he made his way in there too. Here's where it gets a little bit interesting, not only did he survive the journey through the impeller and what seems like taking a left turn coming out into my DT right next to a RW-20. Can't tell you guys how shocked i was to see a happy nem sitting on a rock in the DT The left black hose is the return line for the DT and the straight with the union feeds the frag tray. So when it comes to these insane nitrates and i mean off the api chart, blood red over 160 been that high since at least 4/9 i started to think maybe the test is bad so tonight i tested some of the little bit of water i had leftover from the last WC in a brute sitting stagnant for a couple weeks it came out to around 20-40 Nothing has brought this down, growing chaeto great,heavy skimming, large WC even dropped 2-100g packs of purigen and a 140g system So back to the nem, if one could make a turn and end up in the display chances are pretty high another could have gone straight and died enroute to the frag tray. Question is, with them being small splits how long should it take to decay stuck in piping and could it cause this much nitrate? The return for the frag tray the nem may have gotten into Then there's this mess, i'm sure all the detritus being trapped is not helping. Finally to i.d. some strange purple "pill" shaped stuff i've only seen once before. Sorry for the bad pictures. Note i'm about to try and rid my system soon of red planaria, could it maybe be die off of some of the flatworms? It doesn't seem alive and blows away easily. Thanks in advance for any insight you guys may have. Sorry about writing a book over here, i may have gotten carried away.

Yep, the same batch. I hope it goes well when i finally get to it.

Man! I'm still not looking forward to doing mine

Yep, the 20 is way too much even on my 60'' tank.

Now it all makes sense.

Why?

Or trying to play Ark Survival evolved

Funny you should mention it, i've lived in Seaside for 20+ years and worked up and down the coast from Tillamook to Long beach but yeah i was definitely thinking sustainable food not filtration but i know next to nothing on their feeding habits. Although i don't think clatsop county and surrounding counties will be too keen on letting you setup shop for feeding your "pet sharks" but hey who knows unless you ask but you'll have much better luck if you knew someone up there. Wait... do Sea lions eat mussels? If so Astoria is out for harvesting mussels

Forget something?

You might be able to raise some mussels for your Bamboo cat sharks ( and other sharks). I wonder how hard it would be and how long it would take in a home setting. There's plenty of it being done in the wild.

It reminded me of the one i traded Frank years ago. Nice piece you got there

Where'd you pick that awesome piece up at?

That i could use the ocean as my sump

Be very careful with the intensities going from t5's to led. Your corals will need time to adjust. What led units are they?

I have a standard 55g that's been sitting in my driveway gathering rain water, i just drained it a few days ago and moved it to the backyard to join the rest in my "aquarium graveyard" I have a matching stand and hood for it as well if you figure out a way to haul it. I've got everything from 10g to 120g's glass and acrylic

So... $10.00 for the sump? If so i'll take it. Also interested in the pink hammer depending on how pink, it might be too close to my purples

This drives me nuts as well!

Oh the humanity!