Tank Upgrade: Stand Refinishing

The stand that I got with the 75 gallon was still a nice stand. No cracks, missing pieces, or rotten boards. Just a lot of salt and crud caked on to the inside. With me being the handy man I am I figured I could refinish it and add some more support to it to be a good stand again. And that's exactly what I did. Here's some pictures of what it looked like when I got it.

Tank Upgrade

Well this was kind of a spur of the moment decision. I've been looking to upgrade the display tank for a little while now and was thinking of getting a 40 breeder or maybe even a 55 gallon and build a stand for it. A couple weeks ago I made a trip to my LFS and to my surprise I found my upgrade or at least I thought I had. A 75 gallon tank with a pine stand and sump/ external overflow and wouldn't you know... the price was perfect. At $75 I couldn't pass it up!! The stand needed to be sanded down and re stained, the sump and overflow weren't cracked or scratched and need to be cleaned. The tank though... This is the sad part. It seems the guy who owned it before me used some extremely hard water. This led to the front and back panels being etched... Well there went that. No 75 gallon tank for me. This brought me to the realization though that a 75 was a bit big for me right now anyways. So now it's just sitting here in my room waiting to be resold to someone who can use it for something else.

I started looking around on line and thought that maybe a 40 gallon would work. I have a buddy who has two of them so I went and took a look at them. They wont exactly fit the stand, but they will work and it just so happened that Petsmart had them on sale last week! So after all of this excitement and sadness I have my tank, stand, overflow and sump. Now all I need to do is finish staining the stand, clean the overflow and sump, and get the plumbing set up and I'm good to go. I'll have a page up shortly to follow my build of this tank. It'll be my first build page so we'll have to see how it goes. If I like it I might even post it to a forum haha.

Stay tuned! I'll have a few more posts and pages coming out here soon including my DIY acrylic frag stand, a hang-on-side frag rack and an update on the tanks!!

Reef Tank Pro Iphone App Review

So I needed somewhere to store all my tank parameters as well as additions and deaths in my tanks. I'm good with excel and had created a couple sheets for that kind of stuff when I was working as a pool supervisor so I modified them to fit my needs with Reef Keeping. They work good for what I need, but I wanted something that I could easily carry with me as well as keep pictures of things as I add them to the tanks. I looked around and tried a couple apps, but the one that got me was the $5 app Reef Tank Pro by Eric Cosner. I liked the look as well as the capabilities it had. I've been using it now for well over a year and it really fits well with my needs.

Been awhile!

So it's been awhile since I posted an update. Everything's going good for the most part now. Byprosis is gone in the frag tank, corals are looking healthy, my girlfriends Duncan's made a full recovery in my frag tank and I've been sellin a few pieces here and there with a few freebies given as well.

I recently split up the frag tank into two partitions: one for frags and the other for anemones. I used two pieces of eggcrate as the divider and put them together so the holes were half the size as normal. It seemed to be working good while it was up. I recently took it down, however, to add more room to the frag rack and transferred the RBTAs to a Hang on breeder box where they can do whatever they please. The two RBTAs are still doing good, a nice deep red and bubbly. The RFAs are doing real well. My original one is constantly growing bigger. I got it when it was a baby about the size of a dime, now its about two and a half inches across. I'll probably do a review on the breeder box here soon as well as the Deep Blue Professional SolarFlare lights that I have had.

Bayer Dip and Tank Update

So as of today the Red Bugs on the Blue Stag have not returned so I'll call that a success. However, after dipping the zoa frags a few times it seems that the Byprosis is just as resilient as ever. It kind of faded away for a day or so looking like it would die off, but was back a couple days later in full force. I need to find a way to take care of this stuff cheaply. Yes I know, some of you may say that there is nothing cheap about this hobby and I will agree to some point, but the point of this blog is to find a way to keep reefs somewhat inexpensively. The majority of us, including myself, don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on keeping reefs.

Update: Bayer Advanced Insect Killer Dip

Last night I finally had the time to do this Bayer Dip on my Blue Stag. I was a little uneasy at first because I didn't know how it was going to turn out and I really didn't want to kill it, just the red bugs and whatever else that was being a pest. I used the recipe that I posted awhile back, diluted it a bit more adding about 290 mL to a gallon instead of the 320 mL that would have been used. When I was done mixing it all together it was the color of watered down milk which made me a little more nervous, but I tried it anyway.

NOAA Adds 22 More Corals to the threatened list!!

Well the title says it all. I just learned about this after watching Marks video on Mr. Saltwater Tank TV. This is a bummer in multiple ways. The main being the fact that our Ocean's reefs are still dying. Is there any good thing about this though? I think so. Even though there are a few more restrictions on what corals we are allowed to keep, it means that the Governments are starting to pick up on the fact that we truly do need to protect the reefs that we have. The coral that may come as a bit of a surprise is the branching frogspawn.

To read the article from NOAA and to see the 22 species added click the link below:
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/invertebrates/corals.htm

To watch the video from Mark Callahan AKA Mr. Saltwater Tank:
http://www.mrsaltwatertank.com/replay-of-the-live-qa-session-with-mr-saltwater-tank-about-listing-of-corals-as-threatened-under-the-endangered-species-act/

To read the article on ReefBuilders.com about the impact on the hobby click the link below:
http://reefbuilders.com/2014/09/05/20-species-stony-corals-finally-ruled-threatened/