Kassuns Reef

I got around to taking some new videos this weekend of our reef tank with the new T5 lighting. As you can see it is just a tad brighter.

Are flowerpot and green star polyps corals are still stressed and haven't been opening all the way. We have sporadic openings on our green star polyps and approximately 1/4 to 1/2 extension on the flower pot.

I did a 12 gall water change with Reef Crystals on Saturday evening after letting it mix for 24 hours. The skimmer is always a daily process to get it to work correctly. I am going to pick up an Aqua Roma HOB (hang on the back skimmer) within the next month and sell off the Seaclone skimmer.

Our new tank mate additions have setteled in very well. Our Yellow Tang was a bit stressed out, however the lawn mower salfin blenny has already stared grazing on our green hair algae. The neon dotty back likes to chase our Hawk fish around once and a while, but nothing to extensive that I should worry.

Was able to snap a quick picture this morning of our 2 new additions.

Added a lawn mower blenny yesterday to aid in the algae battle. And today on our way home from the twin cities we stopped off in forest lake and got a spotted hawk fish. Here are som pics.

Luck struck today when a local reefer that is into rc planes offered me a trade for his Marineland T5-48 Deluxe Strip Light Fixture for my rc engine. It's a total of 4 54w bulbs. The color difference in our reef is now insane. Colors are popping and our flowerpot and various other corals are extending. I also stopped by another guys house and picked up 2 maxi jet 1200's full of coraline algae and tunze like powerhead. I now have a total of 4 powerheads ruining in our tank and the flow is great. I had to restructure our hoods layout inside to make room, but the process went smooth and fast. I mounted the hallaide in front. Below are some pictures with our new light. If we want to go less white, we will probably switch out a 10k to a 20k bulb.

One of my projects for this weekend is to pick up a few used maxi jet 1200's and with some simple mods make the put out roughly 1800 gph. These to and my koralie powerhead should give me plenty of flow, especially behind my rocks against the rock wall. I'll post some pics and a link that I am using from someone elses mod.

Our carpet was pretty bleached when we took it home. Almost all his zoointhella was gone. We have been feeding him regulary and will be adding a vitamin such as Selcon and / or Garlic Extreme to fortify his food.

I have to pick up some reef crystals tomorrow and start up a fresh 10 gal water change. And then let it sit with an airstone and a power head to get the ph equalized and stable.

Fine tuned the skimmer this evening. The mods that I did the other night seam to be paying off. It's now finislly dry skimming instead of wet. Which means the the foam coming up is dry and not saturated with water. Hopefully it will continue to produce with weekly cleanings.
A local reefer has offered a great deal on a remora skimmer, that I may look into in the near future.

Met a local reefer that had a new pair of 250w 10k xm bulbs. Picked up a single bulb for $30.00. What a difference in spectrum from my last. Bulb. Brand name equals quality. Looks the way a 10k should.

Found pair, however not interested in relocation at this time.

Wanted pair of clown fish to host, no lease or deposit required

Nothing much happening today. I did a few mods to my seaclone skimmer that I bought several years ago. It is a huge pain to adjust, and I hope to build or purchase a different one soon. I shortened the inner tube to 3inches to give the venturi system more contact with the water. It seams to have made a slight difference, but nothing to jump around about. There is a DIY called the Kalkenstein that I what to build, however the pro skimmers are the way to go, due to the precise design and build quality. Well who knows we will have to see how motivated i am this weekend.

I do plan on adding one or two moded maxi streams to my system this Friday. I am going to soft plumb on some piping so I don't have to keep taking my top off kalk container down just to refill it ip. Automation is always faster and easier to save time.

Installed the final 2 segments last evening with my wife. The rockwall turned out great and fit perferctly. We moved all the fish and corals to a seperate cooler while we installed the wall and shifted the sand. We have a lot of live rock and have considered starting up another smaller nano tank, thus reducing the amount in our display tank give us more room to stack and showcasing more of the rock wall that we spent so much time building. The goal today is to finish the final touches on the aquascaping and leaving the rock alone so our corals can grow.

:: A SIDE NOTE::

Their are some decent plans out on the net for making all in one tanks. So I think I am coin to purchase a 20 long and dedicate a six inch section for a place that will hold the macro algae, heater, powerhead, Ect... I will post some different designs later this week.

When wife asks to aqua scape, it's best to not keep saying, that piece of rock would look great over there instead :)

Epoxy resin and argonite all applied. Now just have to wait for it to cure and cut a small section out to be able to fit it in our reef tank.

I believe our carpet ate our blue tang this evening while we were out shopping. We knew the risk of adding a carpet to our reef tank. In the past we had great sucess with them & without a loss to our fish. Aparently this one has a stomach for live fish. We will know by tomorrow if the tang is just hiding or if it became a snack.

Started on the 2nd and final section of our rockwall this evening. We will let the foam setup over night and cure. Then tomorrow I will apply the epoxy and arganite to the foam. I will be installing it in our tank on Sunday.

A simple drip setup. I used a penguin power head mount and a sea weed clip to hold it in place.

Finially got around to setting up a gravity fed auto top off with kalk this evening. Nothing fancy, just a 2 gallon water container that I used a long piece of rigid airline tube and regular air line tubing with a air valve at the bottom that I can open and close to regulate the amount of water that drops into our tank. It will take a few days to get the amounts of drip to keep up with our evaporation rate which is roughly a gallon + per day.

We also added an Anemone Crab and 3 snails to fight our green hair algae out break.

Checked and tested my 1st batch of two 12 gallon water changes this evening. All parameters with in acceptable limits, so I switched out 12 gallons of water. Our Blue Tang finally moved from behind out carpet anemone to the right side of the tank in the rock work. Peppermint shrimp is running out and about our rock work, but mostly sticking to the rock wall on the right side of our tank. Still no luck with the clown and our anemone, it may take some time, but no guarantee. Fingers crossed.

I sent a complaint to Omega Star regarding the intense yellow from my 10k bulb a few days ago. Today I received two emails back.

The first apologized and said to take the bulb back to my local fish store that I had bought it from.

The second email said to disregard the first email and send the bulb in and they would test it for me and send me a replacement bulb. I was very happy with the second email and the fact that they are committed to customer satisfaction. They agreed that it should be more white than yellow. I have an email reply asking what to do about not having a halide bulb or light for that matter over my tank while they examined my bulb. Because my SPS and Carpet Anemone can't go a long period of time not having light.

Thought I'd share a link to a phytoplankton culturing setup. The start up cost isn't that much, and I will be able to harvest more than enough for my reef tank and sell the extra to local reef owners. Below are a few links to some plans:

Reef Keeping DIY culture station

Shawn Carlson's culture station (photo featured above)

Took some time this evening to do some reaqua-scaping and move some of my soft & lps corals around. Hoping to get them closer to my anemone and get my clowns to show some intrest in our carpet anemone. Instead of the clowns trying to host I'm our flower pot and frog spawn. I goto bed with fingers crossed this evening.

Our brine shrimp hatched today. After putting a light at the bottom for a several minuets, I sucked the empty shells out with a turkey baster and fed my sump and tank.

I will be starting up a phytoplankton culture next week with some DT's as a starter culture. To try and save some money by culturing my own.

Tested my water this evening. Amonia, nitrates & nitrites are high. Phosphates are high as well. I use ro/ di water and my Tds meter reads ok. So I am to assume that because of the rock wall Installation a week or so ago, & the major disturbance of my deep sand bed, that I am going through a small cycle. I will be performing two 10 gallon water changes over the next few days. This should help decrease the high levels.

Our scopas tang passed away today. When we bought him a week ago he was in poor health & we hoped to rehabilate him and turn his health around. Despite our efforts he did not make it. This is the second fish we have lost over the past 5 years, the 1st was our goby that was eaten by our carpet anemone a few days ago.

After a few days of hiding our new sea urchin came out from behind the rock work. He has a nice velvet blue inbetween his spines.

-- Kassun

Found a great article on line regarding snails in a reef tank. The link can be found by Clicking Here

Here is where our crabs meet up every day on our DIY rockwall. At night they start off at the bottom of our reef tank and slowly one by one they form a train climbing up to the top. It's pretty hilarious to watch. I'll try and grab a photo of the journey tonight.

Stopped home this afternoon for lunch and to let my dogs out and snapped a few pictures with my iphone. I also moved some of our power heads around to change the flow and re adjusted our protein skimmer. Sea Clone skimmers are so touchy and need constant attention.

Today while peering into our reef tank we saw our carpet anemone spitting out a large mass. So not to have the mass decompose in out tank i took out a turkey baster and sucked the mass out of the anemones mouth. To my disappointment, it was our Goby. Now that explains why our anemone hasn't been hungry. Wallace past away last night between the hours of 12am and 10 am. My he rest in piece.

The most expensive piece of your reef tank is the lighting. Depending on what you want to keep (fish only, SPS corals, LPS corals, soft corals or a full blown mixed reef tank) will depend on the lighting you purchase. I went to Marine Depot and purchased a DIY 250w metal halide bundle for roughly under $100.00. All that I had to purchase locally was a heavy gauge extension cord,a fuse box to mount the components in and a computer fan to provide air flow for cooling. Reflector's cost can add up pretty fast. I chose to buy a solar tube from Home Depot and a rivet gun. Then I downloaded a template to make my own reflectors online. After the full lighting DIY project was complete I spent roughly $160. If I was to purchase a ballast bulb and reflector, it could have run as much as $300 or more. I also supplement dusk and dawn with 2x65w antinics and created a custom DIY led moon lights that I run off of a standard 12v power supply. At this moment I have 1 250w MH. I will be adding another 250w to my reef tank in the near future.

I purchased an off brand 250w 10k metal halide which should have been a good balance of white and blue, however the off brand bulb is more like a 65k bulb which is more yellow than anything. Lesson learned,not try and save a buck when it comes to bulbs. I will be switching out the bulb with a 20k in a few weeks. This afternoon my wife and I decided to go to our favorite local reef store "underground Aquatics" where we picked up some dosing chemicals, DT's photo plankton, and a large spine sea urchin to help control our green hair algae problem. Tomorrows task will be using a dremal tool to enlarge the space between sections in or fuge to increase the water flow.

I upgraded our fuge lighting with 2 96w 27K compact florescent bulbs and set the new timer to a 10 hour on and 2 hour off period to increase our macro algae growth for filtration.

Here's a what a clean skimmer looks like. I can actually see the bubbles now. I added a container that will scifon out the collection cup so I don't have to check on it daily to empty it.

I started mixing the salt and ro/di water on Wednesday. Then I let it set up mixing for 24 hours with power heads, heaters and an air pump to oxygenate the water and stabilize the PH. I checked the salinity and it was at 1.022, so I adjusted it to 1.025 by adding some more salt. The salt I chose to go with is Reef Crystals, due to it's higher concentrations of calcium, magnesium, trace elements ect..
I mixed up roughly 30 gallons in all. The water change took about an hour or less. I have a drain pipe set up to drain the water out of my tank to the basement stationary tub. Before I used to drain it into 5 gal buckets and empty them one by one, but this works so much better and saves a lot of time.
I have a Maxi Jet 1200 that I have hooked up to a plastic hose that I place in my water mixing container ( 32 gallon brute) and pump the fresh saltwater up and into my tank. The most important thing when doing a water change is to make sure that you temperature and salinity match up, so as to not stress your fish and corals.
I usually do a 10% or 20% water change every 2 weeks. Because doing a water change is time intensive, I am going to start doing weekly 5 to 10 gallon water changes, so it's not one large volume change every 2 weeks.
This is always a good chance to clean or scrape the algae that has grown, and that the mag float wasn't able to remove. I also took the opportunity and cleaned my power heads and protein skimmer that was so dirty you couldn't see through the 1st acrylic tube.

This weekend I will be changing out my lights and their layout in my canopy, laying out the grids in my fuge with egg crate/light diffuser panel and starting up a culture of live brine shrimp to feed my tank.

-Kassun

He's not quite sure about his new tank mate. :)

Well I went on my bi- weekly visit to our local fish store. Today i bought another pepermint shrimp and a cleaner shrimp to help Franki, our Scopus Tang fight off a bacterial infection.

I Bought salt yesterday (reef crystals), and started a water change this evening at 8:00 pm and finished at 9:30 this evening. Tomorrow I will start on Aptasia removal.

Here is a picture of Frankie getting to know our new cleaner shrimp.

Here is a better picture of the sump that I purchased that I converted into an over the tank refugium. This has 2 benefits for our reef tank. It allows a safe place for pod population to grow that will feed our small fish and a separate section to grow macro algae.

I have done a lot of research and the best light cycle for a refugium is 10 on and 2 off. During the 2 hours of darkness if you have an LED light that shines directly into the return line the pods will swim towards the light, thus getting sucked down into the tank. It's a pretty slick and effective method.

Here are a few pictures. This our fish room, which is a very small closet that was converted for an in wall tank.

Well it's been a few days to let the sand settle. We are still in the process of blowing off the gunk on the rocks and will be doing a 50% water change this weekend as well as siphon off all that gunk that has built up from moving the sand around. Our camera doesn't like to take crisp pictures so here are a few pictures of the foam rock wall installed. We did a final check and all the inhabitants are accounted for.

We currently have:

1 - Diamond Goby
1- Neon Dottyback
1- Yellow Tang
1 - Blue Tang
1- Scopas Tang
2- Clown Percs
1- Brittle Starfish
5- Blue Chromis's
2- Peppermint Shrimp
1- Cleaner Shrimp
20- Blue Hermit Crabs
6- Turbo Snails

I had a brief chance to check out the tank this morning. All live stock is accounted for, except our new Scopus Tang and Peppermint shrimp. All the others were swimming around checking out the new aquascaping. Our Goby found a good cave to hide in on the far right. The rock wall turned out great and adds a lot to the look. This weekend I will start on the left hand side back wall and hopefully have it install on Sunday.

The Picture is a bit rough since I took it with my Iphone.

I'll Post some beauty shots with our digital camera tonight.

Our puppies waiting patiently as we started our install this morning

Well it's been several hours and the tank is starting to recover from it's cloudiness, hopeful in a few more hours I can resume aquascaping.