Timfish

That was an eye opener! I was expecting to see something around 20% difference from "advertised" flow.

I'm reading your post as your chiller is turning on and off or cycling between 5 and 10 times an hour. If this is so that strikes me as quite a bit. If I should have read it as running 5 - 10 minutes an hour that's probably still a little frequent but not necessarily so. The chillers I've worked with have had a 2 degree difference in set points also and typically will only cycle every couple of hours with T5s in a closed hood, this is partly a function of the size of the chiller to the tank. I've always tried to size a chiller to give a 20 degree pull down below ambient temp. on a given tank size. If your chiller is inside a closed cabinet make sure it's well ventilated or your chiller is working against itself.

I keep a canister filter around in case I need to run carbon in an emergency. Even though some people like them I haven't met an O-ring yet on one that wouldn't leak. If you do use one keep some silicone grease on hand and clean & lube the O-rings whenever you clean or open it.

I much prefer to run lights continuously but on a few tanks have run them on a split schedule with no apparent problems. I would only do one change at a time, wait till your corals have adjusted to the 400W before playing around with a split schedule.

Shrimpy crunchy thingies, MMMMM

jbharlan91, welcome to the addiction and good point, like most municipalities Austin uses chloramines in the water. The carbon filter on a R.O. unit or dechlorinator will deal with the chlorine. Both will leave ammonia in the tap water. If you test it when you do a water change you'll see the ammonia is consumed by the animals in just a few hours. You'll hear people talk about Total Dissolved Solids, TDS. Here in central Texas calcium and magnesium carbonate are the main components and most of the others are also found in salt water so while people will say it needs to be removed it clearly isn't neccessary. I'm using R.O./D.I., R.O. and tap water in different tanks and can't say that one is better than another and obviously corals can be kept for a long time with tap water. I'd say consistant husbandry techniques are more critical.

If it's open and waggly that's good. Can you tell if the skeleton on that polyp is separate from the rest? This would be the best indicator of a polyp ball.

Sorry to hear about your loss! Not to be the bearer of more bad news but I'd be expecting some kind of algae bloom in the next week or so and would encourage you to start looking at how to deal with it.

+1 I'm definitely in the scavenger camp on this one. GARF swears there are species which eat SPS and there might be but I haven't seen it. I also have both the white and grey in the same tank and think it's just variable coloration. If they bother you just syphon them off when you do water changes.

If it's just one lobe that's sagging it might be a polyp ball forming, I see this regularly in frogspawn. Frequently as candycanes grow the tissue between the polyps seperates and this might be happening. I would be worried something else is going on though. You definitely need to keep an eye out for any kind of necrosis (brown, black or white slime).

I'd use 1/4" but you could probably get by with 1/8" for the dividers. If you're building the tank itself use 1/4" for the tank.

I'd really like to see pics of your tank. This is what I learned by trial and error many years ago, a minimalist approach is less likely to get in the way of mother nature. Can't say I'd stop doing water changes though.

Add another vote for the six-line.

All corals appear to produce allelopathic compounds. The diterpenoids in some Sinularia sp. are being researched as growth inhibitors in tumors. Even though it sometimes seems to be the best explanation for some of the problems we see there's no way to test for it to prove one way or the other. That so many people are successful keeping a wide range of corals together for years shows with proper husbandry techniques it's not an issue.

It's a bristle worm. Definitely don't want to handle them, those bristle along the side break off real easy. Good scavengers and ubiquitous in saltwater aquariums.

Bay (DoMa) I certainly agree a picture can convey a lot more information. Just listing all the corals you have in your tank while it would be an impressively long list does not have the impact of the picture you posted or the video you posted last year. I still think this discussion helps people get some idea of what is a problem in tap water for corals and what is not a problem. Patrick (Subsea) I'm intrigued by the idea of edible seaweed growing in my sump, I'm just wondering if I should tell my friends before or after they've had dinner . It definitely tweeks my curiosity setting up a system that produces fish, corals and seaweed.

As far as UV it's hard to say how it will affect your corals. Some corals produce proteins and pigments that act as UV blockers so they may not be bothered at all but you probably won't know until you try it. As far as the tempered safety glass while it may not be necessary I wouldn't want water splashing directly on a super hot HID bulb and regular glass probably wouldn't stand up to the heat as well.

Most of my corals don't get any extra attention as far as feeding. They will pull ammonia and nitrates from the water to feed their zooanthellae so feeding the fish should take care of most of them. I would say this is something you'll need to experiment with to see what makes 'em happy. The few that do get fed are only fed once or twice a week.

My experience corals will grow over it.

FYI CaribSea's AragaMight in the same product as Purple-Up just in a dry form. AragaMight is what I use on my tanks.

+1, I would reiterate being patient. I've seen green hair algae and other nuisance algae problems clear up on their own without any intervention outside of manual removal during water changes and I've seen tanks all screwed up because too many things were done to fast. Neilson and Fossa i Vol 1 of "The Modern Coral Reef Aquarium" have some good pictures and charts of a big reef system going through it's algae cycles and it looks horrible at first. Definitely keep an eye on your pH, Alk and calcium.

What are the questions you have about one? Here's an elliptical I built in 2004 but it was taken out by the owners in 2009 so they could sell the Condo. Biggest issue was accessability to clean it.

Yes you can but I think there will be more of a guess factor in getting corals that will thrive under just actinics. A lot of corals utilize the red part of the spectrum and may not thrive long term under just blue. This doesn't mean you can't have reds. Corals that are flourescing red will be red under just blue light. Corals that are reflecting red will loose a lot of their color under blue light. This article http://www.advanceda...08/3/aafeature1 is about color and corals and while the first half may not be relevant to your question there are pictures of 11 corals grown under 20,000K MH, 10,000K MH and T5 and the ones that grew best under 20,000K or the ones that did well under all three would be possibilities.

Looking closer at the City of Austin water report ( http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/water/whatsinthewater.htm ) and looking up "Saltwater" on Wikipedia a several contaminants listed are found in saltwater naturally. It may be stuff we don't want to consume but corals are exposed to it all the time. The simple solution for copper and lead is to run your tap a short period before using it. The report left out phosphate and iron which is what I would think people would find issue with. Since iron is so important for chlorophill it doesn't bother me especially after seeing how much is in the mud products for refugiums. Like I said in an earlier post in this thread phosphate levels are much better now than they used to be. To give an idea of how much phosphate is added in tap water and in food I did a small experiment. I took two 1 gal containers and filled each one with 1 gal tap water. In one container I put .5 g pellet food (about 1/8 teaspoon) in the 2nd container I put .5 g frozen krill (slightly less than 2 individual krill) I let both containers set for about 20 hrs. The results were: Tap Water .08 P / .25 PO4 mg/l Pellets .75 mg/l PO4 (.25 from tap, .5 from pellets) Krill 1 mg/l PO4 (.25 from tap, .75 from krill) My Elos test kit only went to .48 PO4 so I used Mercks to test the higher levels in the pellet and krill samples. An interesting follow up to this would be to determine the total amount of phosphate added to a tank during a water change and the total amount of phosphate added for the time period between water changes. As I see it many of the contaminants in tap are things that are bad or distasteful to us not necessarily corals and clearly reef systems can be maintained for years with tap water with little remediation. (and thanks Bay [ Doma ] for almost getting my thread locked )

Well, I actually like having ONE in a tank. They're big (even the small ones) and CLUTZY and people like watching them. From what I've seen they're also decent algae eaters, the claws are used like scrappers. The problem like Mel said is they knock stuff around even rocks several times their size and climb all over corals with complete disregard to what you think. They're also really hardy and will take prolonged baths in strait tap water (forgot one once for over 8 hours and boy was he hacked off ) if you want to make sure you're not introducing something like hydroids into your tank.