Gone skiing.

Gone to Catamount in NY for skiing.  Hopefully, the tank will be o.k..  Yesterday broke two big colony pieces while cleaning . . . ahh . . . always something.  Glued one back in place though  : )

It's always something.

This I think will be a common title.  Today's "It's Always Something" was my sump pump.  I do not have a sink in the basement so I have a sump pump in a garbage can that I use for waste water, and when I went to drain my water change water from yesterday the sump quit.  It might be repairable, but for 5 years and $140 I just replaced it.  Not counting  drive time since I was in Norwalk to buy snow shoes anyways, it took 25 minutes to disconnect and reconnect the pump mostly because I wasted time trying to improve the connection to the drain line with new parts but ended up using the old parts instead.

On another note I got the red LEDs in today.  The 12 x 12 square seems to put out about the same PAR as a VHO Aquasun only it covers a 12 x 12 area.  If you put 4 of these things together it would be like 6 T5s or 4 T12s in output, but the color is only for a frag system and definitely NOT for viewing.  The spot put out about the same PAR, but over a very narrow circle.  I would say it would be usable to a depth of about 12 inches for a single coral head which is kind of what I plan on trying.  Still haven't figured how I'm gonna rig everything for testing, but we'll see . . .

Also found small bags of live sand at Petco.  Perfect for me when I replace some sand.  I had been buying 20lb bags and using a little at a time, but this is really ideal for what I do.

Checked kalk pH again today and it was 11.9.  Looks like when you put in a large amount and it goes bad, adding more doesn't cut it.  Rather I need to clean it out and start fresh.  Seems I need to do some homework on this.  "It's Always Something"  : )

Time check.

I think I will try to post all the work I do as a check for myself to see what time is really involved.  Just finished 43 minutes cleaning skimmer, 50 gallon water change, replacing broken screws on skimmer, adding 500 ml B-Ionic alk and Ca, and added 100ml of kalk to kalk reactor.  Did an interesting unofficial test.  Checked pH at last kalk reactor refill to be 12.4 and expected it would last a week as I usually add 1 cup of calcium hydroxide which always seemed to me to be excessive but that's the way I wanted it, but the last addition was on the 21st and today the pH is only 11.8 so it didn't even last 4 days!  Wow, what a surprise.  I'll try two cups next week.

Sudden thought . . .

What if you made a tank like the Japanese design with spotlights, but used these new LED spots and simply pointed them from all sides towards the middle.  I'm thinkin' 3 spots per side at $60 a spot . . . thats only $720 for a total LED light system on a  240 gallon tank.  Anyways, just thinking out loud . . .

Ah Hah.

Amazing what one finds online . . . found this right after my last post.  Here's a Japanese tank with a red spotlight!  The website is http://aqua-rei.com/photo and hopefully I won't get in trouble for using the photo : )

Red lights on acros.

I was reading through one of my old coral books:  Aquarium Corals: Selection, Husbandry, and Natural History by Eric Borneman and he talked about corals being damaged by red light so I got worried, but then talking to Jason Edward, the owner of Greenwich Aquaria, in Greenwich, CT he told me that several years back red MY lighting was all the rage in Japan where they used it to great effect.

Does anyone have a link to some pictures or information on red lights over corals?  If you do I hope you'll post a link or some info!

Free frag.

I'm excited by the traffic I'm seeing here, but sad that no one wants to comment so I just thought I'd try a gimmick  . . .

 SO . . . I'm offering a free frag to the first person to post a comment on the blog!  Look through my coral; let me know what you like, and I'll ship you a free frag as a way to say "Thanks" for getting the ball rolling ; )

Red LEDs and stylophora test.

As part of my own experimentation I decided to try an inexpensive LED grow light that has a heavy red tilt on a stylo frag.  Really curious to see if the spectral change from Blue/White makes a difference.  Obviously this is a longer term project, but I'm excited to give it a go.  Question now is what alternate light sources should I run as a control on other frags . . .

Stand by!

Sunshine Systems Glowpanel 45

Brown test.

This coral was spectacular only a few weeks ago, and now that I have a macro to compare my guess is too much light so I'm sticking with raising the lights, plus I took a frag and moved it to a lower light zone.

It's up and running . . .

 I finally seem to be getting this all together.  Today's trouble is a brown coral.  Seems something is wrong because my "Christmas Tree" is losing a lot of it's best colors and I have no idea why.  First was a water change and some carbon, next will be a slight lighting adjustment.  It was coincidental with the addition of the LEDs, but no other coral is showing any change so I'm stumped for the moment.  Unfortunately as with everything else in this hobby I expect it will take weeks to figure out.  Good news is the Echinata is coloring up quickly!



The bigger news is almost tragic. . . I had been up for RC TOTM but because of my stupidity and impatience I lost it.  I posted pictures that were intended for the article on the internet and allowed my tank to be "featured" on another site.  Both actions were a clear violation of the RC TOTM policy, but at the time I thought the posts would be so few and buried that RC wouldn't notice or care and when R2R.com asked me if the could "spotlight" my YouTube video, I totally misinterpreted what that meant.  I thought it meant my video would be used on some thread about video making not that my tank would appear on the banner for Reef2Reef.com.  In hindsight I was woefully naive, but such is life . . . live and learn.

Hopefully, RC will give me a second chance in years to come.

Patience.

Patience is the word of the decade.  Here's a shot of a coral I bought in 2003 and the same coral today.  Took a while to get there, but in the end the results of all that patience show : )

This is another test.

The Coral Gardner

This is a test.  This is only a test . . .