Reef nutrition

Mike and Ashley's 150g reef tank (our first)

Ammonia down to zero. Yeah.
Nitrite still high. OK.
Nitrate now somewhere between 20-40 ppm. Getting there...........and I am getting very anxious to get something into the QT TTM cycle.

Lowered the light for the refugium to 5" off the water, which is below the height of the overflow holes in the sock chamber. The skimmer section has about a 1 1/2" higher wall than the water level, so I'll look to point the light towards the sock chamber tonight to reduce spill over into the skimmer section. I may just get a piece of black acrylic from Tap Plastics and extend the baffle between the refugium and the skimmer section. Easy enough to do and should really isolate the light.

That whole pH/oxygenation thing is interesting. We had some painters in today to start painting our downstairs. Closed up house and lots of fumes, pH went from 7.92 to 7.81 in 6 hours. They left for the day and I opened the windows and the pH has risen back to 7.85 in just 45 minutes. We'll see what happens tomorrow when they do more painting.

pH has been hanging around 7.92 for days, given today's unintended "experiment", I think I am going to try aerating a sample of water and watch if the pH changes to see if we just have a high CO2 load in our house.
 
Ammonia still at zero (no surprise there)
Nitrite at 0.25 so very close to being there
Nitrate at 20 ppm

Interesting that the Nitrate has dropped on its own.

Great unintended science experiment. We had painters in for three days and it had a significant effect on pH in the DT.

pH with painting.jpg
 
WCKDVPR said:
Me too. I was prepared to buy a H150 or A160 and Robert at Neptune said that was unnecessary and I should get this one. You can adjust the spectrum so if it doesn't seem to grow chaeto reasonably well on the "grow" setting, I can try it at red, bloom, blue, or in between those settings. It is nice in that I can control it with the apex. I have it on full output from 8:30pm to 9am right now.
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Does anyone know what the right setting is for Kessil H lights on algae is? It seemed like red grew the red algae faster than the green, and blue made the chaeto grow fast but strands were thinner. I switched back to somewhere in the middle ("purple").

Also I can't run my H80 more than 50% without burning my algae and currently am using 40%. You might want to start low and slowly turn it up...

Good idea to add chaeto first! Should help with nitrates during your cycling.
 
Thanks. Nitrates are dropping even as I near the end of the nitrite phase. I have my H80 full power on " grow", I'll try backing it off a bit and setting it more blue.

Scuzy - yikes, what did it take your pH from at baseline to when using the scrubber? I was thinking of blending some air through the srcubber and some from room/outside to make the material last longer as I was afraid it may be pricey.
 
Yeah - tank is cycled! 15 days from 4 ppm ammonia and lots of Dr. Tim's to zero Nitrites.
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Nitrate is still dropping, now down to 10 ppm and I haven't done any water change yet (carbon, GFO, and chaeto running).

Lowered the temp to 77.0 - 77.5 F.

Now seeing I am many weeks away from getting any fish out of QT (seeing I haven't bought any yet), and at least 1.5 weeks from lights and then picking up some starter coral(s), do I need to feed the bacteria until I get some actual inhabitants in there?
 
WCKDVPR said:
Suggestions?

We also have fire shrimp on our list, would those work at this time?
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Snails. I prefer banded trocchus, turbos (if you ever get green hair algea) and cerith. Once you get fish and are feeding, I like nassarius and fighting conch for left over food. Fighting conch will also eat algae. I'd save shrimp until you start feeding fish. They'll help take care of left over food.

If you're gonna go crab route, you can add some too.

Your tank will get ugly before it gets pretty once your turn on the lights.
 
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