wasp

How long the phosphate resin lasts depends entirely on how much phosphate is in your system. Some people with clean tanks have some resin & only change it each 6 months or so. But often a person will start using it because they have a phosphate problem, and the resin will need changing every few days until the phosphate is removed down to acceptable levels. If you've been using tap water, and especially if your skimmer is not one of the best, it is very likely your phosphate will be high.

A cannister is excellent for carbon. It will do also for phosphate remover, but you will get more life out of the phosphate remover if you run it in a reactor, such as a Red Sea Phosphate Reactor.

Straight magnesium chloride is OK, but if you want to get sulphur & chloride ions balanced use 10 parts magnesium chloride to 1 part epsom salts. I got a 25 kg sack of magnesium chloride from a local farm supplier, cost $18.00. Not sure about quality but it says food grade. Anyhow doesn't seem to have adverse effect in the tank. They add it to food for cows getting milked, cos the milking removes more magnesium from them than our typical NZ soil can replenish. Long as magnesium in the tank is above 1250 that's fine, don't go over 1450. What I done now though is add some magnesium chips to the calcium reactor so only have to add the other stuff occasionally.

And here's one of two different types of acros joining together, just seem to be growing round each other

just thought this was quite cool here's a couple of sps starting to encrust the glass, see how they kill the coraline as they go. BTW the pic appears to have a red hue, but that's just how it is it was not colour adjusted via photoshop or whatever.

These two corals where slowly growing towards each other, then when they got close enough the acro was easily able to kill the monti. However there is still a tiny bit of surviving monti tip out of reach which has survived, I suspect the monti's strategy will be to try & outgrow the acro & shade it. See also, as soon as the acro sensed the monti was there, it curled it's branches around and has grown towards it real fast.

fejoa contains phosphate.

Seems to be varying opinions, however for me, if my tank is not doing well and there is little growth, there will also be little PE. If I get conditions right & good growth starts, there will also be good PE. PE serves several purposes, one of which is resperation. If there is good growth, there must be metabolic activity & therefore resperation. Anyhow things looking great Puttputt, whatever you're doing, keep doing it!!

Good stuff Layton! ( See I knew you could take a photo when the time came ) Pretty coral I've not seen one of those before. Is that a particularly fast grower or are they all doing as well?

Very impressed Puttputt!

Thought I'd link this, although in German, because it's an interesting vodka tank. But also the aquascaping is interesting, it's basically nothing but a rock wall stacked to the top, and yet the effect is quite good. http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?hl=en ... _qdr%3Dall

Looking nice Ben, well done!

PE = polyp extension sps = small polyp stoney (often referred to as acros) frag = fragment

Went & had a look at Crackers tank today I was IMPRESSED! The growth of the sps since last time i was there is remarkable! Awesome PE on some of them as well. He gave me two little frags of a blue sps that I don't have, looking forward to how they'll turn out

Layton I'd be VERY surprised if sizes bigger than 24 x 12 is not available in ChCh. Easy to get here, don't see why not in ChCh. A specialist panel store will be a better bet than the ones you mentioned, let your fingers do the walking.

Interesting. Something else to try if I ever come across a tube.

Pink? What's that for?

I sometimes wonder what hidden surprises may await people who purchase homes that once housed a reef tank :lol:

20 to 25 is fine, try that and adjust up or down depending on wether it's doing what you want and the effect on your corals. Some people go 15 or even less.

Some years ago I splilled some cleaning chemicals on the concrete floor in the garage, did my best to clean it up, but to this day it still becomes damp in that area when we have humid conditions such as now.

Not quite correct. The figures I read were that a child born in the US, will be 50 x as much a burden on the world environement, than a child born in India. Not quite sure where NZ will fit in to that, probably somewhere close to the US figure.

If you've ever spilled salt there in the past it may continue to absorb moisture from the air and become especially apparent during humid conditions we have at the moment.

Well can somebody fill in an old timer? What is a podcast? Something to do with Ipods? No I get it! they're little white things that run around in the tank! No but seriously, what's a podcast?

Should be possible to figure it out, do we have info on the LPH of the vortec + power consumption? We could then compare to the stream.

How does the power consumption/flow compare against a stream? Just wondered if it needs some more power to get sufficient magnetic feild through the glass thickness?