Cali Kid Corals

+80g

I've spent a great deal of time recently in the East Coast. Upstate NY actually on a project that took a bit of effort over the last 16 months, and isn't quite done.

Fortunately my system has been plugging along. I gave it a much needed trimming for the frag swap, and to be honest if I had more time (and containers) that morning I could have packed up a bit more. Next time ;) I will say that the Gryphon saw is pretty nice, and is sitting there ready to chop some more.

I dodged 2 bullets in the last month that could have turned for the worse. I had some water "get out" of one of my tanks. Fortunately my wife worked around the problem over the phone, and isolated off a 40 gallon frag tank from the system, where it sat drained down about 3/4, with just a MP10 providing circulation. I run heaters in each tank and the sump, so I wasn't worried about isolating the system and turning it into a coldwater system. Nothing was worse for the wear, and I actually ran the tank that way for a total of 2 wks before putting it back online just before heading back to NY. I don't think you'd want to run the tank that way for much longer than I did, but again, I got lucky.

The second bullet was just after the frag swap, right before I headed to the airport I always take one look at the tank, and to my surprise the landscape had changed. My Magnifica's been sitting in the same spot for 24 months, and the mag and the rock it was attached to had fallen over, and it was upside down, pinned by the rock, right on top of an open brain. I must have knocked the rockwork in my haste that Saturday morning weakening the stack perhaps, I don't know. But it toppled just in time for me to notice. I grabbed it, put the rock (with nem) back, and within 5 minutes the mouth was all closed up. To me it looked like the brain had a go at the nem, and may have inflicted a small bit of damage in one area. Know the look the brains have when they're all puffed up and tentacles out? It looked like it was trying to eat the mag.

I still have this calcium reactor from Crabby I'm working on, needs a little more work still (pH probe port fitting), but it's getting closer. I really hate running out of 2 part, which I do quite regularly. Or my favorite, mix up a new batch and forget to "load" the BM dosing pump, so it just sits there for a wk not dosing. I hear on some systems this results in serious problems, but my tank just sort of deals with it. My ALK drops pretty fast however.

I've always been a light feeder, but I've been upping the portion size if the small stuff recently. Typically I drip in a little Oyster Feast, but I've been mixing TLF zooplankton and Rod's coral food in there as well. I'll keep tweaking that mix. Fish get some NLS pellets, nutramar ova, rod's, nori, and some small mysis.

What else? I used IO on all my tanks dating back almost 25 yrs (to dad's tank when I was a kid) and I've recently switched over to RC. Saves me a supplementation step, which just simplifies things. I'm a chemist at heart, but I got tired of the extra steps...
 
What is IO(Iodine) and RO ??

I'm just reading a lot nowadays and came up to your thread so.
 
Kensington Reefer said:
RO is reverse osmosis
DI is deionized
So ro/di should be pure h2o

Yes, I know little bit about that. :)
original said:
What else? I used IO on all my tanks dating back almost 25 yrs (to dad's tank when I was a kid) and I've recently switched over to RC. Saves me a supplementation step, which just simplifies things. I'm a chemist at heart, but I got tired of the extra steps...

he wrote IO and RC so my bad, what does these two mean ??
 
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