Dan H

Hey hey hey! No free rides!

That's way more inventive than I could have ever dreamed up. Looks like it works well too.

You'll probably want to change out your carbon when you get home tonight and get some fresh stuff in there to help pull out the ink.

My house will hit 1000 when I have people over or sometimes when we just don't go outside all weekend. Also, since the tank has an exhaust fan, it's pushing out air from the house which will pull in air through cracks and seams elsewhere. So I'm sure that's helping keep the CO2 down some.

I've seen inconsistencies in the pH, but there are so many factors that affect it that I'm not always sure what is the cause. I have noticed that pulling outside air for the skimmer definitely raised the pH overall - both the upper limit and lower limit. So that would suggest the opposite of what you're seeing. I recently added CO2 scrubber to the air intake for the skimmer as well, and that brought it up even further. On my tank, the 3 biggest influencers of pH are the skimmer, the lighting, and the ambient CO2 levels. Obviously when the lights are on, CO2 is being consumed by the photosynthetic creatures so the pH goes up. If the skimmer isn't working efficiently, the pH goes down - sometimes a LOT. If the CO2 in the house goes above 1000ppm for a while, then sometimes the tank's pH will start to go down. Interestingly if you are seeing the pH go down when the pump is on, then perhaps it's getting stale air? Is it well ventilated where the pump it? Here's my charts.

This is just a theory, but I saw similar things too when experimenting. I only got good results when the skimmer was pulling in the fresh air. I suspect this may be because of the contact time with water, the skimmer producing microbubbles so dramatically more surface area for air/water contact, and volume - the skimmer is holding close to 1 cubic foot of water/air vs a tiny column of air from the air stone.

Beautiful pictures!

I like the optimism. That'll be some amazing SPS when it's filled in.

Ha! That's $15 of calcium reactor media...

I had to dose my Mg up using Magnesium Chloride - in quite massive quantities I might add. Only after I got the Mg back up to a good level was my reactor able to maintain it (after adding the NeoMag). NeoMag says to use a 9-1 ratio or so, I'm using more like 5-1. My corals consume the heck outta Mg!

Get some Trochus. By far my favorite snails. Fast, sturdy, eat a lot, and can upright themselves. Plus added bonus, they don't get all huge and start knocking stuff over. Frankly a good mix is ideal so they all can do different things and provide a variety of services.

Bout time! Looking great!

I don't think it's going after your nassarius... Looks like pretty normal conch behavior to me. Ours will jump when they need to, nothing unusual there. I will say that is a pretty big one though. Depending on what other snails you have, it could starve.

For me, the only red flag is the Mg is too low. I'd dose that up and see if it helps. Some of my corals start bleaching when my Mag is low so that's a possibility.

I definitely can tell when it's cold outside and the skimmer is sucking in cold air, but it's nothing the heaters can't deal with. I haven't had the outside line plumbed when it's been really hot yet so the verdict is still out on that but I don't think it will be that big a deal.

Awesome. Sounds like everything is heading in the right direction.

I swear sometimes you just feel like the tank is doing better / worse. What types of algae are you seeing?

I ran ours from the start. I have no idea if that was good or bad but we never had any phosphates which is good.

Amazing wiring - makes me think of server-room art.

I love lemonpeels! Such a bright little spark in the tank. Glad to hear it's eating now.

Amen. I wish I had done a GFCI circuit breaker instead of GFCI outlet.

It may be too late for this, but if the overflows are loud, you may want to Google Herbie overflows and Bean Animal. Both are dead silent.

I've got about 30' of RODI line and a salt hose running outside of my house under my deck. It's bundled with a pipe heater and wrapped in duct tape. I'll let you know if the rats think it's tasty, but I suspect they won't like it. So far they don't seem to notice. I'd suggest that having the line in the attic will more than justify the potential risk. Not having to worry about hauling buckets, and being able to do a simple water change in under 10 minutes really improves life. Plus when it's stupid simple to do a WC, you're more likely to do it and your tank will likely be healthier.

Wow... That's going to be amazing. Congratulations!

Yeah, I just ordered 2 of those Icecap batteries as well. Supposedly they give up to 35 hours of runtime - I'm skeptical but we'll see... I think I will have 1 per gyre, but then if/when the power goes out, I can check what the ETA is from Austin Energy and if it's really bad, daisy chain them to 1 pump. So far all of my power outages in the 8+ years at my house have all been shorter than 12 hours. I would suspect that a really bad one here would be bad enough that I'll need to fire up the generator anyways.