Clownfish14's 90 gallon of sexyness

Got the stand covered tonight and made everything look pretty for the meeting monday!

Pictures, or it never happened...

How about you wait till monday im not home till monday morning anyways now.

pics or it never happened! Monday is to long of a wait!

Ok let me just drive 4 hours back to my house to take a pic then drive another 4 hours back. Ill get right on that :/

ok ill wait

Yup

New toy!

I don't think that you have enough alk and calc, you should have gotten more.... like me:

Haha. I got somthing else today that i will take pics of in a sec

So before the meeting last monday i went to pauls to get some refractometer calibration fluid since i couldent find mine and i knew my refractometer was off. So far i had been using the apex conductivity probe to figure out my salinity. Now ever since i started the tank i have been seeing a decline in overall health at first i thought it was the lights then the supplaments and so on. Well on wednesday i was out in the grage when i remmbered i got the calibration fluid so i grabed it and calibrated away. I then checked my tank water ( this is where it gets bad) it was at 25 no im not joking it was at 25 (ppm) or however its measured. I re calibrated and checked like 10 times. Then it all started making sence. No wonder fish were jumping out, corals were dieing, and the tank ddnt smell like saltwater! I also relized thatthats probbly why my skimmer was acting up. The higher the salinity the smaller the air bubbles and the better the skimmer works. All this time i thought my salinty was at least iver 30 because of my probe. I was even using the probe for waterchanges which explains why it hasent gone back up yet. I am now slowly but surley raising it back up. Making sure not to shock the already stessed inhabitants :/ i love conductivity probes! Not!

isn't there too many variables when using a conductivity probe?

Ive heard good things about them but i am starting to think that there is

got a new return pump! this thing is dead quiet!

picture?

Give me two seconds

First here is a pic of the tank in "sunset" mode

thats sweet! how are the livestock doing with the salinity adjustments?

I think everything is adjusting pretty well. I did another water change today and got the water up to 30. So one more tommrow and i should be set at 35. Truthfully i cant believe that anything is alive with the salinity that low

yea im surprised too if you wanted to keep brackish fish you would have been fine

So here is the new return sorry its so hard to see. It tucked back in there pretty good:


Then here is my gfo and carbon reactors that i got going today. They are both on seperate pumps so i can adjust the flow seperatly in each:


And here is the "tube holder" that is holding both in and out lines for the gfo/carbon and the top off line coming from the kalk. It will also hold the calcium, alk, and mag dosing lines from the bubble magnus.


I also got new non felt filtersocks. They are like a screen material that is 100 micron and these things are awesome! They are so easy to clean it takes like 2 seconds!

coryg wrote:yea im surprised too if you wanted to keep brackish fish you would have been fine

Ya i know! Well mabey that explains the salfin and angel dieing in the qt and my dimond goby taking a carpet or in my case hardwood floor dive.

actually most fish will do fine in 25 ppt 1.019 sg. when you treat a fish for ich one way to do so is hyposalinity, and you lower the sg to 1.009 or 14 ppt.

I've done that treatment with the tangs and wrasses that I have.

Hmm. But that would make my corals look like they did? It actually seems like they are getting worse as i bring the salt level up. Any sugestions?

Corals are a different story, that low of salinity may have easily stressed them to the point of stn/rtn.

But wouldent raising it help them. Not make it worse?

Raising salinity needs to be a slow process, it is recommended to raise it 0.001 SG (~1 ppt)a day until you reach the desired 1.025

Instantly going from 1.018 to 1.022 (25 ppt to 30 ppt) will stress everything in the tank, it should have been done in the course of 4-5 days it's a very slow process to raise the salinity.

On the other hand going down can be done rather quickly.

Really 1 ppt a day? Yikes! Ya i took that kinda fast then. Ill wait a couple of days before raising it any more. You think the coral will recover?

That's a good question, I guess it would all depend on how hardy they are and how resilient they are to the change. I would hope for the best and expect the worse.

Great... So waiting a bit before raising it any more will help?

Since you have a top off system you can add salt to the top off container and have it introduce saltwater to replace evaporated water. Depending on the rate of evap, this will allow for a slow enough change that the livestock wouldn't even notice.

Thats smart! I didnt even think of that! What should i make the salinity in the top off?

I would be strictly guessing if I offered advice. Of course it all depends the rate of evaporation, I would start off slow and make the top off 1.015 and in the course of 24 hours monitor the salinity to see how much it changed, then you can go up or down from there. I would think that 1.015 wouldn't change it much I doubt that it would even be measurable with the refactometer but at least you're doing it slowly.

Ok sounds good. Thanks for the help!

I hate dulling out advice, but for you I made an exception.

Ok cool!

...I mean. you're welcome.

So some stuff is looking better! I lost some corals but everything is opend again which is good

lets see some after math pictures

Ok

Ill get some better ones tommrow when the lights are brighter. These are to blue

Did some water tests
Hanna- phosphate- 0.12
Hanna- alk- 11.98 dkh
Salfiert- alk- 11.8 dkh
Salfiert- mag- 1050 ppm
Salfiert- cal- 340 ppm
Apex- temp- 78.1
Apex- ph- 8.22
Refractometer- salinity- 30

Alk is kinda high. Not sure why but i will wait and see where it is bext week. I will get the mag and cal up once i get my doser up and running.

sweet I was gonna say your mag looks low as well as your calcium, and also your alk is high but you already know this

Ya im not sure why the alk is high. Any ideas? Could it be the kalk reactor?

I know that tropic marin runs high on the alk side because it is meant to be used with a calcium reactor so mabey it is so high because of the waterchanges ive been doing to get my salinity up. Only time will tell

I would bypass the kalk reactor for a bit until your calc and mag come up a bit and let your alk come down naturally. thats what I would do.

Wouldent the kalk keep the cal and mag up?

Not mag, only CA and ALK, but why not dose CA by itself until you are at the level you want.

Thats the plan once the doser is up and running. Is the high alk because of the kalk?

Just got some pods and macro algae from reef cleaners!