90g Reef Tank - Tank Log

 

Date Event Type Notes
10 Sep '10 Dismantle Today I sold the last of the live stock and drained the water.  Tank no more :(.
25 Aug '10 Cleaning Cleaned the BubbleKing skimmer as it was full of silt. Working perfectly now.
3 Jul '10 Cleaning Cleaned both Tunze powerheads as the one stopped working - not sure when.  Once cleaned it is working as a charm.
2 Jul '10 Water change 65l water change
16 May '10 Water Change Another 88l water change.  Mg was at 1500 so it was still too high.  Just proof that water changes do not really accomplish a lot when < 50%.
10 May '10 Water Change Last 65l water change to try and correct for the high Mg levels.
8 May '10 Water Change Another 65l water change.  I see some green colouration in the green star polyps.  No definitive change in the other corals yet.
7 May '10 Water Change Another 65l water change.
5 May '10 Water Change Another 65l water change using the (hopefully) good water.  New water's Mg tested at 1390ppm using Salifert.
4 May '10 Observations

I acquired a Salifert Mg test kit today to compare with my Elos Mg kit.  I tested some water I spared before the water change, from my main tank. Lo and behold - the Mg level according to Salifert is 1575ppm (using extrapolation).  I retested using the Elos kit, and Elos says it is 1300ppm.  The Elos kit has an accuracy of 50ppm, and the Salifert 30ppm.  Worst case this means the Elos detected it as 1325ppm, and the Salifert as 1560ppm.  That is still more than 200ppm out!  This is exactly the reason why my corals bleached - it was not lighting, it was the elevated Mg levels from me dosing Kent Tech-M Magnesium, based off an incorrect test kit reading (Elos Mg) showing Mg as 1200ppm when it was in actual fact closer to 1400ppm.

The Elos kit tested the new D-Deltec ProSalt Plus as 1000ppm Mg at 1.026 strength, while Ca (Salifert) was 460ppm, and Alkalinity (Salifert) was 10 dKH. I will be re-testing Mg using Salifert using the second batch of salt water I am mixing as we speak.
3 May '10 Water Change I did a 65l water change with the new salt, with no additives.
2 May '10 Observations

The new T5's have been over my tank for 2 days now.  I suddenly realised today that I just wasted $670 on lights.  If the lights were the culprit then the polyps would have been closed on the upper parts of the coral.  This is not the case.  However I remembered that 3 years ago I faced the same issue.  Most of my soft coral bleached but all their polyps were fully open.  The culprit?  Kent Tech-M Magnesium.  I dosed my tank 3 years ago raising Mg from 1400ppm to 1740ppm to kill of Bryopsis.  While this did kill off the Bryopsis, it fuelled my pink hair algae and caused most of the softies to bleach.  I managed to reverse this situation in 2007 by doing lots of large water changes.  Since I have started dosing Kent Tech-M Magnesium on the 2nd of April, and on the 2nd my corals were not bleached, but only started after that, I am 99% convinced this is the cause.

So I returned my one bucket of Instant Ocean, and bought a bucket of D-D ProSalt Plus which does not need Mg supplementing.  I will do a couple of 16g water changes and see if this helps.
30 Apr '10 Equipment Five of my corals bleached since I got them.  My water parameters are good, so the only culprit I can think of is light shock.  Since I have no room for maneuvering with my metal halide fixture, I decided to purchase a 6 x 54W T5 fixture.  This fixture allows me to switch on only 2 x 54W tubes, or all 6.  This way I can hopefully control the light better.    
25 Apr '10 Live stock So I went on a small shopping spree.  Got a cleaner shrimp, peppermint shrimp, sea hare, mantis shrimp, colt coral, glove polyps and some xenia.  All these creatures seem to be doing fine.
20 Apr '10? Supplements The tank is at optimum magnesium levels at 1300mg/L, so I stopped dosing.
14 Apr '10 Live stock I acquired a tiny sea cucumber to help clean up the substrate.  This guy dived in to the sand bed as soon as I introduced him to the tank.
10 Apr '10 Live Stock I see my Colt coral is starting to bleach a bit.  No idea why this is happening as the lighting is constant.
2 Apr '10? Supplements Since instant ocean salt seems low in magnesium, I had to start dosing my tank with Kent Tech-M Magnesium.  I started with about 90ml every day.  The current levels is at 1200 mg/L.  Maybe this is why my coralline algae does not grow.
1 Apr '10 Equipment To complete my refugium setup, I added 60lbs of oolite aragonite sand to the refugium for a 5" deep sand bed. Even though I washed the sand, the tank was cloudy for about 6 hours after adding it.  I also replaced the MaxiJet in the sump feeding the two reactors (GAC and RowaPhos) with an Eheim 1048 pump as it is much quieter.  The two reactors are now connected in serial to each other and are fed with one pump.
31 Mar '10 Equipment I received my new refugium today.  It is a custom built 3/8" acrylic tank measuring 15.7" x 13" x 19.6".  The tank stands besides my sump.  I use a MaxiJet to feed it with water from the sump at a very low flow rate, and a bulkhead gravity feeds the return to the sump.  This is a rather fail safe design in that it is impossible to overflow the refugium, except of course if the bulkhead hole is blocked.  I relocated my cheato to this tank and moved the refugium light over to only shine on the refugium and not on the sump.  This added about 50l of water volume to my system.  To make room for this tank I had to relocate the kalkstirrer to inside the sump.  The return pump - the Eheim 1262 - was replaced with a smaller Eheim 1260 pump to reduce the noise level.
29 Mar '10 Maintenance I replaced the RowaPhos with new media (even though my Phosphates tests 0), added some Kalkwasser to my stirrer and cleaned the skimmer cup (which is working great).
29 Mar '10 Behaviour The new corals do not seem very happy.  I am unsure whether it is due to the salinity changes, lighting changes or something else.  The green star polyps have not yet opened up, the Xenia looks droopy, the Zoanthids only have some polyps open and the mushrooms - though not shrivelled - are also not thriving.  I will be monitoring my water parameters closely to see whether it will get better with time.  
29 Mar '10 Death :( So I had my first death today.  The Sea Hare died sometime between yesterday night and this morning.  I removed him from the tank as my Nitrites were quite elevated this morning at 0.025mg/L.  I can only imagine he died due to the difference in salinity between the LFS (1.017!) and my tank (1.026), even though I took 2.5 hours to acclimate him using the drip method, and I know he had been in the LFS tank for at least 3 weeks.   
27 Mar '10 Equipment To have better circulation, I added a second Tunze 6105 pump to the tank.
26 Mar '10 Livestock I decided to add some more corals as my water parameters have been doing quite good, and so too the corals I already have in the tank.  I got some orange mushrooms, two kinds of zoanthids, a tiny Xenia frag and some green star polyps.  I also bought a Sea Hare as I have some macro algae growth, and was hoping to supplement his diet with Nori.  I was however quite disappointed to see the LFS keeps their water at 1.017 and not at 1.025.  This meant a 2.5 hour drip acclimatisation process for each of these animals.
25 Mar '10 Water Change I did my first 17% water change today.  Used 1.030 water to slowly raise the salinity from 1.0245 to 1.0255 in the tank.  I also scrubbed the one live rock outside of the tank to try and help control the Bryopsis.  Currently there is no trace of it but we'll see when it grows back.  I changed the aquascaping a bit as well. Lastly, I have thousands of copepods on my glass walls and on the substrate.  My ocellaris is having an extended meal as he picks off all the copepods from the glass.
21 Mar '10 Behaviour The fire goby has been out of its hiding spot for 2 hours now, and seem to have started feeding on the mysis and nori I added to the tank.
20 Mar '10 Livestock To control filamentous hair algae I acquired a small Foxface, two additional hermits and two Turbo snails.  The fire goby made its first appearance today for a brief moment.
19 Mar '10 Livestock I added two snails, two hermits, one brittle star, one fire shrimp and an Ocellaris clownfish and a Fire Goby.  Fire goby has not come out of its hiding spot yet.
17 Mar '10 Observation Since I installed the canopy fan, my chiller has not turned on once.  Tank temperature never rises above 26.5C.
17 Mar '10 Livestock Just got a bunch of cheato with a lot of life on it (brittle stars, sea stars, pods, tubeworms etc) from a fellow reefer @ Canreef.  Hopefully this will accelerate my refugium and provide a stable live food source for my tank inhabitants. 
16 Mar '10 Equipment To help cool down the inside of the canopy, I installed a small Antec 90mm computer fan.  It seems insignificant but today (which is hotter than yesterday) my temperature is actually dropping and this is not due to the chiller!
16 Mar '10 Algae I have diatoms!  Started to cover live rock and the substrate.  Always a good sign in a new tank.
15 Mar '10 Live Stock Purchased a tiny Banded Coral shrimp, as well as a small Colt coral.  These two creatures are very hardy and since my water parameters have been good for the past 2 weeks, I thought I'd see how they would do.  I know this is rushing things a bit - it has only been 2 weeks since I started, but with good live rock, stable water parameters and good husbandry it should be no problem. 
15 Mar '10 Equipment Acquired a 1/4 HP AquaLogic Cyclone TLC-3 chiller (drop in sump type) 
14 Mar '10 Dosing Started dosing 10ml Kent Liquid Calcium per day to raise my Calcium levels. [BIG MISTAKE!!!]
13 Mar '10 Equipment Purchased a Deltec Kalkstirrer and a Neptune Apex controller with a pH and temperature probe, and one 8 way plug bar.
12 Mar '10 Equipment Connected the Sunpod HQI 1164, 48" 2x250W 14k MH pendant to the canopy.  Heat is quite bad so I will be installing a small computer fan just to circulate the air.
11 Mar '10 Aquascaping I relocated some pieces of the LR so that I have a pleasing AquaScaping.  Since the tank is so small it is hard to come up with something awesome.
4 Mar '10 Stocking Purchased 80lbs of Live Rock, as I couldn't see anything I merely stacked the rocks inside the tank.
3 Mar '10 Build Tank finally filled, water circulating.  No leaks as of yet.  Tank has not fallen through floor (yet).  Tank very cloudy as I did not wash the live sand.
2 Mar '10 Build Started filling tank with water.  Takes soooooo long...
1 Mar '10 Build I started with the plumbing today, so that it can dry out before I add water.  Cleaned the tank and levelled it.
28 Feb '10 Shopping Exactly one day after shopping for my new tank, I bought a 90g AGA tank with all the bells and whistles.  Delivered to my door.
27 Feb '10 Shopping I finally made the decision to start up a tank again.  Went shopping at J&L Aquatics and Ocean Aquatics.  Decided to buy the main system from Ocean Aquatics as I really liked their shop and their staff - especially Wendell who has gone out of his way to support me.

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