Cali Kid Corals

BleepBloop’s 73 Gallon

Next project has been tweaking the lighting, I like my light fixture but even the bluest and actinic T5 bulbs in my experience haven't quite produced that fluorescent blue that makes some coral pop. I am trying to find a way to install a couple blue reef brite LED strips to help get that blue. The issue I have is mounting them, the way the T5 fixture hangs, the only place I can put the strips are on the outer edges of the tank, which isn't a problem but I need to angle them towards the tank to get the coverage I want and it seems none of the mounting brackets do that, they only let them point straight down.
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Here is the LED bar across the tank, you can see how its blocking some of the light coming from above it, but maybe it's negligible to the point where if the reefbrite is on it doesn't matter, but I was hoping to have the reefbrite on after the T5 turns off.
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Here you can see where there is some room under the T5 where there are no bulbs and presumably the LED bar wouldn't be blocking out much.

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So what I was thinking is something like this where the light sits on the outer edge but it is angle toward the tank, I might end up having to build a mount myself for this to work though.

I have only been running 4 out of my 8 bulbs for a while now, so maybe I can put the two reefbrites on and go back to 8 bulbs which would make up for any loss of light in the tank. Not really sure how to move forward with this but brainstorming. I tried to attach the reefbrites to the fixture but they are pretty heavy and the aluminum that my T5 fixture is made out of wasn't doing a great job at holding them up when I screwed them in. Might try the reefbrite mounts, but I hate to spend $50 on something that lacks a feature I want, but it will probably look cleaner than anything I would build myself. Still brainstorming on all this.
 
Got the reefbrites mounted and working. A Home Depot run and a little scrounging through the leftover box in my garage got me sorted.

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I wanted something like this which would sit on the outside of the glass because I have a net cover on my tank and it wouldn't it.

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Inspired by the official mounts I bought these hinges and zip-tied them together, I used zip ties mainly because the holes did not line up will for a screw, plus I didn't want a screw sticking out onto my tank and I didn't want them to rust together. Also I have a lot of zip ties so it's easy.

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Wrapped some electric tape over it, not so much to prevent rust, but rather to prevent the rust from staining the glass since I have had this happen before.

I then put a screw through the top hinge to the reefbrite and set the angle I wanted.
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I then repeated this for the other light and here is the finished version:
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So far so good!
 
Not a bad idea, any experience with it? Just worried over time the stuff might chip off and fall into tank
Lots and lots of thin coats. You do not want it to bead so more thinner coats are better than a few thick ones which may run. I haven’t used it for anything reef related, but this could be a good use. you just wouldn’t want it to be causing friction on the part you’ve spray out it will peel
 
Like max said thin coats and multiple dips, let it cure for at least 12hrs, it’s a long process but it’s more durable than that tape in a long run. I used the plastidip for my tweezers before the carbon fiber ones.


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Ok sounds good, thanks both of you for the info, I’m going to leave it like this just to see how I like the setup, and if it becomes permanent I’ll get on the plasti-dip


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Pieced together a working doser from some bubblemagus I got from @Coral reefer. One of them had a clock issue which stopped it from dosing which seems to be a common problem. Installing the pumps from one unit into the one with the working clock did the trick.
My 2-part and dosing containers were pretty DIY from some 2 liter graduated bottles I had laying around still. I used the fritz dry sodium bicarbonate and calcium chloride. It was a little tricky having to make up my own solution accurately and still get accurate dosing, especially lacking an accurate gram scale. Nevertheless I found some rough calculation for the concentrations that would make these last at least a couple weeks.
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Built a little platform for the doser and the solutions.

I had been testing alk pretty regularly and got it right around 9.1 after about a week of adjusting the dosing amounts and such. Calcium was right at 450 when I tested this morning, maybe a 460, hard to see on the titration test sometimes, so I dropped my calcium dosing by just a little bit.
 
Most of my coral did fine through the adjustment period, only thing was one of my chalices looked a little weird this morning, not usually this white, but time will tell
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All other coral doing good, here's a few pictures under the reefbrites, apologies for picture quality, my orange filter consisted of holding a pair of fishing sunglasses over my phone camera.
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Huge fan of the monti in this picture, just looks so bright in the tank
 
Also added some new fish I had in QT for a while, I always wanted a golden head sleeper goby, but of course did not think about its sandsifting nature, so now its dropping lots of sand on my coral and I am not sure how I feel about that. Don't you just hate it when wild animals act exactly the way they're supposed to?
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The culprit at work
 
Will try and get some more fish pics tomorrow, also did a huge manual removal of bubble algae after it starting spreading. Added a phosphate reactor thinking that might be the problem. Last tested phosphates before I had the reactor installed at 0.1, down from 1.5 last time I tested. Hopefully it helps, I'm going to just keeping pulling them out as I can.
 
Given the amount of snow I have rained down upon my entire tank by the goby, his time in my tank is officially limited, however he is going to be near impossible to catch so he may remain longer than I would like. I read a lot of varying reports that eventually the finer stuff gets filtered out, or if you clear a larger portion of the sandbed and leave it uncovered they will stat there but I do not know if I can deal with the annoyance of having to clear my coral of sand every day or the danger of it potentially toppling rockwork. Real bummer cause I love the fish and think it looks awesome, but my own fault for not doing my research and lesson learned. May move him to the frag tank if I catch him since its bare bottom, but feel bad that he won't get to sift and do his thing so a rehome is likely in his future.
 
So the last few days I had noticed a few coral weren't opening up as much as usual, my torches mainly, and some of the others had less PE than usual. I was testing the major parameters pretty much daily but nothing seemed too off. It slowly got worse with today being the worst day, almost all my euphellya is not coming out of the skeleton, I lost a torch about 3 days ago to what I think was brown jelly, few acros have barely any PE, purple stylo neither alveopora neither you get the idea. I'll post some pics and you can compare to previous photos a few posts ago and see difference. Current parameters are:
ph 8.0
No3 5 ppm
Nitrite 0
Ammonia 0
Salinity 1.025
alk 9.9
Ca 450
Waiting to borrow my buddys po4 test kit to get value for that

All the fish are fine, my initial assumption is I fell prey to my own impatience and didn't follow rule number 1 of take it slow. I have made a few tweaks recently, namely adding the doser about a month ago but really dialing it in about 2 weeks ago. I added a phosphate reactor about two weeks ago as well since my phosphates were at po4 and I had added some more fish and suspected it would go up, I currently think this was the culprit since I forgot I hadn't been running my skimmer for about 3 months and think that adding both the phosphate reactor and skimmer at the same time caused my nutrients to bottom out. Lastly I had been running only 4 of my t5 lights and a reefbrite until a few days ago when I turned the other 3 on and maybe that shocked the coral.

I turned off the skimmer and po4 reactor and set my lights back to 4 bulbs till things balance a bit but I am open to all ideas or opinions on whats going on

Here's some pics taken about 2-3 hours after lights turn on
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Tank is slowly bouncing back, lost a couple coral sadly but most made it through and a lot have made a good recovery.
Have had some cyano creep up, maybe in the last week or so, I keep doing manual removal every day but it keeps coming back, tested po4 at 0.08 and no3 at 10 ppm a couple days ago, that was right after a water change so I will test again later today. Siphoned some out today as well, I know higher flow is a remedy but I haven't made any change in my flow and never seemed to have cyano before.
Took a few pics, this was maybe 2-3 hours after I siphoned a bunch out:
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Not saying this is the right solution for you but I had a thick carpet of Cyano in my tank and I just left the lights off for three days. It all died and never came back. I only lost one piece of SPS.

My theory is that during that time, other bacteria that didn’t need light took over.
 
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