Tip of the week: Marine Tank

Water Changes Made Easy. 

Depending how you manage and replenish your water elements whether it be using triton, balling or good old fashioned water changes all these tasks can be laborious, time consuming and messy.

I run a calcium reactor to replenish the main 3, ca, kh and mg, however water changes are needed to remove nutrients and replenish trace elements. Previously I used a 2 bucket method for changing water, mixed fresh salt in one and used the other to remove the tank water. This resulted in a 10 litre water change which is less than 3% of my total volume. It was also messy, spilling salty water on my wood floor didn't go down well with the wife.

The resolution - I stumbled upon a product on various reefing forums. The company is called Reefloat and the product is the Automatic Water Changer.

It's a great bit of kit. I have the 32 litre version. Fill it with RO water add the salt and the internal pump mixes it. An hour or so later put the lid on put the 2 pipes into the tank and press the go button. It automatically changes the water and after the pre-programmed time it turns itself off. Water change done. No mess, no fuss just what I like.

Marine Tank update August 2015

Almost been a year since the last update. not much has happened, I let the tank settle and establish it self and just kept it ticking over. water change roughly once a month changing 32L.

Few problems along the way, the usual algae, had a weird brown sludge on the rocks which seems to be dying back. Green algae on the sand bed, thinking this is partly due to my RO water TDS creeping up in my storage container even though my RO unit produces 0TDS. My deltec calcium reactor sprung a leak around the aquabee pump, in the process of sorting this out, in the mean time I'm keeping an eye on the parameters and having to dose a little sodium bicarb as the KH dropped from 8.5 to 6 over a few days.

Other problems, I seem to have flow dead spots, my wp-25 and tunze 6025 dont seem to create enough of a wave effect so i get detritus settling in places, I'm looking at replacing the wp-25 with 2x rw8's or I may invest in a 130 gyre.

Stock wise, My 2 clowns that I have had for 10 years are well, spawning every 2 weeks. I added 2 bangaii cardinals however one of them seemed to hide constantly since i put him in and unfortunatley I lost him a few months later. I also added my favourite fish the Dwarf flame angel, had one previously in an old tank and really wanted one for this tank. Managed to pick up a 5+ head duncan for cheap and a few zoa frags. Future plans, heading to a wedding this weekend hope to stop in a few places along the way to pick up some new goodies. anyway, words are nothing without pictures Background in this FTS looks strange - think its just the way the camera captures the LEDs

Flame angel Bangaii Cardinal Duncans