A Little Chemistry

I changed 10 gallons of water yesterday (about 33% of the water in the tank) and the chemistry is looking pretty good. It has taken me 3 weeks but I got my SG up from 1.024 to 1.026. I am still working on raising Alkalinity and Calcium using SeaChem Reef Builder and SeaChem Reef Advance Calcium. Once I get the numbers where I want them I bought a two part system: SeaChem Reef Fusion 1 and 2 to maintain these parameters.

• Temp: 78
• SG: 1.026
• Ph:8.2
• Ammonia: 0.0 ppm
• Nitrite: 0.0 ppm
• Nitrate: <5 ppm (close to 0)
• Phosphate: 0.0 ppm
• Calcium: 400 ppm
• Alkalinity: 9 dKH
• Magnesium: 1290ppm
• Iodine: 0.06 mg/L

I bought a SeaChem Iodine test and it's really a tough test to judge because the color is not that stable, so I have very little confidence in it. I order a $40 professional test kit to see how that compares to mine. Although I sent test out last week, so their numbers will be from last Monday and these numbers are from my test last night (Sunday) after my water change. I took a test last Sunday, so my plan is to compare it to that one.

Latest Full Tank Shot

A New Addition...

I added this very cool Long Tentacle Plate Coral. I am hoping the clown fish will call this home. It's actually a bit too big for my tank, but it should have some room to roam around. At least a few inches in any direction.

Added Corals and Fish (Pics!)

On Saturday (3/13/2010), I added two corals. It turns out that each of these corals has other species on their rock, so I ended up with four different species. A week later, the chemistry looked very good, so I added two small clown fish.

Yellow Polyp Coral (Parazoanthus sp.)

Green Polyp Coral (Zoanthus sp.) and Toadstool Leather Coral (Sarcophyton sp.)

Dreaming of a Bigger Tank

While I am waiting for my tank to be ready to handle the load of some corals and fish, I was thinking about where I could put a larger tank. I used Google Sketchup to redesign my family room to support a 150+ gallon tank. I will likely never do this, but it was a good project to help me learn Google Sketchup:

Here is the back wall of my current family room:

Here is it with a built-in 150 gallon tank (63"x24"x24"):

My Leveling Mod

My house is not level. In fact, I have been told the house with move up and down between the dry and wet seasons as the clay soil beneath the house expands and contracts (although I have not lived in the house long enough to confirm this). In an effort to make it easier to level the 600+lb tank in the future, I added Rockler levelers to the bottom of the tank stand. A more detailed write is here. Here are some pics:

Faces of My Tank

I have tried several different reefscapes over the past month, so here are some links:

CURRENT, Version 4.5: Pile of Rock #2:


Version 4.0: (I did not take a picture, but similar to version 4.5. I bought a bigger magnetic glass scraper so I needed to move a rock a little away from the glass but this caused a partial collapse of the structure so I rejiggered it)

Version 3.0: Mounds:


Version 2.0: Cathedral:

Version 1.0, Pile of Rock #1:


I liked The Cathedral the most, but I was unable to reproduce this. I had to take it down because I found a mantis shrimp in on of the rocks so needed to collapse the structure to remove the rock from the tank to remove the mantis shrimp from the rock (more on this in another post). The bottom line is that mantis shrimp are predatory and will kill other animals in the tank, so they can be a problem.

Welcome to My Tank Blog (#2)

I am going to use this blog to document my journey into the art and science of marine reef keeping. Since I was a kid, I have told my self that when I settled down and bought a house that I wanted a salt water aquarium with lot's of cool looking saltwater fish. Well, after a few decades, I finally have settled down and bought a house, so three months after taking ownership, I went out an bought a tank.

The buying decision was complicated as there are a lot of options. The general rule of thumb is that a 40 gallon tank is on the low end of a good beginner tank. Smaller tanks are harder to maintain because they can get out of whack pretty quickly and everything in it can die (the tank "crashes"). It turns out that aquariums are dynamic systems and the key to reef keeping is balancing the various chemical parameters of the tank (e.g., the salt content, calcium, ammonia, etc). This means it is similar to balancing a broom stick on your finger, It requires lots of small constant changes to keep the system balanced; and any lack of attention can quickly escalate into the a complete loss of balance.

I decided on a 34 gallon tank by Red Sea called the Red Sea MAX 130D. While 34g is a little smaller than the recommended minimum, it is a very aesthetically appealing tank and it is more or less complete with everything you need to get started. The reality is that many owners complain about some of the stock equipment, so I did make a few upgrades. Here are my upgrades:

• I upgraded the protein skimmer to a Tunze 9002 because of reports that the stock skimmer was noisy and a bit fickle (the protein skimmer removes Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) from the tank water which will cause problems because its decay produces toxins and the decay process removes oxygen that the animals need to use to respirate).
• I also purchased the inTank Media Basket to hold the mechanical and chemical filter media. This makes access to the filtration items much easier.
• I purchased Purigen as a synthetic chemical filter to remove nitrogenous waste
• And Chemi-Pure Elite as an activated carbon filter to remove ionic organics and other ionic impurities

I also added levelers to the bottom of the stand, but more on this in another post. Here is the tank waiting to be setup with sand, rock, and water.

NOTE: I moved my blog from it's old location to here because of spam issues.