Tank has been up for about a month now and so far so good.
Picked up 120lbs of waltsmith liverock from TBS as well as 60lbs of sand to mix in with the amount I already put in. Tons of critters! Part two of the package went in on the 10th.
Water has a lot of debris in it. Seems like the critters are spitting out things causing what looks like dust particles in the water. Not certain if its from this or possibly micro bubbles, though Im not seeing any place where bubbles might be getting in.
Ammonia has held at 0 and never went very high. TBS does a great job shipping everything, getting it from their farm , boxed and on the plane.
Only thing I'm waiting on is Nitrites to go down. Its been holding at .2 for the past week. Nitrate is somewhat high too and water changes don't seem to adjust much of this. Hoping the carbon in the media reactors will assist with this until the algae in the refugium can get going, otherwise if time doesn't solve this I'll look for something else to assist.
I also changed the overflow plumbing a bit, converting the reef ready to a herbie overflow. Started with a true union ball valve then switched to a spears gate valve as the union valve was hard to be precise with. With that said, it worked, it just wasn't as easy to adjust.
Ecotech battery backup added to one of the MP40s yesterday, and I finally got around to adding in the media reactors. Every inch of space is used in the cabinet. All of the electrical is in a separate cabinet to the side and is packed itself.
For ATO, I ended up getting a 10gl tank from petco which fits perfectly in the side cabinet. Started with a 5gl bucket, but I'm seeing about 2gls per day of evaporation. When I'm out of town, I use one of the 32gl brute garbage cans.
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Refugium is holding lots of critters (gorrilla crabs, pistol shrimp, and 1 mantis shrimp) that I found checking over the liverock. Mantis is ruling this tank.
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