Vincerama2
Supporting Member
Hi guys, so after coming home from the frag swap, I have a bucket of little containers of coral. All with their own little amount of water. The water is getting stale and each and every container needs to be acclimated.
So the question is, what's a good way to do it?
What I USED to do is take all the frags, and their water, and dump it into a 5 gallon bucket, then semi-drip acclimate the bucket. I didn't actually drip (which would be better), but I'd scoop up maybe a half cup of tank water and dump it into the bucket. After there was "a lot of water" in the bucket, I called it good. Then I'd take each frag and stick it into the tank. I may or may not dip the coral, depending on if I remembered to or not.
The problem is the initial mixing of all the different water and all the corals, which may touch each other. This seems sub-optimal. Starting with a small volume of random water doesn't allow you to run a heater either as there is not enough water and you can easily cook your corals.
drip acclimating each container could be done too, with multiple drip lines, which is possible. You could set up ten drip lines, and just drip into each container, allowing it to overflow as needed until the water in each container was more or less entirely your tank water.
This time I did something different which is similar, but not quite.
I came up with something that seems to work well, but of course can be refined. Here's what I did, I call it the "Leaky Lid Acclimation".
I started with a 5 gallon water change, but I kept the "old" water.
I took each container, and with a thumb tack, poked holes around the rim of the lid so the lids were leaky. Then I put all the containers into the old water and went to watch TV. Occasionally, I gave each container a little squeeze so a bit of water squirted out, then sucked back in. SORT of like osmosis, but not really. However MAYBE there is some osmotic action here as the salinity of the water in the container matches the salinity in the bucket. I dunno ... I'm not sure a leaky lid counts as a "membrane".
After some netflix watching, I took the containers out and floated them in the main tank for temperature matching, then uncermoniously removed each frag, tossed it's hybrid water and put it on a frag rack in the tank. If I remembered, I'd maybe have dipped them.
So the advantage here is that;
1) starting with 5 gallons of water, you can put a heater in the bucket which slowly helps the containers to reach the water temp.
2) the holes are small and maybe even without squeezing them (ie; more tiny holes used) they would have slowly mixed water with the bucket.
3) The different water salinity, ph and whatevever can mix into a much larger volume of your tank water, to the point where I THINK that the water will have much much closer specs to your tank water.
Sure you have to toss the lids after, or you can keep them and the next time re-use these containers OR transfer new frags and their water into your perforated containers (or swap lids).
Anyway, that's how _I_ did it. How did you guys mass acclimate your corals?
V
So the question is, what's a good way to do it?
What I USED to do is take all the frags, and their water, and dump it into a 5 gallon bucket, then semi-drip acclimate the bucket. I didn't actually drip (which would be better), but I'd scoop up maybe a half cup of tank water and dump it into the bucket. After there was "a lot of water" in the bucket, I called it good. Then I'd take each frag and stick it into the tank. I may or may not dip the coral, depending on if I remembered to or not.
The problem is the initial mixing of all the different water and all the corals, which may touch each other. This seems sub-optimal. Starting with a small volume of random water doesn't allow you to run a heater either as there is not enough water and you can easily cook your corals.
drip acclimating each container could be done too, with multiple drip lines, which is possible. You could set up ten drip lines, and just drip into each container, allowing it to overflow as needed until the water in each container was more or less entirely your tank water.
This time I did something different which is similar, but not quite.
I came up with something that seems to work well, but of course can be refined. Here's what I did, I call it the "Leaky Lid Acclimation".
I started with a 5 gallon water change, but I kept the "old" water.
I took each container, and with a thumb tack, poked holes around the rim of the lid so the lids were leaky. Then I put all the containers into the old water and went to watch TV. Occasionally, I gave each container a little squeeze so a bit of water squirted out, then sucked back in. SORT of like osmosis, but not really. However MAYBE there is some osmotic action here as the salinity of the water in the container matches the salinity in the bucket. I dunno ... I'm not sure a leaky lid counts as a "membrane".
After some netflix watching, I took the containers out and floated them in the main tank for temperature matching, then uncermoniously removed each frag, tossed it's hybrid water and put it on a frag rack in the tank. If I remembered, I'd maybe have dipped them.
So the advantage here is that;
1) starting with 5 gallons of water, you can put a heater in the bucket which slowly helps the containers to reach the water temp.
2) the holes are small and maybe even without squeezing them (ie; more tiny holes used) they would have slowly mixed water with the bucket.
3) The different water salinity, ph and whatevever can mix into a much larger volume of your tank water, to the point where I THINK that the water will have much much closer specs to your tank water.
Sure you have to toss the lids after, or you can keep them and the next time re-use these containers OR transfer new frags and their water into your perforated containers (or swap lids).
Anyway, that's how _I_ did it. How did you guys mass acclimate your corals?
V
