Thu, 08/10/2006 - 04:11

My order came in from Marine Depot, so I dosed the tank with two containers of Chemi Clean to erradicate the last of the cyano in the system. Each package treats 300g of water.

When dosing something, I prefer not to just dump it in the tank and see what happens. In this case, I decided to buffer up the alkalinty and pH 10 minutes prior to dosing. I also took note of the ORP reading, which was 390. Next, I mixed the first package of Chemi Clean in a cup of RO/DI water until it was thoroughly dissolved. This was poured in one of my overflows, so it could mix with the water draining into the sump. The skimmer was turned off.

Over the next few minutes, ORP dropped to 81 - a substantial drop of dissolved oxygen in the water. All fish seemed unaffected, and most corals looked normal. The BTAs shrunk down somewhat, as did one Hammer coral.

10 minutes later, I poured in a second dosing of the product. ORP didn't drop further. Within a few hours, this reading began to rise again. (Today, 24 hours later, it was back up to 390 again.)

Since the skimmer was going to be unused for 24 hours, I went ahead and pulled it out of the sump and set it up in the backyard in a vat of water and muriatic acid. The skimmer was plugged in to run the solution through the pumps and skimmer body, which broke down all the coralline growth. Once the skimmer had run for a few hours, I pulled it apart and cleaned it thoroughly. It is back in the sump, ready to start up when the time is right.

I've got 55g of new saltwater mixing up now for the water change tomorrow. I'll change the water, then turn on the skimmer. I hope that will be the last of the cyano bacteria for a long time to come.

Tonight, DFWMAS had a meeting in a nice air conditioned room in our new central location (central to the metroplex). A furniture store provided us with a large room, and we had a huge gathering considering it was our first time meeting there. 122 people attended, watched a presentation about a club member's tank, and many left with livestock won in the raffle. The presentation was done with a projector hooked up to a laptop, which is the direction we'd like to go for future meetings. It will take more work on our part to create better presentations, but hopefully the members will enjoy the benefits from the additional effort.

Reefcast episodes 11 and 12 should come out soon. Evan just finished moving to Dallas and should have time to wrap up the editing on those shows. We are going to have a booth at MACNA, so if you are going this September, be sure to stop by and visit. We'll be recording at the conference, and sharing what we can with the internet connection we have there. I'll be updating my site during the conference as well, possibly via this Reef Log as it is pretty convenient.

I'm donating a sump to the MACNA raffle, so show up and you could win it! Reefcast will have one Top Down Photobox raffled off in our booth each day, so if you were wanting one, you could win one that way. See you there!