jestep

That is at the top of hurricane. It's lake como. In 2014 my wife and I spent 2 days in Estes Park, 2 days in Grant and 2 days in Marble. We did the trail through Crystal City to Crested Butte. By way of the "Devil's Punch Bowl". It was a beautiful drive. My wife and I loved Crested Butte.

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Here's a few of ours from the punch bowl:

They had a massive rock slide last spring, so it got a lot gnarlier. It was completely impassable for a while but the forest service and some volunteers got it cleared up enough to get over it.

Last time I was on it, we had to stop a family from Texas ( no offense anyone) down at crystal mill from trying to drive up it in an Excursion. I'm not sure if we succeeded, but hopefully they got stuck or turned around before it got too dangerous. Up until about 6 or 7 years ago, there were still a bunch of jeeps and trucks down in the river. Looks a lot nicer now, but I almost wish they kept them down there as a reminder.

My other hobbies are Jeeping, ham radio and most of all bass fishing. All the super expensive ones. I also enjoy photography, but need lots and lots of help. My old 92 gallon corner tank filled with sps got me very interested in macro photography. Now I have a dslr and need to take lessons.

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Derailing... Do you do any jeeping around here? We left our jeep at our family's house up in Colorado because we never found anywhere nearby to go. Figured there some stuff towards Fredericksburg or Kerrville, but really never had much use for the jeep down here.

I have only been once, but there is an "off road adventure park" in Marble Falls. It's called Hidden Falls. It's a very nice place and the Austin jeep community is always doing things out there. My family vacation most years is a trip to Colorado. Nothing like doing all the jeep trails up in the mountains. We are usually in the Silverton area.

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Nice, is that one at the top of Hurricane?

We're from about 2.5 hours East of Ouray, further from Silverton, but have done a ton in that area, engineer, ophir, imogene, blackbear once (never again under any circumstance ever...), and more East of this area, Crested Butte, Salida, Buena Vista, etc. I think the ones in the San Juans are the best for views by far, even the ones more like dirt roads are just amazing.

My other hobbies are Jeeping, ham radio and most of all bass fishing. All the super expensive ones. I also enjoy photography, but need lots and lots of help. My old 92 gallon corner tank filled with sps got me very interested in macro photography. Now I have a dslr and need to take lessons.

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Derailing... Do you do any jeeping around here? We left our jeep at our family's house up in Colorado because we never found anywhere nearby to go. Figured there some stuff towards Fredericksburg or Kerrville, but really never had much use for the jeep down here.

I know this thread is old and all but forgotten but I'm new and I want to play

My hobbies are photography, making homemade body scrubs, lotions, ect., and baking. I really need to lay off the baking. Noah has gained 20 pounds since April! I love to bake though so to get it out of my system maybe I'll bring something to the meeting (s) if that's OK.

I also love science: Space, ocean (duh), genetics... those are the big ones. Noah and I emerse ourselves in nerd on a daily basis. We love to theorize about time travel, black holes, worm holes, undiscovered life, on and off the planet.

I'm also a huge Trekie, TNG. But I have a great respect for the original series, I just don't watch it as much.

This may bother some of you, but I also love Star Wars

I seriously think I'm the biggest nerd I know, Noah next

I have an 11 year old daughter who somehow enrolled herself in 3 science classes this year, you all definitely sound right up our alley. We're star wars, star trek, firefly, red dwarf, and just about any other sci fi nuts as well.

Wow, just got back from about 6 weeks away from Austin / the US / any communication, and apparently have to catch up here. This is one of if not the most helpful and tolerant web forums I've ever participated in...

Kayaking (w/fishing some of the time), rock climbing, mountain and CX biking, paintball, skiing (snow), golf, working on my house which my family has started to call the farm... Used to play soccer a lot but injuries were starting to catch up and not go away, so currently on hiatus. Also travel a lot, still have family property up in Colorado as well, so try and spend as much time up there as I can.

Here's one I use quite often, if you do water changes just using 5 gallon jugs for makeup, you can just put your jugs in the kitchen sink and run some hot water in the sink to increase the temperature. I can typically increase the temperature in 5 or 6 jugs by 10 degrees in about 10 minutes. Heat transfers very well through the side when it's sitting in hot water. Much, much, faster than combining them all and using an aquarium heater.

Start a new thread here: http://www.austinreefclub.com/forum/166-equipment-discussions/

This one was almost 10 years old.

So tank PH has been fairly consistent. Down to about 7.9 at lowest during the day and 8.04 at night. Pretty good guess Ty.

So far Ca and Alk have been very stable at my current dosing rate, but it's still a short period of time. Ca running at 440ppm and Alk at 8.5 dKh. If I can maintain these without frequently messing around, you can consider me a convert. Will be checking daily for at least the first 2 or 3 weeks though. I'm sure my Ca requirement is going to increase but my 10# tank will last way more than a year at this rate of CO2 dosing.

You can get that range way,way down. They're not too expensive either. 30-40ish.

Separate project, but do you know if they make one that will fit inline on garden hose connections, FGHT -> MGHT? I briefly looked on their site but didn't see any ready to go. Could probably plumb one into a GHT fitting.

Yall need to get yourselves a Dwyer ml/min flow meter instead of this drops per minute madness.

Yeah, I've got the effluent coming out so slowly, it wouldn't matter at this point but will probably get an accurate volumetric meter if I have to increase the flow to a stream.

Here's the guide I went from: http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-05/sh/feature/

I'm running a 6x18" reactor with about 12 lbs of media.

Guide suggested starting at 40 drops per minute and about 10 bpm, so I went for something in that range. 10 bpm was almost impossible to accurately adjust to so I settled slightly higher after many attempts to get it there. Seems like it was either 5 or 20 bpm.

I may be way off on my drip / flow rate then, too early to tell right now but will continue to test and dial it up. My tank's quite a bit smaller than yours as well, so will probably need much less with my current coral.

In that case, I'm betting on a unhappy new year! Please mark me down for January 1st.

Do you run CO2 all night? Also, what drip rate do you run into the tank?

Right now, my bubble rate is about 15 - 20 per minute, and drip rate is about 30 per minute. I may end up swapping out regulators because the needle valve on mine is extremely difficult to accurately adjust in the <30 bpm range.

Reactor PH made it all the way down to 6.22 this morning, tank ph down to 7.95. Not changing anything until I see if my alk / ca is stable at this rate though. Hopefully I need to slightly increase my drip rate because I think it will bring the reactor ph right in range without the controller shutting off CO2 for me.

Current Apex programming:

Fallback OFF

If PhRx > 06.68 Then ON

If PhRx < 06.48 Then OFF

If PhTank < 07.80 Then OFF

Defer 001:00 Then ON

Defer 001:00 Then OFF

Woohoo! Are we taking bets on your final DT pH? I'm going with a high of 8.05 and low of 7.85.

I think a more appropriate bet would be when I screw this up and dissolve half the tank.

And we're off to the races.

Just got this little darwin from AD to pair with my 16+ year female. He instantly started following her and was eating about 15 minutes after being added. Unlike a lot of the recommendations I hear, I try to get fish eating in the first hour after adding them. They seem to settle in much better. He's also pure black, which I hadn't seen in a clownfish this young. They normally start out a chocolate orange color and turn black when they mature.

The initial dialing in is always fun! I hope you have a lot alk reagent laying around Jestep!

FWIW, I recently switched to Reborn media by TLF after 3 years of using ARM media after hearing reports of the ARM media quality going down and some people having problems with it. The big one was hearing that BattleCorals (big time SPS supplier on another forum) switch after having problems with his stock and everything looked better after the switch. The Reborn media looks like dead coral skeleton branches where the large ARM media looked like they harvested and crushed large concretions of aragonite. I'm only 2 months in so I'll let you know how it turns out.

Yeah, I was on the fence between the 2. Saw several older reports of some bad ARM batches. Seems like they may have corrected it. I think they were having some PO4 problems a few years back as well. Hopefully this works out, otherwise will switch to reborn.

Just found these which look perfect for feeding. Was going to run a separate pump but my return uses 3/4 tubing and I hardly think the tank will notice such a small loss in return flow.

Almost everyone is doing a 15% off deal right now. None of them cover higher end brands or ones with MAP pricing, which typically includes neptune, ecotech, digital aquatics, bunch more.

Aqua cave only takes 2 days to ship to Austin for their economy/free shipping. That typically makes it cheaper than Amazon and you still get it in 2 days unlike BRS, DFS, MD, and others.

CO2 filled yesterday, it's going to happen...

You can chelate aluminum with vitamin c. I know there's various methods of dosing vitamin c in reef tanks for a carbon source and other reasons. I wonder if an ancillary effect could be detoxifying aluminium. Long shot on this one.

Possibly bentonite clay which is really good at binding to metals.

There's a bunch of chelating agents that remove aluminium, copper, and other metals, but would take someone with a lot more chemistry knowledge than myself to assess whether any would be effective or if they would cause more harm than good.

Jestep, just a thought I had this morning. How long ago did you add the Cermedia block to your sump?

I've just been reading on other forums lately and there was a correlation of higher aluminum levels in tanks that had one of those blocks. This is assuming that the Triton test is at least able to discern high and low concentrations of Aluminum.

Not everyone who had a block had higher aluminum levels but interestingly, a lot did.

Only reason I mention is because you had an issue with randomly stning corals this past summer even though all your measured parameters were in line. Once I corrected my salinity and lowered my nitrates, I had random STN for awhile too and it only stopped here lately. I wonder if it's time to pull my block.

It was about a year ago exactly when I started using it. I did have alk issues when my dosing pump went ^&*$^%* this past spring though, and I changed lighting this summer, and we moved in July, so I don't think I would want to try and make any definitive statement on what caused the STN. But it's definitely possible. What was weird is that some, not all, of my monti caps and other very forgiving coral were the ones STN'ing. I will do some research on it as well. I'm 100% convinced the large block has de-nitrification ability, so I truly hope that's not the case. I think these blocks are one of the simplest and best ways to remove nitrates I've ever seen. Skimmer stand is a bonus. I wonder if there's an easy way to remove aluminum from the water without stripping everything else out at the same time.

You got a FTS Jestep? I was a big fan of your old tank's minimal aquascaping. Wondering if you employed similar design plans in this tank when you upgraded.

I actually don't have a recent one. There's a huge window opposing the front of the tank, so I have to take one at night with all the lights off to have any chance at a decent one. I more or less set it up exactly the same way after we moved so not a ton has changed. I'll see if I can find some time this weekend to get some updated photos.

Was doing some work in the tank and accidentally obliterated my large hammer. Looks like it was around 80 heads, just guessing.

Pretty crazy how much skeletal growth is on this. Started as a single head about 4 years ago.

Volleyball size:

I'm using the pellets that came with the reactor. I've looked around and can't figure out what, if any, off the shelf brand is the same. Seem to be a little larger than BRS but smaller than the NP XL's.

I would just avoid anything that is a sphere or oval and smooth like the NPX. If they're cylindrical shape, or uneven shaped, they should be fine. If the reactor never shuts off I think it would be less likely to clog as well.

I just have my reactor in the same compartment as my skimmer and it works fine. From what I've read it doesn't matter where they are in relationship to each other as long as there is a skimmer in a tank. I would keep it the way you currently have it.