KimP

Awesome! Looks like things are doing better and those are some great pics.

Hey, slow down over there Ty! No finishing up your build before me! (It looks really good btw!)

Welcome to the club! I'm about to clean out my 20gal sump and it'll be available for sale. Have you thought about what size you want to fit in the stand?

Victoly mentioned a cbb to me earlier today. My impression is they're really hard to keep alive. Seems like my tank is big enough though. I need to read up on it more. Then there's peppermint shrimp but I swore them off a couple years ago after they started ripping the mouths out of my lps, they sure did the trick though with the aiptasia. Perhaps I'll get some berghia nudis. I appreciate the ideas.

I've had 2 tassled filefish now and both were/are perfect citizens so far. But they also haven't touched the aiptasia. I love filefish in general and would love to try more, just need to figure out which ones are most likely to eat the aiptasia. Which I'm guessing means they'll be the ones most likely to eat coral too.

Have you used a filefish before for aiptasia? If so, what kind? Thanks for the other info too.

I hadn't realized, or maybe remembered, that all your loss was after a tank move. That sucks How long did it take after the transfer to see the corals go downhill? I have a pretty good size red planet colony and a smaller unknown acro. Both look fine but I'm only 4 days in.

Well, all of the contents of the 90g got moved over Saturday. So far everything looks fine, I hope that continues to be the case. I did discover a bunch of aiptasia hiding on my big rock :/ Big bummer about that, it's pretty important in my aquascaping. I'm deciding what to do about that. I've been so busy trying to get things set up I haven't had time to write up a good post. Look forward to an update coming soon!

Welcome to the club!

Awesome! Things look great!

Welcome to the club! You've done a great job with that tank and I look forward to seeing what you do with the new one.

Okay now you have me worried. Did all of you have problems transferring tanks!? Has anyone moved tanks and had it go smoothly?

You guys have great timing! I'm just today getting back to working on the tank. I just unscrewed the back panel on the stand and got it mounted with hidden magnet locks. I didn't think I'd ever need to access this side of the sump, but I've needed to a few times already. Now it's super easy to get full access! That panel comes all the way off. Next I'm mounting the reactors. The tentative plan is to move everything over on Sat. A little nervous about this part.

Neat idea! I like that you can't knock it over, it's so frustrating when that happens. What's it hanging from?

That looks great! Good job.

I'm just catching up with your thread. Great job on the qt tank! Sounds like you're doing better than most with that little hippo. And there's nothing wrong with a starter build, I'm looking forward to following your progress! You snagged an excellent mentor

I do but I'm way south.

That was my thought. I guess I'll have to decide what I can realistically manage. Doesn't actually sound like any more work to maintain, just added cost for another reactor.

I hope not. I painted a few times the inside of my new stand just a few feet away from my tank and nothing seemed to notice. We have good airflow in that part of the house and the a/c was on a lot. That probably helped.

Just curious about how others use gfo and possible ways to reduce stripping the phosphates too fast. Has anyone tried limiting how much is pulled from the water by just reducing water flow through the reactor? I was thinking if I just added a little gfo and kept the flow the same, I'd imagine it'll just pull out a bunch at once until it's full, still removing too much at once. I like Richard's idea of running a few reactors at once, that seems optimal, but I can't manage that level of maintenance right now. So I thought maybe it won't matter how much gfo I have in the reactor if I can control how much gets pulled out by controlling how much water is going through the reactor. Thoughts?

That's awesome! It's always great to have options for fish and coral locally!

Welcome to the club!

Exactly right on the old tank water. Those 2 water changes are all I'm doing. I noticed some minor changes in a couple corals after the second big one. Ran my alk too high on accident from it too. I think bamboo and zip ties are a great idea!

Time for an update. Not much has happened since the last one, but at least I'm getting the cycle started. The sump is full of water with a few loose rocks from the 90g and the display only needs about 2 brute cans full and I'll have it all running. Right now I have a return pump circulating water in the sump and one of my spare back up battery air pumps in the display until it gets filled. That thing has lasted over a week now on just the 2 D batteries in it. I'm impressed! Makes me feel a bit better about vacations, besides the heat of course. So I've ran 2 brute cans full through my 90gal to get some tank water into the new system, and the rest has been freshly mixed saltwater. I don't want to disrupt my 90gal too much. One of the batches of water I made up just using RO water which gave me some ammonia to add. I tested it with 2 ammonia tests and had the Dome test it, and before adding the RO saltwater, the existing water in the sump had 0 ammonia and 0 nitrite. The batch of RO saltwater tested around 0.8ppm ammonia and after adding it to the sump, the sump tested 0.5ppm ammonia. About 24 hrs later it now tests at less than 0.25 but not quite 0 yet. That's okay though, the whole thing isn't even running yet and there's still time. I also made a mock up of the canopy out of cardboard, so that's my next project as the tank cycles. The picture is pretty crude but you can probably get the idea.

Can you lower the salinity a bit? It should be able to hold more oxygen (right?). Lower the temp?