65 Gallon Wife Approved Build

Quick Update:

Got through the diatom phase with some hair algae starting to crop up. Swapped the astrea snails to the sump and added 8 trochus to the display. Still looks real ugly but most of the diatoms are no longer growing.

Harvesting 75% of refugium macro weekly.

Added a doser for 6ml of alk overnight (spaced 1 ml 1 hr apart).

PH swings are much smaller now.

Purple firefish decided to die on us from unknown causes.

Tang fooled us and looked to be getting sick, shed it's mucus layer and hasn't missed a step since.

Zoas added new polyps. Digi has new growth tips on it. Cap and encrusting corals are in recovery but doing ok.

Good job getting through the ugliest without freaking out.


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Lesson Learned: Don't Throw out Frag Plugs just because you think the coral died.
I have 2 encrusting montis, 1 monti cap, 1 digi monti. When I added to the tank at the end of December they all freaked out and receded, loosing color and structure. The encrusting and caps bleached nearly white within 2 hours with tissue necrosis evident. That was weeks ago. I kept parameters at safe levels, kept up with water changes, and kept the flow/light schedule the same. I moved the corals to better positions based on their type (the cap is now tilted so that it's not acting as a sail catching all the halide light). I did not see any changes for weeks. 6 weeks later and every coral has started coming back, this week we started seeing them pop under the LEDs with 1-2 polyps forming again. What looked like a complete loss for 3 of frags has, over the course of 2 months, come back to full life. More pics to come once they fully heal!

Ya, I always leave frags in until I am sure they aren't coming back. Can't count how many time I put something in, have it appear to die and then have it come back sometime later.
Glad yours came back this time around.

Major tank renovation this weekend:
I was having issues with my parameters (specifically ph / alk). While I could dose alk and get some stability I was finding that I was hitting a ceiling with C02 and buffering. This is partly due to being in a basement. I did add an airstone to the sump to offset this but it wasn't getting the results I wanted. I was also seeing the corals recover but not grow, things are stable but not thriving and I wanted better.
Initially I had emphasized biological filtration to boost the bacteria, pods, and algae in the sump by removing the sump baffle between the refuge chamber and skimmer chamber. I had 20lbs of rock and a whole mess of macro in there (harvesting macro at 75% 2x/week). While this was keeping up with the nitrates/nitrites, I wasn't seeing what I wanted so we made the choice to add a skimmer now before we started going heavy on corals and growing the tank out.

1) I setup a pod tank in the utility room. We pulled all the live rock save 1 small piece from the sump, all the macro, and the 3 pod towers and moved these to the pod tank. I have a small powerhead, the AI refuge light, a small heater that's all connected to my old reef keeper lite for ato/heater control.



2) We added the baffle back in and cleaned out all the settled detritus. Moved all the snails, hermits, and crabs to the pod tank. Then adjusted water levels and added the skimmer. I have 3 skimmers, we chose to go with the Skimz I had as it was original with this tank purchase and would for sure fit. It also has a port on the skimmer cut for draining where the other two don't. I would have preferred the reef octo 150-S but space and the lack of the drain port meant going with the Skimz.

3) There's a small amount of macro in the refuge now and a piece of rock. Adjusted the water levels, ran the skimmer for a bit, turned the ato back on the display tank and we're back in business. So far this morning, the tank has responded well with no large algae blooms, water is actually running clearer than it has in a month or so now and the corals have all shown polyp extension which is new.

Add a vornado or a few clip fans over the sump and that will help a lot with ph too. These are a must in most cases, but especially for basement sumps. I keep 2 or more on every one of my tanks in the system. The ones on the sump are blowing directly onto the water too