Jestersix

Jeff's 75G conversion from FOLR to reef

I do pellets 4x a day, two spins each time with the eheim, and 3-4 cubes of mysis per day. No thawing or nothing. Just frozen cubes straight into the feeding ring.
 
Feeding Ring from Two Little Fishes.
 

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87G or ~100G total volume with sump, chaeto and calcium reactors. Total fish count = 15.

This is what I fed in my 47G with 7 fish.
daily_feeding_080317.jpg


Fed heavily through the day, strong nutrient export, and weekly water changes (15%). The food is also broken up into 10+ meals/day, whatever they can eat in a couple of minutes.
 
Yeah, I'm in the feed a lot camp as well. I feed about the same as @Ibn in my 85 gallon garage tank and maybe two thirds of that in my 65 gallon tank inside the house. Big on nutrient export as well, each tank has around 10-11 gallons of fuge space with cheato growing in it.

My nitrates are around 1 and phosphates at 0.02 in both tanks.
 
I forgot to mention earlier, I target nitrates of 0.2 ppm. If it drops near 0, I skim less and harvest chaeto; if it’s too high I skim wet and let the chaeto grow. If nitrates get above 2.0, then I turn on a reactor with beads.


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Flagg37 said:
Man that’s a lot of work.
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The first time someone on ReefCentral related this feeding regimen to me, I had the same reaction. Since I’ve been doing all these tasks for years now, they seriously only take 1-2 minutes each. Spread throughout the day, it doesn’t amount to much at all. For comparison, running a minimal set of water tests (Nitrate, Alk, Ca) takes about 5 minutes.


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Ibn said:
Never actually strained out anything. Need the nutrients. :)
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So I am really curious about this. I've never been able to just drop whole cubes of anything in my tanks without getting an absolute explosion of pests (and I've battled them all: diatoms, dinoflagellates, cyano, bubble algae, GHA, ...).
So those of you that are able to do this, is it a matter of tank volume? Have you fed this heavily from the beginning or did your tanks have to mature for a year or two before you could tolerate the nutrients from frozen food juice?
 
OnTheReef said:
So I am really curious about this. I've never been able to just drop whole cubes of anything in my tanks without getting an absolute explosion of pests (and I've battled them all: diatoms, dinoflagellates, cyano, bubble algae, GHA, ...).
So those of you that are able to do this, is it a matter of tank volume? Have you fed this heavily from the beginning or did your tanks have to mature for a year or two before you could tolerate the nutrients from frozen food juice?
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I have 20+ fish in a 170g tank. As the tank gets older, it has handled nutrient better. I do a 50g water change every two weeks and the only thing I have to export other than that is phosphates. Over the course of 6-8 weeks they will climb from 0.03 to 0.15 and that's when I put gfo online until it drops again.

My nitrates are fairly consistent at 1ppm. I feed a few sheets of Nori (buy 5lb bags of sushi sheets) 3x a day and in the evening I feed 2 cubes of mysis, 2 cubes of carvivor delight and a little of my home made food (copies rods reef food ingredients). I have to drop a little food in the overflow for the yellow coris that lives there. Media cups with filter floss gets changed out every 3 days and skim wet.
 
OnTheReef said:
So I am really curious about this. I've never been able to just drop whole cubes of anything in my tanks without getting an absolute explosion of pests (and I've battled them all: diatoms, dinoflagellates, cyano, bubble algae, GHA, ...).
So those of you that are able to do this, is it a matter of tank volume? Have you fed this heavily from the beginning or did your tanks have to mature for a year or two before you could tolerate the nutrients from frozen food juice?
Click to expand...

I've always fed heavily once there was enough fish to consume the food, but I have always focused on heavy nutrient export. Even from the get go, I had a fuge or an algae reactor. So I don't think it's really tank volume (to an extent - I wouldn't dump a whole cube in a 10 gallon tank), rather it's how much nutrient export you got going on realtive to the size of your tank. I can't remember the last time I strained frozen food.
 
Thanks everyone! That's definitely enlightening, you guys are doing massive nutrient export. Like @RandyC, I have taken to cycling new tanks with a refugium and it definitely keeps things more under control from the beginning. I've also started using the type of filter sock that's made of a very fine mesh. I rotate in a clean one once a week or so.
 
Jeff,

Back on topic I have some potential corals for you, let me know which ones are interesting to you:
1) ORA Pink Tipped Birdsnest. I just got a bunch of it from @Chromis and I can easily create a couple frags.
2) Frogspawn. I have ~ 30 heads of it at this point, so I could create smaller or larger colonies of it.
3) Green Hammer. I have a couple pieces with 1-2 heads.
4) Orange plate montipora. @coral4me trimmed a large colony last night and sent me home with 3-4 frags of various sizes.

Cheers,
Eric
 
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