KimP

Wow, those are really good pictures. Your corals are looking great!

Yes, and it's been through some rough transitions and always looks good. Bleached out a bit one time but quickly recovered. It's been pretty bulletproof over the years!

Mine is much happier since I moved it into a really shady spot. Of course that depends on how much light you have in your tank in general, but it's worth a try.

Yeah those pumps don't last too long, especially if you tend to let your top off container run low before refilling and the pump sucks air. Mine just went out actually and I need to replace it. Lucky they aren't too expensive.

If you're ever down south I can give you a big piece of (your old) red planet from my tank.

Those wrasses are gorgeous! I hope that's the end of your losses.

Nice tank. Beautiful fish and corals! Good luck with the not spending money on your tank thing

A couple things have happened with my tank the past few days. I noticed all of a sudden most of my aiptasia are gone!!! Finally! I put in 10 berghia plus eggs quite a while ago and haven't noticed a single missing aiptasia, and hadn't seen the berghia since. I had aiptasia everywhere, tons of tiny ones and many big ones. Now I only have a patch of them right where the flow is the highest coming out of the closed loop. I thought I better try catching some berghia and passing them on before they run out of food. I got a red light, put the fish to sleep early, and turned off the closed loop pump for the night. I still have decent flow from the return pumps. Several times during the night and early morning I sat and looked and looked for some berghia and never saw a single one!! Not sure what to make of it. And I still have the aiptasia in my sump. So I'm wondering if the filefish finally started showing some interest in the aiptasia, or maybe it's just a passing phase like diatoms or gha. Not sure yet. Maybe they don't like the higher light? I haven't seen the filefish picking at any. So I'll keep watching and try to catch something eating them. In the end, it doesn't matter, they're almost gone!! Yay Today Timfish came by and we redid the bottom panel in the canopy. I have a kessil in each corner, then I had the 5th one to the side, in the middle, just past the center brace. Having that one towards the middle made a big shadow. So we made a new bottom and cut that hole further to the side, and made the hole for the 6th one even on the other side. The difference in the tank is amazing! It makes much more of a difference in the tank than I thought it would. I'm thrilled with the result. I was also able to turn the intensity down overall. I will need to move a few corals into shadier areas, but I have tons of shady spots that can use some color. I'm looking forward to being ready for some highter light loving SPS.

Yes, I've learned that lesson. I calibrate before every use now.

I decided to test salinity yesterday and found it close to 40 Oops... I get lazy about testing it with the ATO. I'm pretty impressed with how few corals appear affected by the high salinity and wondering if getting it back down to 35 will help out the acans.

Looking forward to pics!

There are many great, huge aquascaping threads on reef central, if you ever find yourself over there.

I can't give good advice on a length of qt, but I'm sure others will. You'll get advice all over the board on a dsb. I'd think with your first tank it's not worth the risk. Just a good enough coverage of sand to look nice seems like a good decision. Plus your tank isn't all that big, so a 3"+ sand bed would seem like a ton of sand in there.

You can also throw a bag of carbon in your sump or filter sock, if you use those. Doesn't have to be in a reactor.

Nothing for the qt. Carbon would pull out any meds you might add and you usually do plenty of water changes on a qt, so nothing else would get high. For your display I'd consider having a gac/carbon reactor and a gfo reactor later down the road. You can get away with running both in a single reactor but if you have the space and money, it makes more sense to have a dual.

No, your return pump isn't for flow, it's just for turnover in the sump mostly. I'd be looking at power heads in the tank to get the flow you want.

Yikes, sorry to hear they lost that battle! Thanks for the compliments on the tank. I'm really happy with it so far!

I got a picture of the eel. He's been out a lot lately and it's really fun! The hidden cup corals are happy! I've had these since my first saltwater tank at least 5 years ago.

This past week I swapped out the carbon and did another water change. There are more spots with gha growth, so I syphoned that out too. I've slowly gotten everything off the sandbed and into potential permanent spots. It's amazing the difference cleaning up the sandbed can make in the overall appearance of the tank! The damaged corals are looking the same unfortunately, but nothing looks worse except some bleaching on a chalice. The acans are all half pulled into their skeleton, but not any more than they were when I returned. The scoly looks horrible, but still hanging on to the thread of tissue left. Lobo looks the same and that's about it. I guess the zoas/palys are doing better now that I think of it. Not as drab and all opening up. And my blastos haven't been affected at all, they still look fantastic as always. Weird. I'm assuming at this point that whatever happened is just going to take time to heal. I'll be bummed if I can't keep any meaty LPS anymore, that's for sure. My SPS are all doing fine so I'm planning on adding my first pieces in a really long time soon. That's exciting! I have some great spots ready. I just picked up another Kessil (thanks Jimbo!). I know, 6 over this tank seems excessive, but when we compared par values in this tank to what I was getting in the 90gal, 5 actually doesn't quite cut it. 6 should do it! I'll also be able to not run them at 100% for so long during the day, I hope. Plus I'm getting an annoying shadow so adding one more should get rid of that. Soon I'll get this other light hooked up and finally finish staining the stand and canopy. That's been a long time coming and I think we've finally found a great stain match. I'll also be hooking the closed loop DC pump to the apex and playing around with some variable flow throughout the day. Continue with water changes and trying to get the acans back to health too. Finally some pics... The damage I've moved the scoly up to a shady spot on the rock because my wrasses keep getting sand on it. This way it's not having to deal with sediments. If anyone has other ideas to help it along please share. The FTS

Sending pm

Welcome to the club!

Welcome to the club! Your set up is looking great so far.

Well, both lol. They last for a week or more, then go away.

At it again...