| 05/31/04 Day 26 Xenia I have just bought a red Xenia yesturday at Pacific Reef, but due to my pH freezing at 8.0, I have decided it was not safe to add it to my tank. Currently the Xenia is in the store, and I will be picking it up when I decided it is time. Today I have moved the Nano tank from Kiki's apartment to my house, luckly everything survived, but this move annoyed the anenome and has caused it to move to another location. |
Master water flow plan that did not work The red arrow indicates my guess as where I wanted the water to flow according to the powerheads strategic locations, but in actuality the Maxi-Jet shoots the water forward where it deflects off the glass front panel and comes back at the exhaust and then moves all over the reat of the tank. At least I know that the water circulates really well : P The same goes for the top diffuser, the water hits the front wall and begans to send a ripple of refracted waves to the the other walls. This project worked better than my illustration of water flow! To see where the water is flowing I used fish flake food, when fish food flake is placed in the water the food circles the whole tank once or twice before it begans to wiegh down and get soggy. Then the food sinks down to the middle of the tank where it is blown to random parts of the tank, while some pieces of flake gets sucked into the Maxi-Jet intake and then spitted out the exhaust in tiny little bits for the little guys to eat, how wonderful. Project complete. heh heh From watching a piece of krill float in my Nano, I know there is some kind of water movement pattern. I have been experimenting with the placement of the Maxi-Jet...still no success, The anenome does not like the water flow, and has moved itself under a Marshal rock. |
| 06/01/04 Day 27 pH Information Today I will learn something about Ph to solve my Ph problems. So far I have found some useful Ph information here: Advance Aquarist Nano-reef fourum posts About website: Everything you needed to know about pH I |
| 06/02/04 Day 28 Maxi-Jet 600 I took the Maxi-jet 600 out of the tank because it created to much flow in my nano. The other thing I did was to test my CO2 by testing my pH from my water sample, then testing the same water sample again after 24 hours. What I have found is that both pH results are the same, therefore there must be enough surface aggitation to create sufficient gas exhange for my inhabitants. This means I do not need to add some kind of aeration to the water. The Mini-Jet was efficient enough on it's own with the diffuser nozzle added for creating surface distubance. |
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| 06/06/04 Day 32 Damn Damsel Sadly about two days ago I had to return the Damsel fish back to the LFS becuase both the Damsel and the Blenny decided to bite up the new clown's fins and tail constantly everyday. I decided if one fish had to go, It would have to be the that damn Damsel. Sending Chip back to the LFS brings back the old memorys of Chip swimming happily between the rocks, I just wish I knew somebody that would take him. When I dipped the green net in the tank to remove him from the tank, some how he knew that the green net meant he was coming out of the tank and was diving through rocks and caves to avoid being caught by the net. After an hour of frustration of moving rocks around and getting the fish to swim towards the glass, I finally was able to capture him. Yesturday, I had discovered that one of my vantec fans had failed due to salt deposits on the circuitboard inside the fan. Unfortunately I was not able to fix the fan by scraping off the dried salt creep that had corroded the circuit board. After moving the tank from the apartment to my parents house, the moving caused some water to splash up onto the circuit board inside the fan. After the water on the circuit board had dried up it left the salt deposits on the cuicut board. Salt being a good conductor of electricity fried the cuircut board after I pluged the ac/dc adapter back into the wall. Thank you for destroying my fan you fan killing salt. Well nothing I can do, but to buy another fan, and replace it and see what happens. A better fan will be a simple fan with just a motor or magnets in it rotate the fan. If you already have one of these Vantec stealth fans, no worries, just becareful not to splash water into the fans. by taping up the fans before the move. I bought the vantecs stealth fans because I thought they would be the least noisy fans, but it turns out they were just as noisy as other fans if the speed was turned up. These fans are rated at a 29db noise level, but that kind of data is vague and does not tell how the fan noise was measureed. So, when buying a 60mm pc fan, just by any cheap fan, it will probably work fine. |
| 05/30/04 Day 25 Mystery Poop It turns out that the mystery poop belongs to the worms that live in the sand that I have yet to find the name for on the internet, more on that later. A couple of days a go I have taken out the Maxi-et pump leaving the Mini-jet to do all the water pumping. Everything seems to be going fine, and I think the rose Anenome Is now better acclimated to the saltwater conditions and lighting. Yesturday I bought a bottle of DT's Phytoplankton to feed my anenome, and other small corals, hopefully this will help them grow more healthier. I have not read anything about dosing yet, and I am tring to figure out what is important, so I will be researching that today. I have added a Mexican Tequila turbo snail to my tank, and it has been taking care of alot of the green algae problem that is begining to a appear on the live rocks. The Bi-color Blenny is doing a great job of eatting off all the rusty brown-red diatoms that had been covering the rocks. Now almost all my rocks look clean and are begining to grow back the purple coraline algae. A cleaner shrimp was also added, and is picking up the excess food flakes, other pieces of foods laying on the sand, and eatting it up. I think this will be it for my cleaner crew, one cleaner shrimp, and one tequila snail (snail shell looks like a cone). If you plan on getting a snail, get the Tequila snail, it has been working great for me, and I only had it for two days. One snail seems to be working very well, to clean the rock works. Today I did a risky thing, I use the stock power head to squirt water at the the anenome's foot. After about 5 minutes the anenome gave up, and released itself. I then placed the Anenome on the top most rock. |
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| About false bottom intake: I later learned that the bottom vent is actually blocked with a piece of plastic preventing any flow of water to enter the sump. Although the plastic piece can be removed by sticking something thin through the slots to punch the plastic out, I left my bottom intake flow blocker intact. |
| pH fixed! After the use of Chemi-pure, my pH went up to 8.3 : ) |
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| Build a Nano Reef Day 25-32 |
| Important: pH wiill fluctuate during the cycle period, it is best to do nothing about this as the pH will eventually equalize. |