Water Parameters

As many of you know, I highly urge everyone to test their water on Saturdays. I did so that night, and the Elos Alkalinity test kit measured 9.0 dKH. The Trident measured just slightly higher at 9.3 dKH. All is well, everything is running perfectly.

I just opened up Fusion moments ago and noticed that my alkalinity had plummeted to 7.5 dKH, and the graph showed a steady decline since midnight Tuesday morning. Over the past 48 hours, alkalinity dropped 2 full points. I need to create some type of alert in Fusion, apparently.

It's been another month.  The 400g has been running for 5 years and 7 months as of tomorrow. I've been dosing 40 ml of Nopox daily for 58 days. It looks like nitrate is finally approaching 10 ppm (looks like 15 ppm today via API), down from 50 ppm.  Phosphates measured .1 ppm (Elos)

Other parameters:

For the past few years, several vendors have offered ICP testing. It's a process of blasting a water sample down to its ions and elements. Here's a quick description quoted from icp-analysis.com:

Using the ReefTrace app to track all my water parameters, I've been entering in quite a few data points over a period of many months.  Today I decided to use the Compare option and selectively worked my way through each test, and I set the Date parameter from Jan 1, 2017 until today. That was easier than trying to remember when I entered various test results.  

I was reading an interesting thread on Reef2Reef about TDS measurements today. I think you might like it as well:

http://www.reef2reef.com/threads/poll-do-you-know-your-tds.349288

It includes a poll. Check out all the people that own their own RO/DI system and actually measure their TDS too.  That's awesome!

Once the front viewing panel was scraped clean of film algae, the corals looked a lot better. While my arm was wet, I tried out some Aiptasia Rx today to see how well it would work.  Too bad the peppermint shrimp in the tank don't do what I hired them to do. Maybe they'll get motivated?

Water parameters are doing quite well these days in this tank. I seem to have the dosers dialed into a good spot.

I've been uploading videos to Youtube pretty regularly lately. Did you happen to catch the Youtube Live show last week? Here's the latest one, so if you've missed a few you need to get caught up. I describe how I set up the 60g frag system I built myself, including all the acrylic work. 

While most would get excited to go out on a Friday night, I instead stayed in and tinkered with my reefs. Reefkeeping needs attentiveness, and tonight was one of those nights where I needed to address specific needs, or lose corals.  

A few weeks ago, I saw something really neat and contacted that person for more information. If possible I hope to sell these from my shop, but for now let me showcase what he sent me as a gift. It's impressive!