My 75 Gallon Reef build
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jsker
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My Tank Thread
First time seeing you build, and just went through the posts. Very nice DIY work on the project.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
Salt mixing station is slowly but surely taking shape. I have a new respect for plumbers, like wood working... Not my thing. Lol . I am testing as I go. The biggest issue is the threaded fittings. I was running low on Teflon tape so was skimping. My water level indicators are leaking.
I put an elbow and piece of tubing inside the can to act as a siphon.
Here is the salt mixing can.
I put an elbow and piece of tubing inside the can to act as a siphon.
Here is the salt mixing can.
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b4tn
Valuable Member
Been awhile since I added an update. I had a ton of set backs this year and almost lost everything. I was very close to throwing in the towel and calling it quits. Something gave me the urge to give it another go and I have been nursing bubble algae infested bleached coral back to the health. The biggest comeback was my purple stylo colony. It was bleached white with a ping pong ball sized bubble algae cluster right in the middle. You can see in the pic where it was. I picked it all out with tweezers and it has recently started getting its color back. Not 100% but getting there.
OP
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b4tn
Valuable Member
And since this is an ever growing project.. I have now started a reef-pi build to replace my slowly failing RKL. I am getting excited as its getting closer to completion. It will cover all the basics for power control plus dosing and possibly in the future stepper motor control so I can do precision dosing and auto water changes like the DOS.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/another-reef-pi-build.506894/
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/another-reef-pi-build.506894/
Diamond1
Valuable Member
OP
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b4tn
Valuable Member
I have decided to switch gears a little bit and start using this thread as a place to document my progress, lack of progress, and setbacks Even if no one follows along I think I am in this hobby for the long haul so it will give me a place to look back down the road. I am going to start with a quick recap on some of the major issues I have had over the past couple years.
April 2017: I was successfully keeping a very healthy mixed reef dosing BRS 2 part and doing monthly water changes. Corals where growing like crazy under OR T247 lights nutrients where kept in check with a turbo aquatics Algae Scrubber. Reef was controlled with an RKL lite
Parameters:
Salinity 1.026
Alk 8.7-8.9
calc 440-450
Nitrate 0
phosphate 0
Livestock:
One spot foxface
Yellow tang
2 clowns
Yellow coris wrasse
Coral beauty
blue/green chromis
assorted crab free cleanup crew
Milipora
Montipora
Red Dragon acro
Asorted acros
Birdsnest
Acan
Assorted Brains
GSP
Duncan
Lots of zoas
Asorted lepto's
Asorted Stylos
Hollywood stunner
October 2017: After a several year struggle, In a life changing moment, I finally admitted defeat. I had to put my whole life and everything in it on pause and check myself into an alcohol treatment facility. It was all very sudden but worth it in the long run (1 year 3 months and 10 days sober today) but the affect on my reef was near catastrophic. I was away for a month and during my time away my communication with the outside world was completely cut off. Since I am the only one interested in reef keeping at my house no one knew how to do simple tasks like filling up the top off water, turning off pumps at feeding time, how much to feed, etc. While I was gone my son attempted to help by feeding but was way over doing it. The tank was not getting top off water and eventually evaporated to the point that the return pump was running dry. My father in law figured out how to turn off the return pump to stop the noise but the display continued to evaporate and my son continued to feed.
November 2017: Needless to say when I got home I almost threw in the towel. I lost the following:
The majority of my snails
Foxface
both clowns disappeared a month or so after returning
chromis
Tons of coral!!!!
I am very surprised that anything survived at all due to the fact that my salinity was 1.04 in the display due to evaporation but I was able to save all of my LPS, a few SPS I fragged and most zoas didnt seem to care. My 2 hand sized brittle stars survived along with my sea cucumber and my tang and angel fish.
I spent an entire day soaking pumps in vinegar, cleaning GHA from rocks, draining my stagnant sump, and making fresh saltwater to get my parameters back to where they needed to be.
Salinity 1.026
Cal 400
Alk 8.8
Nitrate 0
Phosphate .01-.02
Cleaned Post reef Apocalypse
Jan 2018: Most of my surviving SPS bounced back. I had to frag a few more that where RTN'ing but overall coral was returning slowly but surely. But even doing weekly 10% water changes I am guessing that all the excessive feeding cause the rocks to absorb a ton of excess nutrients and I had a GHA explosion. I was spending hours each week scrubbing it off rocks with a tooth brush only for it to return in full force by the next week.
February 2018: I am a proponent to not using chemicals in your reef that good husbandry and patience will prevail, but after a month of GHA nearly taking over my entire tank I resorted to fluconazole treatment. I had added molley's, turbo snails, and even a sea hare hoping they would help keep it under control but not any of them would touch the stuff and the Sea Hare eventually died one day. So I dosed 7 capsules of fluconazole, removed my scrubber, carbon, and added GFO. I waited for 30 days and the GHA was still spreading, actually increasing so I decided to take a different approach and did a large water change, added carbon back to the reactor along with GFO, and put my Algae scrubber back online. I turned my scrubber light intensity up and increased the light schedule to 20 hours. On top of that I aggressively scrubbed the GHA from the rocks in the display. Just a note that through all of this my Nitrates and phosphates all read 0!
April 2018: Just a side note, at this point I am doing so many water changes so often I was not dosing two part. my levels read April 1st:
1.026
Alk 8.7
Calc 390 ppm
Mg 1400 ppm
N 0
P 0
But.. After months of manual removal all the GHA was gone from the display and grew very well in the scrubber chamber. I finally had won.
August 2018: I cant seem to catch a break lol. Now that I had beat GHA I started seeing green bubbles, then more, then more, next thing I know they where covering everything. Each week doing my 15% water change I was manually removing globs of bubble algae every where!
Once again Nitrates and phosphates read zero, doing regular water changes, levels are solid, algae scrubber is growing tons of GHA, and coral is growing well. Critters are not interested in it and manual removal was getting to be a huge chore. But once a week I was in the tank scraping bubbles off the rocks hoping that frequent water changes would eventually kick it out. No such luck.
November 2018: I broke down and jumped on the vibrant train. I am dosing 7ml every 4 days keeping up with weekly 10% water changes. My water changes where not keeping up with my demand at this point as my corals are growing well and I started dosing reef fusion 1 and 2. It was getting expensive running to Petco every 2 weeks for refils so I bought some more BRS bulk solution and have been dosing the following.
35ml Sodal Ash
28ML calcium chloride
Levels are consistent
1.026
8.4 dkh alk
445 ppm Calc
1350 magnesium
Nitrates 0
Phosphates 0
I did loos my big purple stylo though. Somehow bubble algae grabbed hold int he center of the colony and I could not remove it fast enough. I wish at this point I would have fragged a piece of it but I unfortunately didn't and it eventually died. Probably from me constantly taking it out of the water trying to scrape off the bubbles. At this point you can see the stylo declining. This is after a water change and bubble algae removal session
January 2019 and current!
First off I have fully transitioned to reef-pi as a controller. Its controlling all power, ATO, temp, and lights. I am super excited becuase it works very well and is much easier to use than the RKL.
Secondly, unfortunately I do not have any recent close up pics but will get some soon. I am on dose number 16 of the vibrant and the bubble algae is taking a massive hit. Occasionally the power heads will blow a chunk off the rocks that I could not get to for manual removal and there will be a massive storm of clear dead bubbles. It is rapidly declining and does not spread anymore once removed. My scrubber is also dead now. All GHA that once grew in it has withered away. I ordered another bottle of vibrant since my current 8oz bottle is almost gone. I am hoping that it wont be much longer of treating before all the bubble algae is dead.
One the negative side my corals have all stalled. They are not getting bad but they are not growing. I assume that my nutrients have bottomed out. To battle this I have started double feeding home made fish food and feeding zooplankton twice a week. It was suggested to dose nitrate while treating with vibrant so I dosed 5 ppm which almost instantly doubled the red slime and caused one of my acros to start browning out. I added some GFO and stopped the Nitrate dosing and the coral is recovering. I am just feeding heavy and running a small amount of GFO for now. This was from this weekend the morning after a water change and aggressive vacuuming of the sand. It grows light or no light and covers rocks and zoas. I am positive though once the bubble algae is gone and I stop dosing vibrant I can get it in check. I just need to be patient.
So now that I am all caught up. I will start updating this thread regularly like a journal.
April 2017: I was successfully keeping a very healthy mixed reef dosing BRS 2 part and doing monthly water changes. Corals where growing like crazy under OR T247 lights nutrients where kept in check with a turbo aquatics Algae Scrubber. Reef was controlled with an RKL lite
Parameters:
Salinity 1.026
Alk 8.7-8.9
calc 440-450
Nitrate 0
phosphate 0
Livestock:
One spot foxface
Yellow tang
2 clowns
Yellow coris wrasse
Coral beauty
blue/green chromis
assorted crab free cleanup crew
Milipora
Montipora
Red Dragon acro
Asorted acros
Birdsnest
Acan
Assorted Brains
GSP
Duncan
Lots of zoas
Asorted lepto's
Asorted Stylos
Hollywood stunner
October 2017: After a several year struggle, In a life changing moment, I finally admitted defeat. I had to put my whole life and everything in it on pause and check myself into an alcohol treatment facility. It was all very sudden but worth it in the long run (1 year 3 months and 10 days sober today) but the affect on my reef was near catastrophic. I was away for a month and during my time away my communication with the outside world was completely cut off. Since I am the only one interested in reef keeping at my house no one knew how to do simple tasks like filling up the top off water, turning off pumps at feeding time, how much to feed, etc. While I was gone my son attempted to help by feeding but was way over doing it. The tank was not getting top off water and eventually evaporated to the point that the return pump was running dry. My father in law figured out how to turn off the return pump to stop the noise but the display continued to evaporate and my son continued to feed.
November 2017: Needless to say when I got home I almost threw in the towel. I lost the following:
The majority of my snails
Foxface
both clowns disappeared a month or so after returning
chromis
Tons of coral!!!!
I am very surprised that anything survived at all due to the fact that my salinity was 1.04 in the display due to evaporation but I was able to save all of my LPS, a few SPS I fragged and most zoas didnt seem to care. My 2 hand sized brittle stars survived along with my sea cucumber and my tang and angel fish.
I spent an entire day soaking pumps in vinegar, cleaning GHA from rocks, draining my stagnant sump, and making fresh saltwater to get my parameters back to where they needed to be.
Salinity 1.026
Cal 400
Alk 8.8
Nitrate 0
Phosphate .01-.02
Cleaned Post reef Apocalypse
Jan 2018: Most of my surviving SPS bounced back. I had to frag a few more that where RTN'ing but overall coral was returning slowly but surely. But even doing weekly 10% water changes I am guessing that all the excessive feeding cause the rocks to absorb a ton of excess nutrients and I had a GHA explosion. I was spending hours each week scrubbing it off rocks with a tooth brush only for it to return in full force by the next week.
February 2018: I am a proponent to not using chemicals in your reef that good husbandry and patience will prevail, but after a month of GHA nearly taking over my entire tank I resorted to fluconazole treatment. I had added molley's, turbo snails, and even a sea hare hoping they would help keep it under control but not any of them would touch the stuff and the Sea Hare eventually died one day. So I dosed 7 capsules of fluconazole, removed my scrubber, carbon, and added GFO. I waited for 30 days and the GHA was still spreading, actually increasing so I decided to take a different approach and did a large water change, added carbon back to the reactor along with GFO, and put my Algae scrubber back online. I turned my scrubber light intensity up and increased the light schedule to 20 hours. On top of that I aggressively scrubbed the GHA from the rocks in the display. Just a note that through all of this my Nitrates and phosphates all read 0!
April 2018: Just a side note, at this point I am doing so many water changes so often I was not dosing two part. my levels read April 1st:
1.026
Alk 8.7
Calc 390 ppm
Mg 1400 ppm
N 0
P 0
But.. After months of manual removal all the GHA was gone from the display and grew very well in the scrubber chamber. I finally had won.
August 2018: I cant seem to catch a break lol. Now that I had beat GHA I started seeing green bubbles, then more, then more, next thing I know they where covering everything. Each week doing my 15% water change I was manually removing globs of bubble algae every where!
Once again Nitrates and phosphates read zero, doing regular water changes, levels are solid, algae scrubber is growing tons of GHA, and coral is growing well. Critters are not interested in it and manual removal was getting to be a huge chore. But once a week I was in the tank scraping bubbles off the rocks hoping that frequent water changes would eventually kick it out. No such luck.
November 2018: I broke down and jumped on the vibrant train. I am dosing 7ml every 4 days keeping up with weekly 10% water changes. My water changes where not keeping up with my demand at this point as my corals are growing well and I started dosing reef fusion 1 and 2. It was getting expensive running to Petco every 2 weeks for refils so I bought some more BRS bulk solution and have been dosing the following.
35ml Sodal Ash
28ML calcium chloride
Levels are consistent
1.026
8.4 dkh alk
445 ppm Calc
1350 magnesium
Nitrates 0
Phosphates 0
I did loos my big purple stylo though. Somehow bubble algae grabbed hold int he center of the colony and I could not remove it fast enough. I wish at this point I would have fragged a piece of it but I unfortunately didn't and it eventually died. Probably from me constantly taking it out of the water trying to scrape off the bubbles. At this point you can see the stylo declining. This is after a water change and bubble algae removal session
January 2019 and current!
First off I have fully transitioned to reef-pi as a controller. Its controlling all power, ATO, temp, and lights. I am super excited becuase it works very well and is much easier to use than the RKL.
Secondly, unfortunately I do not have any recent close up pics but will get some soon. I am on dose number 16 of the vibrant and the bubble algae is taking a massive hit. Occasionally the power heads will blow a chunk off the rocks that I could not get to for manual removal and there will be a massive storm of clear dead bubbles. It is rapidly declining and does not spread anymore once removed. My scrubber is also dead now. All GHA that once grew in it has withered away. I ordered another bottle of vibrant since my current 8oz bottle is almost gone. I am hoping that it wont be much longer of treating before all the bubble algae is dead.
One the negative side my corals have all stalled. They are not getting bad but they are not growing. I assume that my nutrients have bottomed out. To battle this I have started double feeding home made fish food and feeding zooplankton twice a week. It was suggested to dose nitrate while treating with vibrant so I dosed 5 ppm which almost instantly doubled the red slime and caused one of my acros to start browning out. I added some GFO and stopped the Nitrate dosing and the coral is recovering. I am just feeding heavy and running a small amount of GFO for now. This was from this weekend the morning after a water change and aggressive vacuuming of the sand. It grows light or no light and covers rocks and zoas. I am positive though once the bubble algae is gone and I stop dosing vibrant I can get it in check. I just need to be patient.
So now that I am all caught up. I will start updating this thread regularly like a journal.
OP
OP
b4tn
Valuable Member
I forgot to add, this past week I picked up a pair of True Percula clowns and a pair of emerald crabs. I really wanted to buy some new coral but I am going to hold off until I get this bubble infestation knocked out.
I feel your pain... went through a partial-crash last year too. Disheartening is putting it mildly. Glad you are hanging in there, looking good!
OP
OP
b4tn
Valuable Member
Thank you both!
I am very pleased with progress tonight. Another bottle of vibrant came in the other day and I’m probably going to start dialing back doses soon. I looked over the tank tonight and the bubble algae is about 95% gone! I don’t know if it’s coincidence or not but every 2 days I have been turning off my skimmer for 4 hours at night and dosing 7ml of seachem zooplankton. The previously pictured red slime is going away and my acro that was starting to turn brown has been getting its green color back. Another Change I recently made is when switching over to reefpi I went from an on/off light schedule to a ramping schedule. On Sunday it will be one week and so far no Ill affect on corals from the change. The drawing below shows the change I made. I will probably rent a par meter in the near future and see if I can go up in intensity.
Tonight’s readings are a bit low but I’m going to be switching over to my reefpi dosers soon so I probably won’t mess with them for now.
Salinity 1.026
Calc 425
Alk 8.3
Mag 1320
I am very pleased with progress tonight. Another bottle of vibrant came in the other day and I’m probably going to start dialing back doses soon. I looked over the tank tonight and the bubble algae is about 95% gone! I don’t know if it’s coincidence or not but every 2 days I have been turning off my skimmer for 4 hours at night and dosing 7ml of seachem zooplankton. The previously pictured red slime is going away and my acro that was starting to turn brown has been getting its green color back. Another Change I recently made is when switching over to reefpi I went from an on/off light schedule to a ramping schedule. On Sunday it will be one week and so far no Ill affect on corals from the change. The drawing below shows the change I made. I will probably rent a par meter in the near future and see if I can go up in intensity.
Tonight’s readings are a bit low but I’m going to be switching over to my reefpi dosers soon so I probably won’t mess with them for now.
Salinity 1.026
Calc 425
Alk 8.3
Mag 1320
OP
OP
b4tn
Valuable Member
Thanks, the patch directly behind the wrasse has been struggling. There was an aptasia growing right in the center of them that I couldn’t kill. I hit it with kalk paste again last week and haven’t seen it but it usually comes back. Even since it has been there those particular zoas have been thining out.
My zoas also migrate. Occasionally a head will separate and blow around the tank until it has a resting spot. I have a couple on opposite side of the tank on the other island that popped up. I have not decided if I am going to let them stay or not.
My zoas also migrate. Occasionally a head will separate and blow around the tank until it has a resting spot. I have a couple on opposite side of the tank on the other island that popped up. I have not decided if I am going to let them stay or not.
OP
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b4tn
Valuable Member
I am pretty happy with my reefpi controller doser. I calibrated it to dose 1ml per second and am dosing 35ml of BRS soda ash and 28ml of BRS calcium chloride spread out through the day. I test right around 7pm when doing all water tests and my levels are holding pretty solid! I did add some magnesium since my last time testing.
Salinity 1.025
CALC 435
Alk 8.4
Mag 1440
Nitrate 0
Phosphate 0-.02 (really hard to tell)
I also put some new additions. I got 3 frags of what I think is red planet Acropora, jack o lantern lepto, Miami chalice, purple hammer, and a rose bubble tip anemone that’s already ticking me off. LOL. It’s a gorgeous nem but prefers to hide in a cave vs be out in the open.
When I first placed it
Hiding
Miami chalice next to one of the acro frags
One of these days I will get a tripod and learn how to better use my camera
Salinity 1.025
CALC 435
Alk 8.4
Mag 1440
Nitrate 0
Phosphate 0-.02 (really hard to tell)
I also put some new additions. I got 3 frags of what I think is red planet Acropora, jack o lantern lepto, Miami chalice, purple hammer, and a rose bubble tip anemone that’s already ticking me off. LOL. It’s a gorgeous nem but prefers to hide in a cave vs be out in the open.
When I first placed it
Hiding
Miami chalice next to one of the acro frags
One of these days I will get a tripod and learn how to better use my camera
OP
OP
b4tn
Valuable Member
@McFly thank for checking in! All the acros have been moved up top and have already started encrusting over the super glue on the base. I am still debating on where to put the low light frags (jack o lantern lepto, and Miami chalice) so they are still sitting in temporary low light areas. The Miami chalice has started encrusting over the the cut edges and growing some new green eyes though. The jack o lantern has not changed much. The Miami chalice frag has probably 20 eyes and is a good 3” so I’m thinking about craving a small piece to put on a magnetic frag plug for the back wall.
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