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 Water
Treatment (cont.) |
| one
less thing I have to worry about in
terms of maintenance. Another
win-win. Rowaphos is supposedly
good too, just harder to find and a
bit more expensive. |
All
other parameters are about the same
except for Mg, which I'm happy
to say is finally staying above to
1300ppm mark. Still no return
of coralline algae to the tank surfaces
though. If it's not being
consumed, I have no idea why. I'm
no longer going to sweat it though. Everything
else seems okay.
|
| [Update 6/04: For the past
few months there has been a(nother)
movement amongst reefers towards a
new salt: Oceanic. Just about
all who've tried it love it because
it comes much closer to the water parameters
reefkeepers strive to attain right
out of the 'box'. With
Instant Ocean, most of us have to use
additives to get our Alkalinty, Calcium,
and Magnesium up to preferred levels. It
also mixes up faster and is apparently
cheaper. While all this sounds
wonderful, I plan to wait for a few
more months before giving another switch
some serious thought. I'm
sure you understand.] |
| Husbandry & Maintenance Go! |
Not much in the way of change
here except it seemed like there's
been a lot more of both, especially
during the Dec-Jan 'rtn' madness. To
tell you the truth, this facet of
the hobby was really starting to
get me down last winter…not
to mention the wife. I DO recall
reading somewhere about it becoming
more and more difficult to
|
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| maintain
stability in 'mature' reeftanks,
(the so-called Old Tank Syndrome
that got me into so much trouble
last year) but I also remember
reading that occasionally switching
out some live rock, among other
things, really helps in combating
the problem. |
Well, we
switched out a heck of a lot
of live rock last year so I'd
be quite disappointed if 'OTS' was
really what was happening.
Again, as of right now, things
seem pretty stable so we're
back to just routine H&M. Had
one of the wavemaker acuators
develop a small leak last March,
which I can accept considering
it's the first time ever
I've had that happen. Fortunately,
because I'm such a fanatic
about redundancy (having back-up),
we just dug out my spare, made
the switch and got on with
life. Now I'll
get to see how efficiently
the George Fischer company's
service department is.
|
| The
one daunting maintenance chore
ahead of us is a thorough cleaning
of the INSIDE of the acrylic viewing
area…you know, the sanding
and polishing thing. I look
about as forward to this as I do
a colonoscopy. In a tank
this big (and this dirt…um,
mature) this task could take several
days since many passes with various
grades of sandpaper must be made
for proper cleaning and polishing. It's
also a leverage problem since the
tank is far too deep to do this
by hand. So how do we plan
to overcome this little roadblock? Well,
fortunately (for me), one 'ldrhawke' over
on Extremereef.com (www.extremereef.com),
had the exact same |
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