Cali Kid Corals

New to me Reefer 250

Rostato said:
I feel like having nutrients always available for the corals is a good thing. My thought is to always have food available so that nothing ever starves.

I’d much rather waste a bit of money on food then starve things in the tank and not get any growth.

I have 10 fish in a system with only 50 gallons of water in it. All of the large pieces of food get eaten, and the ones that don’t get eaten by my two cleaner shrimps or by the massive army of mini brittle stars I have.

All the little bits get sucked up by the corals and sponge in the tank.

Whatever is left is exported by the skimmer and scrubber.

It’s a balance. I only spend maybe $10 per month on food max.

All I’m saying is that this is by far the best growing tank I’ve ever had, and the only one I’ve ever fed more than once a day.
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Nice, I think I need to increase the feeding and flow in my tank!
 
Phosphate jumped up to .2

I guess all the feeding has caught up to me.

Added a little gfo to help combat the phosphate and I’ve reduced my feedings a little.

Some of the softies don’t look great so I did a water change today. First time in a while.

My wife officially wants an bigger tank. Mostly just because she wants to get rid of the anemones and the only way they are getting out is a tank tear down.

I’ll be on the lookout for a 4-5 ft tank. I really like the water box 190.5 but they are SPENDY
 
Lots to update.

Our clam died...super sad but it sounds like it was lack of light[emoji22]

We were able to get our nems off the rocks and sell them off so we are now nem free. It was a very painful 8 hour process to get them off, but it worked.

So, now I have more room to let things grow. Hopefully I can get another year or two out of this tank before needing to upgrade.

Somehow my alk jumped up to 9.9. I’m thinking maybe the last batch of b ionic I mixed up was a bit too concentrated

I had to start running gfo again to get phosphates in line. They hovered near .2 for a bit and are at .09 now.

Nitrates finally ticked back up to 5ppm even with me changing my algae scrubbers schedule from 12 hours to 16. So I bumped it up to 17 hours now.

Due to the higher phosphate, I reduced my feedings from 6 to 5 a day and use a little less phyto, reef roids and oyster feast in my food. It seems to have stabilized a bit.

I also added a blue and yellow damsel because I like them, a neon dottyback, and and awesome marine betta ( thanks @tankguy)

So far the betta has been eating well, and coming out a few times during the day. It also will eat right out of my turkey basted and kinda beg for food. It’s an awesome fish.

So far it has not eaten my cleaner shrimps or small fish or anything really. A great citizen.

All of my fish seem to come out and swim more often nite that the betta is dominating the tank.

Here are some random shots of the fish and corals. That have taken the spot of the anemones.

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Sorry about the clam.
Did you glue montis and chalices to overflow or back of tank? I like it. I may try that if I ever have a serious stinger and if I have enough light.
 
I got sick of the lack of enough spread on my hydras, so I added 2 primes a while back. This worked for a while, but I still did not get enough light at the front of my tank. I was going to add 2 more primes, but I felt it was just getting crazy.

So Instead I picked up some radion xr15 pros. I not have 2 gen threes on the sides and one gen 4 in the middle. I liked the adjustability of the radion mounts much better than the custom hydra mounts I had.
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I absolutely hated programming these stupid things. It took me like 8 total hours, and 2 computers to get it figure out. I can’t understand how the best lights out there could possibly have some of the worst programmability.

Either way, I’m much happier with the look, and the amount of light fill I have in the tank. Colors seem to be popping a bit more already. Could just be that they are actually being lit, or that the lights are pulling out more color.
 
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