I decided to test the water for the last day of the year.

At the same time, I did some dosings. So let me start off with that. I've had cyano slowly spreading in my tank for the past couple of weeks, and I finally decided to use my final batch of ChemiClean in my tank. As I've mentioned before, I believe it drops the oxygen level in the water rapidly. Before adding:

Temp 81.6F
Salinity 1.025 sg
pH 8.15
ORP 456

I mixed the entire bottle up in 12 oz of RO/DI water and then slowly added it to the sump over about 60 seconds. Here's what I saw:

1 min - pH 8.07; ORP 88 (!)
3 min - ph 8.15; ORP 161
5 min - ph 8.15; ORP 152
8 min - pH 8.14; ORP 153
20 min - pH 8.15; ORP 166
35 min - pH 8.15; ORP 174

So as you can see, it really does affect the water. All the livestock looks 100% unaffected, and the water quality is perfectly clear. My skimmer will remain off for 48 hours during treatment.

Now for the test results:

Temp 81.6F
pH 8.15
Salinity 1.025
Calcium 460
Alkalinity 10 dKH
Magnesium 1185 (so I dosed more to help bring this up)
Nitrate 12 (replaced Algone pillows)
Phosphate - 0 <-- Who's your daddy now???!!!  

I tested the effluent of the Calcium Reactor, and Phosphate was .03 but that might be because the water in the reactor takes a long time to exit (as in days) and the PO4 level was higher recently. So that would be older water that hasn't been treated with the GFO (Granular Ferric Oxide) media.

How nice to have decent numbers. 

I fed the Copperband Butterfly again today with Hikari Mysis with garlic, and it immediately started sucking them up before my eyes. I checked back a few minutes later, and it was less excited to eat what was still moving around in the tank, so maybe the garlic washed off. I don't know. I'm happy to see it eat anything, rather than starving. I did lose one of those pretty multicolored hitchhiker featherdusters (that pop out of LR / corals) to this fish, but I'm not going to get upset about that.