FarmerTy

All those years of chopsticks have finally paid off! Lenver, I'm a big fan of the coralife aquatongs. They seem to be the best quality that I have found and can grab medium sized rocks on the sandbed easily. I occasionally use them to grab my 10" clam and move him around if needed. The stand does look great!

I'm not buying a frag until I see a daylight picture and I see some encrusted rubber first.

Ph and temp probe... and yes, I control my lights.

Apex here. Same as above, I couldn't imagine keeping an SPS-dominant tank long-term without a controller of some sort. You can get by for awhile but it only takes one moment to nuke the whole setup.

I aim for 5 polyp minimum. I've just had a long history of them more prone to melting away otherwise.

I think RCA rents out a Par meter. I don't know if they charge for it or if it's for premium members of the club only but I would ask since you're so close to them.

Stand looks great! I want to see a video too! After running at 28" deep tank, I now know this is the deepest I'd ever want!

If it's who I'm thinking of in Dallas, I've had poor success with the chop shop method that he employs. 1-3 polyp frags always die when I used to get it from there.

Hmmm, I've tried with the upmost failure. The link doesn't even take me to the right place to vote.

Fishes are our friends! We don't eat them!

I thought it was highly entertaining to watch... more so than that Cowboys game last night!

Good question! The vision I had was interesting videos concerning your own tank. Something highlighting the corals or fish in your system with a nice creative approach.

If you missed out on the live feed yesterday, here's a video of my clowns spawning by their anemone. Please excuse the photo bombing blonde naso.

I already got Jake to bag up all my frags in champagne flutes, just so I can feel fancy. It's going to be hard to cram a flame angel in one but I have supreme confidence in his bagging ability. I'll also be wearing a tuxedo to commemorate the event (wear tuxedos for no reason... you tell'em Jay-Z).

Spot saved

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Hello fellow reefkeepers, I try not to cram down your throats that I'm a real estate agent too often... I prefer to bombard you with my reefing methodologies and unrequested opinions instead! [emoji6] I will say that switching careers after 10 years in the environmental consulting industry to real estate was a scary venture on my part but having a supportive reefing community made the transition all that much easier. My wife and I are truly thankful for everyone's support on this forum. My fish friends are the best! [emoji3] In hopes of giving back, I thought it would be fun to sponsor a video contest where the winner would be able to choose their favorite charity and I will donate $75 in their name. If we have enough entrants, I may even offer up a 2nd place prize of $50 to their favorite charity as well. To make sure the winner/winners don't come out of it empty-handed, you'll receive a free frag from FarmerTy to thank you for your charitable nature when you pick up your donation check. For contest submissions, let's have all entries be posted by Christmas (12/25/2014) and voting will continue until the end of the year. Let me get with the ARC magic elves that make this forum possible from behind the scenes and we'll have a system in place for submissions and voting. For now, you can PM me a link of your video and it will be posted in the appropriate place once we set it up. Happy recording and editing my fellow reefers! I am very excited to see the creativity that us reefers can manage to pull together. Let's get some funky music in there too and have some fun with this one. [emoji440] -Ty the Real Estate Guy

It's more manly if you shoot your mimosa and then smash the plastic champagne flute against your forehead! Ohhh Game of Thrones... come back to me already! I not afraid to admit that I miss you and love you very much! [emoji7]

I wish there was a way to submit for fun if you've already won for the year. I'm always down for trying to catch an interesting picture. Or maybe we can bump up the game one month and have users submit a video as a contest... make the most artsy video you can of your tank and it's inhabitants.

Depends how low you need to set your pH in the reactor to melt the media Jim. When I was using the large sized ARM media, I ran my pH in the reactor at 6.5 and it usually depressed my pH from 8.2 down to 7.9 for the high reading of the day. When I was maxing out the reactor, I had to run it at 6.2 pH and then depressed it further to 7.8 as a high. Now that I run a larger reactor and use the TLF media instead of the ARM media, I am able to run my reactor at 6.7 and my pH hits a high of 8.1 usually these days. I don't usually worry about the pH of the tank as long as it's within acceptable parameters. I aim for somewhere in between 7.8-8.4. However anecdotal, during my usage of both dosers and a CaRX reactor, I felt that I got better growth via my CaRX. I felt that it added a lot more than just alk or Ca but that many other trace elements and other metals were also being dosed as well. I think I had mentioned when you were at the house Jim that my Mg level actually slowly increased over the 3 years of no water changes. Maybe that's part of the reason I didn't have any ill effects while basically running the same water for 3 years. I wonder if that would have played out the same if I had used 2-part dosing instead? To be fair, I only used the 2-part for 5-6 months before switching to a CaRX.

Right behind me and my mimosa. [emoji23]

No problem Jim! Thanks for letting me use your Red Sea kit to doublecheck myself. It's always fun to dive back into the science every once in awhile instead of just taking things for granted.

In other news, finally got around to installing that autofeeder I bought a year ago. Since it was just dropping the food on the surface where it immediately floated into my overflows, I put together a nifty little contraption made of the top of a water bottle, a seaweed clip, and generous amounts of super glue. The Mcguyver skills are strong with this one. I couldn't figure out a way to get a paperclip in there or duct tape but he'd be proud of the final product either way. You can see the pellets sitting there at the surface and soaking up the water first and then sinking so that the fish can feed. Fish population approved! I put in a mix of AlgaeMax pellets, NLS pellets, and Hikari seaweed extreme pellets for their feasting. The feeder turns on at 5pm, 8pm, and 11pm and does two rotations during each interval. I've just officially put myself out of a job... but at least I can still earn some keep cleaning the glass and emptying the skimmer cup. [emoji16]

Alright, back to the boring, old regularly scheduled programming... nothing left to see here folks. For those that missed it, here's a video.

I just plugged it into your formula sir. Sorry, did I calculate wrong? I blame my clownfish mating if that's the case.