BBMarlin

I think your best bet is trying to find a fixture that is as full spectrum as possible starting with the violet wave length. There are not many out there that I've been able to find that are affordable, over time prices will come down.

This might help you: http://www.advanceda...12/10/aafeature If you don't feel like reading the entire article refer to Figure 4 when researching LED fixtures. I was really surprised to learn how important the "actinic" spectrum is to our corals. This is what you should be looking for in your next LED fixture. -brett

Sweet! Mason helped me move my tank earlier this year, things could not have gone smoother! Great guy, really helped me figure things out when I was just getting started and still remains a good friend. -brett

Your tank looks outstanding and there is nothing in it! Wow.

Cool pics subsea. It's interesting when my LPS get direct sunlight through one of my windows (maybe 20 minutes a day this time of year). My acans and chalice get all excited and inflate/extend their tentacles, neat to see.

looks great!

By aggressive I mean that you should start changing the GFO media more often than the recommended once / month. For me the half recommended dosage and bimonthly schedule worked out. A light just went off in my head one day that perhaps my GFO was becoming exhausted long before I would swap it. As far as the manually removal, what I liked about the smaller hose was that I could, with one hand, hold the hose and pinch off the GHA from the rocks and send it down to my bucket all while not syphoning a ton of water from my display. I would fill a 5G jug weekly with the stuff and call it good enough for that week. If I would not have manually removed what I could get my hand on in the tank I don't think I would be where I am at today, the GHA will not simply disappear on its own nor can a CUC deal with the amount that was growing in my tank. Try the manual removal route, do one side of your tank. Wait a week and see what grows back, if it’s all still growing back keep swapping your GFO and keep changing your water and keep removing it! Good luck. -brett

First off, thank you all for your kind words on my tank. It's been a bit of a journey . I hear you on the GFO thing. I actually took it offline because my Valida started showing burnt tips. I haven't had an Alk spike so I'm wondering if maybe it is because of a nutrient imbalance in the tank. I'm not sure about this, but you can bet I'll keep an eye on everything. I think I'll quote you on this one: "there is more than one way to do this job" I have not tried a turf scrubber. I'll check out this video. I did compare my Hanna tests with API, which 0 and no color. -brett

I thought I would share with everyone my battle and ultimate success against a nasty bout of GHA in my 76G Half Circle Oceanic. First, some pics: here is my tank in April and my tank yesterday (sorry for the crappy photos). 4/7 FTS: 4/7 Left Side: 4/7 Sand bed: 9/3 FTS: 9/3 Left Side: 9/3 Middle: 9/3 Sand bed: Now, let’s talk about how I got where I am today. As any of you know that have dealt with a GHA issue, it’s very frustrating especially when you take care of your tank with good husbandry as I do. I do weekly water changes, I don’t feed a lot and I keep up with media changes (GFO/GAC), water chemistry etc. I am really on top of my tank, so to see my tank get overrun by nuisance algae was a real bummer. I moved into a new home back in early January, up until that point my tank was thriving at my old place for over 2 years. As part of the move I changed my substrate with some crushed aragonite that my buddy had left over from a tank downsize. We moved all rocks (trying to match as best we could the old formation), 50% of the water and probably replaced 70% of the substrate. We got the new tank set up and for about a month it all looked really great! Enter February and BLAM nastiness ensued. I think the new rock scape and “used” substrate had a ton of organic material trapped just waiting to be released into the water column, since the rocks were moved and rearranged this was causing new flow to hit parts of the rock that were hidden from flow before and I think that the substrate that I added was riddled with organics (even though we rinsed thoroughly). Both of these issues were adding loads of phosphate to my tank, but everything was testing at or near 0 according to Hanna. How can Hanna PPB PO4 tell me that I have almost 0 phosphates when my tank looks like a green hair monster? Well as I learned through this process if you’ve got an algae issue, your P04 will almost always test near 0 because the algae is eating it all up. So I really wonder if there is any point of testing for P04 anymore, shouldn’t you just let your tank tell you if there is a problem? Here is a timeline of things that I tried, what ultimately worked and what didn’t. You can see I’m heavy on SPS and removing the rocks and scrubbing them (I don’t think this would have worked anyway in my case) was not an option due to the large size of some of my colonies. We are looking at almost 7 months of trial and error, as everyone always says “nothing good happens quickly in a reef tank”, patience is key. 2/1/2012 is when everything started going downhill. 2/15/2012 Started upping the volume of my water changes (5G/week -> 20G/week) 3/15/2012 Things keep getting worse 3/20/2012 3 days lights out, magic bullet! NOPE. By the way, anyone that tells you that 3 days of lights out will not harm your coral do not believe them especially if you keep SPS. I lost 2 large colonies due to the 3 days lights out. 4/11/2012 BioPellets added as a magic bullet! NOPE (even after 6 weeks) 4/14/2012 Started dosing Dr. Tims waste away another magic bullet! NOPE 4/30/2012 Upped MG to 2K using Kent Marine Tech M. Maybe I have bryopsis? NOPE 5/1/2012 Added aggressive CUC 5/15/2012 Still no relief, time to change things up. Started manual removal of the algae using ¼” syphon hose. This works wonders if you can’t remove your rocks. 6/1/2012 Started swapping GFO (non-primo version BRS) at a rate of every 2 weeks ½ recommended dosage from BRS. 7/1/2012 The algae that I am removing is not growing back in a week, great news. Progress! 7/27/2012 More CUC added. Things are looking better, I’m making progress now and this is the appropriate time to get a decent CUC going (sea hare, lots of crabs) Lessons learned: If you have a nasty algae problem as I did, you must first get it under control. And by under control I mean that anything that you can manually remove does not grow back in 1 week. How do you get it under control? In most cases you are going to have some sort of phosphate problem to trigger an outbreak such as mine, be aggressive with the GFO and water changes. I saw the biggest improvement when I started swapping my GFO ever 2 weeks and manually removing the algae using the ¼” hose. It was a pain and about tripled my maintenance time that I spent each week, however I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel once I began this regimen. Once you are making progress, this is the time to start thinking about adding a CUC, a CUC will do you no good if your algae problem is out of control. The crew simply cannot keep up. I’ve had the best luck with crabs, I’ve got some snails but the little blue leg guys and emeralds really have made the biggest impact in my tank. Jabba the Hutt (Sea Hare), also was a nice addition to help me clean up my rocks, he’s about finished his job and will be heading back to the Dome soon. You can probably tell from the photos that I still do have a little bit of GHA growing in my tank, which I am OK with. The crabs keep it trimmed and it gives the pods somewhere to hang in my display as I do not have a refugium. What am I doing now: As of last week I’ve taken my GFO offline in hopes that my biopellets will be the only media that I will have to deal with (GAC as needed). Only time will tell if the biopellets will also keep my PO4 in check, based on my reading this should be the case. We will see. Sorry for the long post, this turned out to be somewhat cathartic for me. I hope that my experience will ultimately help someone else that is considering giving up due to the green hair monster. -brett

sweet! I'm thinking about a LED upgrade sometime soon. Already been looking at Apollo from some of the discussion threads here at ARC, thanks for the support!

wow, that's impressive. Do you have any more stats on the system?

This works for me: http://www.marinedep...LC-vi.html and LFS will have it. As Mike said though it will cause harm to coral, although mine always recover.

"After using it I will probly switch back to chem tests for it." Good choice. There is no benefit IMO to the Hanna calcium checker, it's not more accurate and it's not easier than traditional tests. So I must ask, what's the point? I own the checker and have had the same problems that you describe.

I had one test with the CA Checker come out at 420 every test that has followed it blinks 600. I know based on two other tests kits that I have that my CA is somewhere between 420-450. And yes I use RODI water when doing my tests and follow all the instructions. There are some threads on reefcentral talking about ways to improve the results, one being to get an insulin syringe from the drug store and use it to provide a more precise measurement of the .1ml required sample. Personally I'm not willing to spend any more money/time on it to get it to work as advertised.

I own both of these checkers. The ALK checker is very good but I have not had much luck with my Calcium checker. I will be curious to know your results with the calcium checker.