Update 1-24-24
Tank has continued to chug along. No more random coral deaths, and everything's continued to color up and look better. We're putting a hiatus on adding any more coral to the tank for the next 3-ish months, though, just to be safe.
Food and feeding
Costco was doing a sale on an upright garage freezer last month, so we picked one up. As a compromise with my wife to avoid frozen food proliferating throughout our fridge, I took two drawers in said freezer, and stocked up on frozen food. After asking around, I ended up doing a bulk order from Brine Shrimp Direct given their pretty solid pricing: 77 flat packs (mix of mysis, spirulina mysis/brine, krill, ay caribe, and arctic copepods), 1.2 and 2.4 mm pellets, flake food, and the omnivore gel diet.
For a data point for those wondering how much others feed their tanks: I've been feeding a total of ~15 cubes of food per day, split among three feedings, with one feeding enriched with five drops of Garlic Power and three or four drops of Selcon. I'll also feed a pinch of flake and pellet during the day, since I'm going to be buying an Avast Plank from @Srt4eric soon and am trying to get them used to pellet/flake food for automated feedings to replace one frozen feeding). I'll also give them a sheet of nori every couple days. Given how fat some of my fish are I'm guessing this is leaning towards the heavier side of feeding, but they seem to all be doing well. The coral also gets 40 mL/day of Red Sea AB+ .
Video of feeding time:
drive.google.com
Nutrient management
I'm pretty sure adding the bella goby to the tank caused a nutrient spike due to a combination of a prior lack of thorough sand sifting and lots of food on the sand bed. Phosphates got pretty high (0.57 at one point, and 50 ppm nitrate), so I spent the better part of a week slowly dosing lanthanum chloride to bring it down, and continued dosing ~25 mL of homemade NoPox* daily. Phosphates are now around 0.20 and dropping slowly.
I also got a great deal from a friend up here so I swapped out my previous IceCap K2-200 skimmer for a brand new Reef Octopus Regal INT200 protein skimmer. Love it so far: quiet, will be easier to clean, and has a float switch to avoid overflow. I'll be hooking up a recirculating CO2 scrubber at some point to help raise pH, too.
Next steps
Continuing my theme of 'trying to automate as much as possible', my next projects are going to be:
Tank has continued to chug along. No more random coral deaths, and everything's continued to color up and look better. We're putting a hiatus on adding any more coral to the tank for the next 3-ish months, though, just to be safe.
Food and feeding
Costco was doing a sale on an upright garage freezer last month, so we picked one up. As a compromise with my wife to avoid frozen food proliferating throughout our fridge, I took two drawers in said freezer, and stocked up on frozen food. After asking around, I ended up doing a bulk order from Brine Shrimp Direct given their pretty solid pricing: 77 flat packs (mix of mysis, spirulina mysis/brine, krill, ay caribe, and arctic copepods), 1.2 and 2.4 mm pellets, flake food, and the omnivore gel diet.
For a data point for those wondering how much others feed their tanks: I've been feeding a total of ~15 cubes of food per day, split among three feedings, with one feeding enriched with five drops of Garlic Power and three or four drops of Selcon. I'll also feed a pinch of flake and pellet during the day, since I'm going to be buying an Avast Plank from @Srt4eric soon and am trying to get them used to pellet/flake food for automated feedings to replace one frozen feeding). I'll also give them a sheet of nori every couple days. Given how fat some of my fish are I'm guessing this is leaning towards the heavier side of feeding, but they seem to all be doing well. The coral also gets 40 mL/day of Red Sea AB+ .
Video of feeding time:
PXL_20240118_164803809.TS.mp4
drive.google.com
Nutrient management
I'm pretty sure adding the bella goby to the tank caused a nutrient spike due to a combination of a prior lack of thorough sand sifting and lots of food on the sand bed. Phosphates got pretty high (0.57 at one point, and 50 ppm nitrate), so I spent the better part of a week slowly dosing lanthanum chloride to bring it down, and continued dosing ~25 mL of homemade NoPox* daily. Phosphates are now around 0.20 and dropping slowly.
I also got a great deal from a friend up here so I swapped out my previous IceCap K2-200 skimmer for a brand new Reef Octopus Regal INT200 protein skimmer. Love it so far: quiet, will be easier to clean, and has a float switch to avoid overflow. I'll be hooking up a recirculating CO2 scrubber at some point to help raise pH, too.
Next steps
Continuing my theme of 'trying to automate as much as possible', my next projects are going to be:
- Setting up an automatic dry food feeder to replace one feeding per day, and to be able to leave the tank completely alone for several days in emergency situations
- Setting up two dosing pumps: one four-head doser for Red Sea ABCD dosing, and another two- or three-head doser to automate NoPox dosing and AB+ dosing.
. On another note, seems like you are doing a lot of Red Sea. ABCD/No Pox/AB+. Have you considered or already ried the Captiv8 products for traces or nutrients? I am using several of them, and the cost-benefit is massive. The need for several dosing heads is significantly reduced. Also, I have been using their Remedi8 and Inocul8 nutrient-reduction products (0.5 grams per week), which are super powerful.
