Since you asked about testing levels, I just went and did a quick test. I was actually surprised to find that with the new strips I bought for quick tests, I was reading them all wrong and comparing to the freshwater chart. I didn't see the part about peeling back the label. Having said that, I am now maybe understanding a bit more about the testing. I typically use drops, but since things were always coming out at zero, nitrates, specifically, I was wondering if something was wrong. Anyways, with the strip I just used, here's what i came up with:
Nitrates: 40 ppm
Nitrites:0 ppm
Alkalinity: 300 ppm
ph: 8.4
sg: 1.023
I will retest all of these today with drops, but I have never got a reading on a nitrate test before. My ammonia levels have always been 0. One note to add is that on my hex tank, I ran a magnum 350 canister with carbon. I stopped running this on the 75g as I read about them being nitrate factories. If my alkalinity and ph are truely this high, how do I go about getting them down? Could it be that with the larger water volume, the amount of LR I have isn't keeping up?
As for additives, I started supplementing with SeaChem Reef Advantage Calcium after reading a lot of material over on garf.org. my calcium has always been on the low side, about 350ppm, so I wanted to start bringing this up.
As for the yellow polyps, the rock they were on was made up of a bunch of scrap garbage rock/pebbles, etc that was somehow just molded together. Basically after my snails and crabs got done cleaning around the polyps the rock started to disintegrate. I would wind up with a single polyp clinging to a crumb of gravel and they would get tossed all around the tank at night when the hermits came out to play.
Since I brought over everything from the hex tank I was not expecting to go through a full blown cycle in the new tank. I had a little cloudiness one day last week, which I suspected might be a bacteria bloom from a mini cycle but it went away within 24 hours. I do run a skimmer 24 hours and have a pair of powerheads (all of which I will be upgrading soon)
for flow. Since I am not using the canister any more, I need to up the powerheads to get more water turnover.
Yes, Bubbles the yellow tang is much happier in his new home. He loves to hang out with my ocellaris clowns. They all huddle in the corner for a while, then go swim off, then huddle.
As for the lighting of the leather at the store, what I saw was a hood over the tank that had halides and PC actinics. The halides were off when I was there. This kinda amazes me about this place. They are a pretty big place and have a large fishroom. That Fish Place has a big catalog, rivaling that of Foster&Smith. In their fish room, they have a large table-tank set up with their corals. The surface of the water is maybe 4 ft off the ground. The halide hoods over that table are maybe 3 feet or more over the water surface. I really wonder how much light reaches the corals in there. Any time I go to a LFS their tanks always look dimmer than mine, and I'm only running 3.5 watts per gallon. Anyway, the leather I bought was actually in a real tank with the halides off, along with a number of other soft corals. When I got it home I tested the water that it came in and the sg was like 1.021. Needless to say, I did a rather slow acclimation
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