DerrickH

thats a good looking clam! I hope to get mine back this weekend. I moved all my corals to a friends QT tank so I could do 7 days of darkness.

The crabs molt is much thicker than a shrimps. I think he molted. I did have a big carpet nem eat one of my emerald crabs though....well and half my hermits. They are ruthless. condy's are die hard. Petco has oodles of them in their tanks, that should tell you how easy they are to keep alive.

I had to post again...that post number was just plain bad luck....

The one in RR off of louis henna has started carrying zoa's n leathers. They had a war coral the other day. They switched all their gravel out to argonite and upped their filtration system from what they said. I still dont see how its going to work till the silicates are out of the substrate and some bacteria is established. Purple tangs seems a bit risky to me. Ive seen a ton of dead naso tangs in their tanks.

they will kill those nice fish for sure

Well I have had the tank blacked out since Friday night last week. Going to peek in there and see if this ocean snot is still flying around on my rock. Ive got my kalk reactor plumbed into my ATO now and picked up some tubing to run my skimmer to the window. Just been too busy

Venting the skimmer to a window is my short term fix, and by all means, the cheapest lol!

I let it level back out and sure enough with the windows closed it dipped into the 7.7 range. This morning was 7.8 and opened up all the windows. The lights have been out for 2 days now(im doing complete black out, corals moved to QT tank with lights). I also opened the doors on the stand and sat down and watched the ph. I watched it for about 5 minutes before I opened the windows then sat down and watched the numbers increase by 1hundredth every 20-30 seconds after opening the windows.....The house is 1yr old and theres not a door that dont seal like a tupperware container. C02 is my problem. The ph jumped to 8.1. Since I want it very high to help fight this dino, I dosed some dkh solution. It jumped to 8.6 over about 20 minutes(again I have no corals in my tank atm). I left and went to the lake. Just got home and its still over 8. I did close the windows but even with them open for a while and since there was no one in the house, it managed to level out. Im going to figure out how to get my skimmer venturi tube vented to outside air without having to "crack" a window. Im thinking a slick little tv cable cover with a hole drilled to the outside and a vent cap with a filter on the cap. Remember, I rent. If I owned the house, I would have an ato line, and a large vent for the stand to outside air...

Corals and fish are considered "fragile".....I dont believe this. I do agree that constant "shifting" of their living area makes them frail and die. However, gradual increase in all the "forbiden" levels of parameters means nothing. They adjust well and learn to adapt to their surroundings. They may change in color, or may not do what you want, but at the end of the day, they survive just like we do. You have to ask yourself, "what do corals eat?"....what makes them tick? Thats when you will be successful. Not what you need to prevent, but what you need to increase. A tank with some nitrates but a low nutrient content can grow some of the best SPS as long as its STABLE. Not a roller coaster. If they are used to NO nitrates then yes at the first sign of them they will appear a lot different and not look so happy. This is not the opportunity to freak out and TINKER/ADJUST everything. Leave it be, let it level out and let them adjust. They will make it just fine. No different than you do when 35 is stand still and your used to rolling 70mph down the corridor. You just learn to deal with it. Or you move north of the weird place....LOL

Well I think I may be on to something. Since I raised my temp on the chiller setting my ph seems to follow the water temp pretty closely as displayed above. Well today I wanted to try something different. I wanted to open all the windows in the house to see if maybe its a C02 problem in the house thats causing my low ph. Well since I was having problems keeping the ph up above 7.8 when my chiller was set to a lower temp, I decided to compound the experiment. Figured since I was having problems with cooler water ph levels, Id open all the windows in the house(actually had my GF do it, Im at work). and then turn the chiller back down to 78 range. Let it run for a few hours and see if there was an immediate difference in ph. The results are below.....think im on to something. At around 11:30 had her open all the windows, and I set chiller back down to 78...Only thing I need to do is duplicate this tomorrow but with lights off as it may just be a repeat due to light timing. Either way I was able to seperate the temp/ph at a controlled time. Going to kill the lights and see what happens.

Shane has some tremendous knowledge and has been very successful with his reefing. In no way am I bashing him or his business. Im sure we could all learn a lot from him. However, like someone else said here, not in so many words, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I like seeing everyone's perspective and learning something from it.

No, he is strongly against anyone that does not do things exactly like he does them. Whatever you do, not ask him about LED lights.

Nothing great happens in this hobby fast. My old tank was "ok" for a while. Always tinkering with it. One day I went home and didnt even look at it. Few weeks later I decided it may need some attention and actually "looked" at it and realized it was better than ever since I had let it stabilize and work its own magic. Out of all the gadgets, chemicals, filtration systems, and tank types, the one thing that will always make them work right is patience. Just happens to be the hardest thing to have when you first start.

Well here is a more direct correlation. Opening up all the windows in the house today and shutting down the AC for about 4-5 hours. Going to see what trend the ph follows after that.

I think being open minded in this hobby and willing to weed through the stubborness to find that gem is worth all the trouble. If your not constantly learning, then you might as well call it quits and tear down the tank as your journey is over.. And yes, as soon as I read 'trashed this site'.... I know exactly who was being spoken of..

So do I for kalk solution. Soda lime is to remove co2 from the air inlet on the skimmer. This will raise ph a lot from what Im reading. Just for *hits and grins, Im going to run an airline from the window close to the tank, and hook it up to the skimmer venturi. See what this does. I wonder what feeding pure O2 to the skimmer venturi would do??? I have a tank full of pure O2 thats regulated....hmmm

Dang, soda lime is expensive lol! $70 for 5g bucket of it!

Im picking up an ATO reservoir this weekend. I have an old calcium reactor that Ive converted to a kalkwasser reactor. Going to put it inline between ATO and float valve. Figure have the reactor pump stir up the solution 2 times a day or so. This should help. Also going to take all my corals out and put them in a QT. Going to black out the tank for a week or so. Hoping this will kill all these dino's. Was looking at getting an ozone setup, but they are a bit too expensive for my taste. My ph has seemed to stabilize after the waterchange but now the dino's are full swing. Also drilled/tapped the bottom of my skimmer cup and put a remote reservoir for skimmer output. Cranked it up and letting it wetskim like crazy. Figure between wet skimming + evap, my ATO should feed a lot of kalk to the sump and that will get the ph up high enough for a while.

My fuge is not reverse lit. My lights are trimmed only to about 6 hours from 12-6.

Heres a couple days tracking temp and ph. Looks like there is deffo some following of ph to temp rise. Lags a little behind but pretty spot on. Water change was the spike in ph around 6:30pm yesterday.

I check both. My dkh is actually measured in meq2 but the test kit I have is vague. Ive scaled it with ph before and they follow dynamically so I know when my ph is low, my dkh is low. If I add buffer e.g. baking soda, my ph rises no problem(higher carbonate hardness). Its fine for about 8hrs then falls again. I did a pretty large water change, 40% or so and my ph has stabilized but is still too low for my liking. Ive calibrated the probe twice so I know its accurate and its right on the money with my redsea kit. I think my water is just too dang soft! When I had RR water, my ph was alway around 8.4-6 using a redsea kit and I never had algae outbreaks. I have had cyano twice since Ive moved to Jarrell and now Im pretty sure I have dino. I need to get the hardness and ph up so I can fight off this dino....

Ok, so what do guys with bare bottom tanks do?

Rock is from prof, dry base rock from old coral reef. Sand is pure argonite. On my old tank I never had a problem keeping ph up. The water in RR was very hard though. The water in Jarrell is nowhere near as hard, and especially after its ran through the softener. My dkh has been very hard to maintain since I moved into this house so only thing I can assume is its the base water. I also changed to RSCP salt. Was using reef crystals before. Texas Nano picked up rock from prof as well and he has no problem with ph. He's using different sand but still argonite based I believe. I run a thin sandbed so dont think it could skew my ph that much.

Well Im sick of dosing dump truck loads of baking soda and pickling lime only to have my ph be low....Im going to try running the softener in bypass, do a 40% water change and monitor the ph over a week and see what happens. Also going to extend my skimmer air line outside of the stand, and maybe install an air stone in the sump or OF box. The only thing that I can think of is C02 is high and no way for me to check it. Moved my chiller, helped but still not good enough, run my skimmer non stop. Plenty of surface aggitation as well. No canopy, open top tank....I shouldnt have such a problem keeping the ph up.

Im renting a house in Jarrell and there is a pretty intricate water softener system in the garage. From what I can tell, the line in from the meter goes to the softener and then out to the rest of the house. Is this normal? Reason I ask is its near impossible to get/keep the ph up on my water. Im lucky to stay at 7.9. If this is normal to have them plumbed this way, Im assuming I could tap into the "in" line on the softener and hook up my RO/DI unit to that. Assuming this would drastically increase the carbonate hardness of the water and buffer my ph. Whats yall's thoughts? Hydro, you have any experience with this in your endeavors? Currently Ive tee'd into my cold line for the washing machine so assuming at minimum, the softener would be ported to this, correct? TIA