Marine Tank update August 2015 (part 2)

After attending a Wedding 4 hours away from home I decided to look around for a Marine shop. Anytime I go away I usually have a look around as the nearest LFS (Local Fish Store) to me is a 2 hour drive. I found myself in Kettering Aquatics. I was highly impressed by the place, their display tank was amazing to look at and something to aspire to. Their frag/coral tanks looked clean and tidy with a good selection of corals, fish and inverts.

For the last few weeks I’ve been researching new ideas to improve the flow in my tank, there’s 3 options I have narrowed it down to, Maxspect Gyre 130, Vortech MP40 or 2x Jabeo RW8’s. All have their pro’s and con’s however after visiting Kettering Aquatics I managed to narrow it down to either the Gyre which they had running in their display and was the only wave maker in there or the 2x Jabeo RW8’s which they had in many of their frag tanks. The gyre 130 produces a nice wide blanket type wave and has various settings such as pulse and gyre mode, this is a fairly new product which many reefers have ‘upgraded’ to over the vortechs. On the other hand the Jabeo RW8’s are also known for good cheap wave making capability. They don’t look too bad and having 2 allows the controllers to be pair and run in a sync’d mode. Still having a hard time on choosing, will research a bit more before I take the plunge.

While at Kettering Aquatics I made a few new purchases. 3x Green chromis, fighting conch, 5x turbo snails, maxima clam, toadstool softie coral, a few frags of xenia and a collection of sps frags.

I’ve add them all to the tank and so far all look ok, the SPS still looks like its sulking hopefully this will be ok and colour up soon. I have been researching Red Sea Reef Colour ABCD additives which I may give a go to see if it improves the colours.

Finally, I’ve always kept my marine tanks slightly higher temp than the norm due to having high powered lights that output a lot of heat or a hot house. Normal temps are usually 29-30c however I haven’t been that happy with them at that temp so I built a cooling fan which is hooked up to my STC1000 temp controller. The controller currently is set to bring the temp down to 28.5c, which over the next week I will drop it down to 27.5-28c and see if that has any improvement on coral colouration. Will talk more about this next week as a Tip of the Week. Stay tuned.

Test results this week.

CA – 390 (slightly low due to taking Calcium reactor offline to fix a leak)

KH – 8 (dropped to 6 recently now dosing sodium bicarb to bring back up to 8.5)

NO3 – 0

PO4 – 0

I will probably do a ICP test soon which costs £35 but you get results for a lot of parameters including some trace elements, it will be a good test to see where my tank is at now.