About a year ago I moved houses and upgraded from my 55 with a 40 gallon sump to a 125 display with a pair of 40 gallon breeders as sumps. I don't know if it was the new water (VERY industrial area here) or the tank (which I scrubbed out well but had clearly had snakes of some kind in it) or the salt (instant ocean with extra calcium) or what, but this tank has just never done well. Also with school work it has been BADLY neglected lately, the scrubber hasn't been growing much and I have been getting a little more algae lately, then suddenly over about a week I had a huge bryopsis bloom which basically tried to smother everything. Well after digging around a bit turns out I am a fricking moron. Some months back I meant to turn the scrubber/sump lighting to 5 on 1 off and managed to get it backwards, so my scrubber has been only running 4 hours a day...... Anyway, I decided to upgrade my sump lighting to help my scrubber out in addition to manually cleaning out some of the algae. However I am a broke *** college student, so everthing I do is as cheap as possible. This was my previous sump light, made out of left over LEDs and some heat sinks off ebay: I had originally put them together with gorilla glue, which was NOT a good idea. Some time ago I was given a power supply from a broken lab centrifuge: I dug around on ebay and looked for some combo of cheap LED chips that would work with this output of 32v at 3.2A (which is 108.8 watts), I decided 3 50w chips in in parallel driven at 36w each would work out well, if one stopped working the other 2 would only be slightly overdriven, and hopefully I would catch it before they all burned out. I got 2 warm whites and a cool white for $7.41 shipped for all 3: I had originally meant to use these as my FW display light, but honestly that tank is doing amazing with my shitty old rusty overdriven t8 Walmart shop light with my original reef bulbs (a 50/50 and an actinic). So I attached all 3 of the 50w chips to free Intel CPU heatsinks and some free network cable I had (this was all tech shop garbage) and I found a couple pieces of glass sitting out by my apartment dumpster that I cleaned up: and silicone everything together: Then turned it on to let it dry faster: Turns out these LEDs mean business...... Melted this plastic lid through the glass..... Just gotta let it all dry and mount it now.
Ugh! how long has it been like that for? Since you set it up? I remember all the troubles with bubble algae. One suggestion. Instant Ocean Reef Crystals sucks. I've come around to this conclusion. I always though that brown sludge that formed was normal, and that it took all salt a while to mix up clear. Not so. Aquacraft Bio-Sea Marine or Seachem/Aquavitro Salinity is the way to go. More expensive which doesn't help you but a 150g box/bucket mixes to 150 gallons at 1.025 instead of RC which a 200g box mixes to 1.021 or whatever, essentially you have to over-mix it to get to 1.025 and that means your 200g box actually only makes 160 gallons anyways. RC = $55 on a good day at Dr Foster & Smith, Aquacraft is more like $75 retail but when you combine a good scrubber into it and feed a quality food like LRS or a DIY version of that with preservative free ingredients (tri sodium phosphate is hard to get rid of once it's in your tank) then you can probably go down to minimal water changes, like 10% every 2 weeks or maybe even stretch that out further. So it all pays for itself eventually. I think too many people rely on water changes to fix things. That's Paul B's opinion also (the guy with the 40 yr old reef tank on RC/R2R) JMO
I used Kent reef salt before and was quite happy with it, it isnt very clear on this amazon page but this box is $60 shipped and is for 200 gallons: http://www.amazon.com/Kent-Marine-0...UTF8&qid=1437661484&sr=8-4&keywords=kent+reef I only got instant ocean because I was at the limit of my time and money when setting up this tank and the local petsmart had both instant ocean and calcium suppliment on sale for like $30 for both. I either have to get some more Kent and start doing water changes or just start carrying 5 gallon buckets of filtered gulf water home with me each day..... This is all I have fed the tank since november of last year: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M8IIBSU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00 I slice of a 1/4" x 9" strip and feed it to my sailfin tang each morning
When I bought that the add made it sound raw, and I didnt realize it was cooked until I got it. Now they have changed the add and it is quite clear it is roasted. It actually occured to me the other day that lateral line disease in tangs is probably similar to scurvey in humans. Wouldnt surprise me if it was caused by the lack of vitamin C that gets destroyed by heat in processed foods.... Is there any reason to feed tangs raw nori besides the lack of vitamin C in the cooked stuff?
And woukd this be the right stuff? http://www.amazon.com/Raw-Organic-N...=UTF8&qid=1437662818&sr=8-1&keywords=Raw+nori
And it has only been like that for a couple months, the previous tank was the one with bubble algae, and the timing was definately right then.
Yeah that's better. Or get the bulk pack of Two Little Fishies stuff from premium aquatics. 100 sheets http://premiumaquatics.com/products/fishes-seaveggies-green-seaweed-bulk-pack-10.html $38 so same price per sheet and made for your tank. Also I would mix it up and feed frozen also. Find LRS you will be thankful. Really good stuff.
That looks like $38 for 10 sheets..... thats kinda crazy... My damn sailfin tang doesnt seem to recoginize anything but nori strips as food, except I think he ate some male guppies I put in the tank..... He completely ignores flakes and thawed frozen brine/mysis shrimp and even clumps of prawn roe which EVERYTHING else goes crazy for. I cant even get him to eat the hair algae in the tank or even the fresh green ribbon algae out of my scrubber. I guess he is spoiled on Nori.... I guess I should get rid of ol scarface.... If he wasnt in there I could just stop feeding all together.
It's 100 sheets. That's an error on their site. The second zero gets cut off. I've bought these before for DIY food, it's 100 sheets. Look at the description for the purple pack http://premiumaquatics.com/products/fishes-seaveggies-purple-seaweed-bulk-pack-1.html That one says 1 sheet in the title I can guarantee you that your tangs and any other finicky eaters will devour the LRS food. They've managed to get Sea Dragons that are on live food to convert over to LRS in no time. It's by FAR the best food on the market.
Someone at NOAA, where I work part time, said she would like the tang, so I think with him out I will just stop feeding the tank for a while. All that is in there is a damsel, maybe a mandrin goby (havent seen him in a while) and a few guppies in the sump, and they have all been fending for themselves for almost a year.
Sadly I found the mandrin goby: Dont know what caused him to jump, he never even went near the top. This is what the sump light looks like, now time to start a calurpa bed on the right side.
Poor guy, my flame hawkfish also decided to go carpet surfing a couple of weeks ago. That's a long sump! Nice
Its 2 40 gallon breeders I bought on sale at petco for $40 each. I cut the trim off one end of each of them, siliconed the together and drilled 2 large holes through them.
Wish I'd thought of that. I would have skipped the silicone step and just put an additional bulkhead gasket between the 2 faces and one on either side of the glass also, but that works too!
I designed the stand to hold the same footprint in the sump and display, so I had to get the sumps as close together as I could. Even as is, it was a close squeeze. But yea, $80, a half a tube of silicone and 20 minutes work for a 80 gallon sump was about the best deal I could get I think.
I acclimated some guppies and mollies. The guppies have been in my sump for over a week and the mollies went into my display last night. Hopefully they can help with the algae a bit. I am giving the tang away to someone at work, so I am also going to stop feeding the tank. Maybe just a few flakes in the sump to get the guppy population rolling.
God this tank has been a mess since I set it up. Every time I go back and look at pictures of how good my 55 looked I am disappointed in my current tank. All my snails died, most of my corals are dead or doing very poorly, the only thing I can grow is algae it seems like. It is sad that my wifes 0 maintaince 3 gallon desk tank in her office does 100x better than my 205 gallon home reef system..... Cheapie 3 gallon pico setup. A couple weeks ago I bought a thing of algaefix and kent reefsalt: http://www.amazon.com/Kent-Marine-0...qid=1443455683&sr=1-1&keywords=kent+reef+salt http://www.amazon.com/API-Algaefix-Algae-Control-16-Ounce/dp/B003SNDNQ4 Early last week I turned off the return pump and started dosing the crap out of the DT with algaefix, the directions specify 10ml/100 gallons every 3 days, but I was doing that much about 3 times a day. This last weekend I removed as much of the algae as I could easily get to out of the display and changed ~180 (205g system total). It was weird to use 58lbs of salt in one go, but that's what happened. I got rid of my sailfin tang, and am not going to feed the tank anything until this crap gets under control, if it doesn't work I am going to scrap the whole thing and make it my new FW tank and just say screw the reef tank for now.
