Achilles Tang

Strange... could someone have used his account when he didn't log out in the office and type the message? We wouldn't know... let's wait for his reply!

Ahem. Guys, please know your limits. I will not and cannot stop people from sharing their experiences. Or even their point of views. SRC is not a communist state. However, if you have experiences to share, please back it up truthfully and daringly because if the owner of the LFS wish to take issue with you, you ought to be man enough to stand by every word you say. Yet even in a court of law, you have to be proven guilty before you are sentenced. Remember, the terms and conditions for use of the SRC forums... I am not liable for your personal views and opinions. If you wish to openly criticise any LFS, then prepared to be identified and be contactable... if you wish to remain behind a nick, then please be sensible and censor yourself or use very vague descriptions, so its everyone's guess. I trust everyone here is mature enough. AT

Hi and welcome to SRC! Hope you have taken some time to surf this forum because these questions have been asked to death already many times. I will give u some simple answers: 1. The redness on the rocks is coralline algae. 2. You can manually scrub or pluck off the green macroalgae. 3. Some of the hitchhikers on LR can be helpful. Best to read up about them before deciding what to get rid of and what to keep.

Moving out to the proper forum.

CMY, I went through the tank immaturity phase... through diatoms, to cyano, to dinoflagellates to hair algae and am confident to say that its all over now.... having upgraded my skimmer helped a fair bit. I can overfeed my tank the same way I overfed my tank a year ago and not experience any outbreak of cyano like before.... which is extremely pleasing the least to say! Nuisance algae is more of an aesthetic problem rather than something that will hurt your tank... so be patient and let your biological filtration mature (if you set it up right in the first place or it'll never happen!) and invest in a good skimmer and one day, your tank will not go through a nuisance microalgae phase again once it matures unless you allow dissolved organics or phosphates to build up to a very high level. Flipper, good skimmers are usually relative to the size of the price tag. Take a look at those which are $500 and above.... like H&S, Deltec and Schuran, all German. Or beckett skimmers which produce awesome foam but are expensive to run. The cheaper Taiwanese or Chinese brands are not as well-designed or efficient... and the saying: "You get what you pay for" is especially through for skimmers.

Hmmm.... your MH reflector's design is extremely bad. There is no maximising of the reflective surface... its like a box where the light will bump into the each other and not go down. Only the bottom of the bulb will beam straight down. Best to get a spiderlight reflector design or you'll really be wasting light! My 2 cents. AT

Well done! Our youngest SPS reefer! 400w 6500k alone? You have to add some blue bulbs to counter the strong yellow-green of the sakis. That should give you a pleasing whiter look. How are you keeping up with the calcium uptake?

Purple queen anthias, beautiful fishes.... extremely high chance you won't see them survive for more than 2 weeks. 3 weeks at the most. Not recommended for marine tanks as even advanced aquarists will find it hard to feed them continuously throughout the day with enough food that they LIKE without crashing their tanks due to overfeeding and overloading their filtration system. Even if you do all that, that is no guarantee because they are extremely fickle fishes and will choose to starve to death rather than eat whatever you throw at them. They feed on zooplankton in the wild. Better left in the sea.

Nuisance microalgae will stay in most tanks until the filtration system matures around the 10th month to 1 year mark. That is because most of the nitrates, phosphates etc will not be processed quickly enough by natural biological filtration and will be fuel for cyano, dinoflagellates and diatoms unless your equipment & usage of chemical filtration can process/export them fast enough. That is why a very very good skimmer is recommended as an investment because it is able to export out dissolved organics before they have a chance to break down. Usage of high quality absorbents like Rowaphos, polyfilters and GAC will also help. If not, water changes may help to export out the bad stuff. The key to understanding how to control nuisance algae lies in dealing with their 'fuel' first before they have a chance to take hold and overwhelm the tank. Reduce reduce reduce.... export export export! = Do not overfeed, do not overstock.... skim, waterchange, use absorbents.

Interesting... how much did it cost you to build this unit and the time to shop for the parts? I heard the TUBBY unit by Cookiemunster was discussed amongst a few of you DIYers before he decided to commercialize it with a few more improvements regarding not just cosmetic but safety features. I understand his unit has much more thought placed for the reefer's safety and he has spent a lot of time sourcing for quality parts and have them manufactured to lower the cost. Surprisingly, his profit margin is extremely low and is thus an affordable yet quality product which impresses me. As he is a sponsor of this site, I hope that those without the technical, handicrafting and electrical knowledge and skills or the lack of time and money to experiment to build your own top up unit, to support the TUBBY product instead. AT

So far the only thing that may represent a threat to my TUBBY float switches is the polyfilter pad that floats on my water surface of my sump's last compartment. Having two float switches placed at both ends of my sump has prevented the accidental triggering of the topup pump due to the floating polyfilter pad being stuck next to it.

Don't hijack Danano's thread or I'll have to delete the offtopic posts. Go and setup another thread to discuss T5 lightings & SPS corals. What dispar said is true.. having 1000w of MH lighting doesn't mean your corals will do great... its having stable and optimal water parameters, lighting is just another important and NOT the MOST important factor.

Turn white, melt and die. Releases toxins into the water.

Goodness sake, don't use rice vinegar!!! You want white vinegar because of its acidic content, rice vinegar has a lot of extra organic ingredients in it like fish sauce etc depending on brands!!! Unless you intend to turn your tank into steamboat dish, please avoid rice vinegar! White vinegar is artificial vinegar with 4% - 5% acetic acid and the rest is just water. Saturated kalkpaste works better as a aiptasia killer.

You're welcome! Morgan, cookiemunster, bawater and marinebetta were there as well! Too bad we couldn't meet up and say hi... at least, we met your missus! AT

Its toxic to fish. They won't eat it. So far the only creature I know that will eat it is the lettuce nudibranch. Had one before that wiped out my turtleweed. Anyway, from my experience, these kind of macroalgae's beautiful but will ultimately crash somehow.

Red Clown with no tail? You mean the deformed True Percula?

I said: Cool show... enjoyed it except for the ending... hehehe... no spoilers from me... go catch it. From that moment onwards... it was pure crap... I didn't lie... You believed in my story-telling despite of this... who's the gabra goblin?

Torch coral.

Very very tiny snails. Seriously, how different are you expecting them to look like?

I beg harder to differ. Once you dial it in and tuned it to supply the right amounts of cal and alk, what 's so difficult to dose except ensuring that your CO2 bottle is filled once a year and your calcium media is changed out once a year too? I don't see any diff with dosing a two-part and dosing calc chloride and an alk supplement. Both means manual labour on a daily basis (for hard corals tank).

Well... so ends the liarlogy... damn fuel... oh well.. it was fun while it lasted.

Read this.

A calcium reactor is the best & easiest method to deliver calcium. Drawback is the high cost of the equipment (but still cheaper & much less work than dosing calcium chloride manually & daily). Also tends to lower PH in the tank. A kalkreactor is supplementary and does a ample job for a softy only tank... but cannot be relied on to supply a hard coral tank with enough calcium long term. Raises PH in the tank. Works with a water topup system like the TUBBY to make sure your salinity levels stay the same while dosing kalkwasser at the same time. Main drawback is that little kalk is dosed unless you speed up water evaporation. I use both of them simultaneously to take advantage of their strengths.

Looks like Darth Vader when he was slimmer.