hi
thank you all for the interest in the tanks they make for fun discussion. Quang thank you man that is really cool!
I live in Lubbock where Bob Knight takes a chilled retirement and lets his son do all the yapping
the water is changed about twice a week 100% at each interval because it's so convenient with the tanks sitting right on my counter above the sink. while making coffee I just take out premixed water in old milk jugs and zap out the tanks through their feeding holes with a rigid tube. funny huh I don't even move them to drain the fully. the little scraper is really strong and I add a clip of scouring pad between it to really clean. it scratches but I don't care, I'm tired of scraping coralline with hemostats I can't hardly reach anything
it's not like I have to change daily, if these reefs lost any of their practicality I wouldn't have them. its because they are convenient that I keep them, for what I'm used to I couldn't bear the maintenance on a large tank although I love the diversity you can have in them with the beautiful fish. they can go a week without a change while I go scuba diving or something but mostly I change out twice weekly, maybe even three, if I feed really heavy to bring out the asexual growth/budding/corallite fission that tells you corals like where they are living. of course I have to reposition some from time to time, especially the galaxeas or frag em down smaller, but this is all expected maintenance in a palmtop I guess. I grew an acan for example from a 3 mouth LFS save frag to a 12 mouth behemoth that was mesenterying everything in my tank. when he hit my rare blastos that was it. I clipped an ear off
glued it to the back rockwork just to save a little of that orange mean line, then traded 11 mouths back to the lfs for some yellow candy cane heads. it's like being a parts trader for model cars, small and technical like that
my favorite coral is the alveopora which has literally added 4x calcium carbonate biomass, from the size of a pinky nail to the size of the whole finger, that's big stuff in a pico but I really like him most because the books say he's the least likely to truly thrive and grow. Now I don't get all red and pink showy colors, maybe browns with red/green on the tips, but that will all change as soon as someone invents led lights that are little metal halides ha!
I trim xenia dang near weekly from the glass or I just use the algae scraper to mow through it and suck it out with a water change. No lie, I think I've harvested 10 pounds of it but since it's not affixed no one wants it so I just flush it.
The vase is partially resticted from evaporation, so it's a three day topoff. Do that one if you are going to set one up, they are the cheapest reef tank that will give you the most of any design possible (for that size). you find a vase, find a plastic lid to rest on the inner diameter of the neck (to redirect airstone splatter) and you can find this lid in the garden section of wal mart it's the plastic lid you set an 8 inch potted plant in so it won't leak all over your floor, very simple stuff here. Invert it and stick in on the vase, run the lines for the heater and airstone through a slit and the rest is fishbowl glory. The square tank is totally sealed and does not evaporate at all by design, with the internal oxygen generation. If I could get anything out of these it would kindly be to ask for the title of first reef tank to eliminate topoff hassle of any size, so keep that in mind when some dude mass markets the idea sometime in the next 5 years! I don't care much about entrepreneurialism so leave the dollars to someone else I just like practical biology. If I had to do it for a living I'd hate it really. if he can grow em this thick in two inches depth then more power to him he he lol good luck bud
Lastly the dosing. the water changes alone don't grow that coralline, it's the c balance. I add 1/8th capfull of parts a and b, on alternate mornings, strictly before lights on. You add it at 3 pm when photosynthesis has sequestered carbon from the solution and you will peel the skin off em at pH 8.8, I know this tragically first hand during the first few months of training-wheel reefing (ha the terms are flowin' now)
Lastly I know this sounds wierd, but I found something that influences sand bed longevity and by that I mean the nitrates you deal with by year three...these dsb's dont reduce nitrate I think, they just look cool and provide worm substrate for you to watch below all the reef action. But you still have to deal with natural bed sinking, ie holding in nutrients and potentially re leaking them, so I addressed that by stopping feeding of any pelleted food. I believe the fillers and binders/breading/dough etc takes longer to break down and accumulates faster as organic dissolved and suspended muck in the palmtop or vase tank. my dsb's used to be dirty and have gravid/dark spots but in the years since I only fed mysis or marine bioplankton frozed, all that has cleared up. I believe it anecdotally to be the proteinic breakdown cycle of the living organism vs the prepared pellets, since time is of the essence in a small tank the shrimps are degraded by benthic organisms and only tiny fragments are incorporated into the sandbed for a more scaled down mineralization cycle. You guys buyin any of that? I really think it!
nice to meet you all what a nice forum!
