Kassuns Reef

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