DaJMasta

Wow, great collection, too bad you have to part with it. You did a great job with the pics and numbering too.

I'm interested in the white and gree pipe organ if I can meet you after work (after 5pm) tomorrow.

If so let me know and I'll PM you my contact info.

Other PMs replied to. Bry, I won't be around from 4-10pm or so on tuesday. I have no problem with meeting late or earlier if those are options for you. In the next few days I have a series of rehearsals for commencement in the evenings, then my family is coming to town, so until sunday I don't expect the dinnertime hours to be free. Earlier in the day is fine except for thursday, late at night is always an option (I am a night person and will be up past midnight). The neighborhood isn't bad either.

Then is a whole collection of pictures of the corals. Each coral is numbered and where it is in the pictures is numbered as well. If you want specific history of a coral I know where I got most of them and what they were called (if there's any info) for most. I can also tell you how they've done in my tank relative to other corals I've kept.

The end of the day today is my goal to sell everything to be able to clean out the tank (selling the tank would be great too) as tomorrow I pack the truck and early sunday I drive out. Make me an offer or just stop by and pick things up, if you want to bat cleanup and drop me a line at 7 or 8pm I would be happy to sell you the remainder. Also, cash only and I will not hold unless you arrange a paypal transfer for the items. I will check back on this thread often and PMs are a good way to reach me. I live at 51^st and N Lamar and cannot deliver (no car).

Combos:

All corals and fish: $40

All live rock: $80

24G Setup: $150 (see below for what it includes)

All live stuff: $100

And livestock in the main tank:

4 - Red and yellow scroll coral - $20

6 - Magician zoa frag - $5

15 - Green and Orange Echinata Acan frag - $5

16 - Green and Brown Favia frag - $5

17 - Green (Milie? Prostrata?) Acro frag - $5

20 - Green and Blue Acro mini-frag - $5

21 - Orange Polyp Montipora Digiata larger frag - $5

30 (Not numbered, but center right in the pic in this post) - Green and Red Rhodactis mushrooms - $5

Fish:

Lattice Cardinalfish - $10

Green Banded Goby - $5

Live rock:

All of it - $90 - Everything pictured in the main tank and the 5G tank. Included encrusted goodies include 2 acros, 2 pocilloporas, and some zoas. Also coming with is an emerald crab, the little guy doesn't want to let go, so i'll just let him be if the next tank will support it.

Equipment:

24G JBJ Nano Cube with no hood, stand, JBJ Nano Glo light, MaxiJet 900, JBJ surface skimmer - $150

Pics of what remains:

Corals:

Goby:

24G live rock and setup:

Additional bucket-o-live rock:

It needs to go as I don't have a home for it when the tank is taken down. Just come get it, if you're willing to take all the live stuff I'll knock $20 off the total.

There's also one from me....

The frag tank is the one maybe half the height on the shorter stand in the pics? If so I would be interested in the frag tank alone... would you sell it, what would it come with, and how much?

+1 to ballast problems - especially if there is some sort of audible noise or slight flicker when some bulbs don't light properly. If it is the ballast, the solution is to replace it. Not really easy or too safe to go messing with it on your own.

If they went through the trouble of center bracing it, they're probably using thinner glass on the side panels and taking it out would compromise structural integrity.

Can you measure your magnesium? In my experience 680ppm of CA and 7dKH of alkalinity would be snowing right now. If your magnesium is like 1800 ppm then maybe it could manage....

You mean on an established tank?

I'm pretty sure that the nature of bacterial reproduction makes any form of dosing (of the bacteria) essentially moot. So long as the conditions in the aquarium allow them to survive and they are introduced (seeding with live rock, ammonia from decaying food, a bacterial starter, etc), they will be able to multiply and spread quickly and without anyone's help.

Carbon dosing and some others do rely on bacteria to make them work - they essentially support a larger number in the tank than would be present under normal conditions... they do reproduce and not at a slow rate... so dosing more bacteria should be entirely unnecessary.

+1 to flow and CUC if you want it gone. It won't be a problem in the long term.

I've heard people mention moonlights are useful because they help stimulate breeding cycles... but in a home aquarium I doubt there's much difference with or without. Having some lights on after dark is really just so you can see things., and with LEDs, if they're too high power they could break the proper day/night cycle for some corals.

If the TDS of your RO water is zero or near zero, pH of the filtered water is relatively unimportant. Mix the salt, bring it to 1.026 and check your pH. Due to the buffers in the salt mix, it will be near the 8.1-8.5 you'd like to see.

This (though I run 1.024 ). After some looking around online, RO/DI is neutral in pH (7), but because it is largely devoid of the ions used to measure pH, the meters don't necessarily read it correctly.

Just remember that 1 inch under means about an inch of your display tank WILL end up in the sump in the event of an outage - so be sure the sump has enough capacity. I prefer a pair of small holes near the water line. That way if one clogs (algae, snails, etc) you're still good and not too much of the display is siphoned into the sump.

If you use a rigid container and tube, you can use a gravity feed ATO which stops and starts itself because of the way air and water pressure work. Look up pet water bottle ATO or something similar - basically you have a rigid reservoir and feed tube above the tank and the tube meets the water where you want the level to be. When the water level drops, the water from the reservoir pours in, when it is high enough it stops automatically.

The only disadvantage is that because of the rigid and airtight requirement for the reservoir and tubing, the size is usually pretty limited.

Honestly running a pump from a reservoir on the ground is a pretty simple way to do it. Requires power and some equipment, but unless you're running a gravity feed ATO into your sump it's annoying and unsightly to have it above your display in most cases.

On that page click the tab that says impatient...to much for me to summarize quickly

That just gives you the link to the main page, which is not functional.

I think part of the reason people keep tanks at lower temps is to prevent things like power outages from being as immediate problems in terms of tank temperatures and because a lot of critters we keep are used to deeper depths which are cooler in the wild. Really unless you're specifically aiming for a biotope and have done your research, you're going to have species ranging from a bunch of different temperature areas under the umbrella of tropical water temperatures. There will be some creatures from the shallows where it's warmer, some from the deep where it's cooler, some from farther from the equator or in a normally towards-equator current that are used to cooler temps, and so on. The important thing is that there is always some fluctuation in temperatures so they should be fine in a decent range, but knowing approximate limits of what can be tolerated, I would keep it a degree or two on the cool side - I usually aim for 78F. Basically, if equipment fails (chiller, AC, whatever), here in Austin the odds are the temp will start to rise, and it seems like the critters we keep are more sensitive to high temperatures (like 82-83 for long term and 85+ for extremely short term) than they are to a few degree colder ones (after all, they're usually fine after airmail transit). I think this is because in the wild the water temperatures really never get past the low 80s, but with cooler currents and winter months, they get down easily to the mid 70s or below.

It's less of a concern for people with large tanks - at least in terms of the power outage thing.

The two problems I've thought the Marineland lights had were that there isn't nearly enough blue to use them without supplements, and that by only using 1W lights, they don't penetrate to the same depths, don't crank out the same PAR, and aren't quite as efficient as their higher power counterparts.

For softies and LPS it's probably fine, but in terms of PAR (given that the supplemental lights haven't changed), the LEDs alone are probably putting out 1/5-1/6th of your 3x400W MH setup.

It's true, but the solana is fairly deep too... so long as the optics aren't too tight you could probably get away with a sol, just don't expect LPS in the top half of the tank. Though, if you've got it set up to be dimmable it could be just fine.

In my experience many low-light corals actually can tolerate a good amount of light if they're acclimated to it or just out of the intense areas. I've had a 150W MH and now 63W of LED over my 24G tank which contains mushrooms, a maze brain, and some lower light zoas and things... but keeping them on or near the sandbed, or just out of the center of the tank or partially shaded by rockwork keeps them happy enough.

FYI, that has been 'coming soon' for quite some time now. 36W of LED over your tank (since it say's it's half a sol) would be enough to meet your requirements, but the SPS and higher light corals would probably have to be under the fixture and closer to the top.

Do the shrimp come out? They can be somewhat wary, but if you can get them out in the open just put the net behind them and your finger in front - their natural reflex is to back up quickly to avoid the finger and into your net. They're also not as quick as fish, so they shoudln't be able to get out before you scoop them up. Works the same way with a cup, but it's riskier because water doesn't flow through it.

I was always under the impression that keyhole limpets were the unsafe ones and if you could avoid that shape of hole in the top of their shell then there was a much better chance of them being safe.

Good luck with the infestation....

Well, I didn't mean that they're cheap and expendable, just that they're fairly hearty and would certainly survive in good health if quarantined in a small space like a 5G bucket for a week.

Parasites don't take over the whole tank, they can enter the water column and stay, but they can only live on their hosts, so they don't infect rock or sandbeds or anything. I don't know the specifics about the eel... looking around the web some people seem to have used it on puffers (also don't have scales) without negative effects. Since they broadly generalize in their advertisement it can treat a lot of things and works in salt and freshwater, I wouldn't be surprised if it works fine.

That said, they're just chromis.... so do you have a 5 gallon bucket and a spare heater and powerhead? You can do a little mini quarantine for the length of the treatment without too much concern I think.

What was your salinity before the water change? 1.021 is a little low, but if you were running 1.025 or higher the sudden change in salinity of the water change could definitely do it. Also was the water you used already heated?

If you have a big loss immediately after a water change, it's usually an indicator of bad water chemistry going in. Occasionally it could be stirring up something or killing something in the cleaning process before the change, and sometimes it's a coincidence.

If I put my hands in my tank and the temp is around 75 it feels cold to me....if its 80 degrees it feels watm to me. I keep my tank at 78 degrees which feels comfortable to me and hopefully this translates to comfort my livestock too. There is certainly no science in that observationn

I notice it the same way 80 and over is noticably too high, below about 77 feels cold.