Hello! It’s been way too long since my last post. Things have been a bit crazy. First came the holidays (not to mention my Brother-in-laws birthday which falls between Christmas and New Year), and second is the buying and selling of houses. If you’ve read my bio you may remember my wife and I own a small real estate investment firm (www.apexpropertieskc.com if you’re interested). With the holidays and the current housing market/economy things had been very slow. I glad to report that just after the first of the year things are starting to pick back up.

Anyway, back to things reef related. The tank is doing pretty well. I’ve been fighting some algae so I’m trying a new product called PURA Complete. It’s actually not totally new to me, I’ve used the PURA brand filter pads before and really liked them. This product is the same chemical filtration media used in the pads, but run passively in a mesh bag in my sump. It’s a mix of granulated ferric hydroxide (commonly called GFO or GFH) for phosphate control, some high grade carbon and zeo-sorbent that will remove urine, phenols, coloring agents, odors; even heavy metals like copper, lead, and mercury. I don’t ever have any “detectable” levels of phosphate in my system, but the growth of algae indicates that it’s just “bound-up” in the algae. I’ve used various GFO’s and carbon separately before, but I was pleased with the PURA pads I used in the past so I thought give this “all-in-one” product a try. It’s early days still, but I think the algae is already starting to recede a little.

I’ve been working on a short article for another website called saltwater-aquarium-online-guide.com for a few days now. Hopefully it will be published soon and I can share it you, so check back in a day or two for that.

Until then….

Happy Reefing!

A while back I decided to make a video of my tank.  Now, I’m no cinematographer and my camera leaves a lot to be desired, but it was a fun project all the same.  There’s been a fair

amount of growth since the video was made and a few of the inhabitants have changed, but overall the tank looks very similar to what you see in the video.  It gives a good overview of my basement fish room too.  Again, a few minor changes in equipment down there, but mostly it’s still the way you see it.  The DIY skimmer is going great; I’ll do a post on it in the near future.  Oh, one other difference about how the tank looks today vs. the video is the tank back glass.  I decided I couldn’t stand the coralline covered back and now keep it scraped.  I’ll never let it get that covered again; it took a whole family scraping party to get it all cleaned off.

Happy Reefing!

Since this blog is about my addiction to all things reef, I suppose I should talk more about my setup. After all, that’s what us “reefers” do when we get together and talk. Unfortunately, there is a secret language used by those in “the hobby”, that might as well be Chinese to the uninitiated. I will try to keep my ramblings in the vernacular and avoid the use of terms, abbreviations and acronyms that might not be easily understood by the non-reefer, or at least I’ll take the time to explain what they mean if I do.

I don’t see much point in going back in my history any more than I did in my previous post, so I’ll start with the tank I setup in December of 2007. As I mentioned I got rid off the vast majority of my equipment before moving back to the Midwest last year. Being a true addict it did not take long before I was anxious to set up a tank in my new house. Initially I went the cheap and easy route with a 55 gallon tank plumbed to a simple sump via some DIY overflows.  BTW I don’t suggest overflows, DIY or otherwise, they are just an accident waiting to happen.  Drill your tank from the beginning or get a RR tank (RR = Reef Ready, comes with the holes already drilled and normally some of the basic plumbing).  Over the course of a few months the tank went from the image you see on the left (essentially a pile of freshly cured live rock with a few fish and corals) to what you  see in the image below.  I don’t recall the actual dates, but the pictures are about 7 weeks apart. Then in early February 2007 I was chatting with my buddy Pat, who owns a local pet store specializing in saltwater (I refer to him as the used car salesmen of the pet industry) and he mentioned having a couple of used 125 gallon tanks for good prices.  So I loaded up the family and off to the other side of town we went.  The first tank he described as a little rough, wow was that an understatement.  I wouldn’t have taken that tank if he’d given it to me for free.  The other tank however was in great shape other than being a little bit dirty.  He was asking $650 for the 125 gallon reef ready tank, pine stand, a sump and some filters.  Now remember this is the wheeler dealer pet store owner, who will take all kinds of stuff on trade.  I told him I had my 55 gallon tank, stand, and a MagDrive36 pump that I didn’t need that I could trade (long story, but never hook up a 3600gph pump to a 55 gallon tank unless you want to get wet!).  I also told him I really didn’t need (or want) the sump and filters he was including with the 125 gallon tank.  So Pat did some figuring in his head, a little counting on his fingers, some humming and hawing, then turns to me and says “how ‘bout I keep the sump and filters, you bring me your 55 gallon tank, stand and the pump, and I’ll let you have the 125 tank and stand for $140 cash.  In case you don’t know 125 gallon tanks start at $500-$600 new for just the tank, so needless to say I shelled out the cash, loaded up the tank and stand and headed for home.  As I said the tank needed a little clean up (dang corraline algae) and the stand ultimately was painted black, but all in all I feel like I got an awesome deal.  So that’s the story of how and where the 125 came to be.  I’ll get into more of the technical setup and the change over to the new tank in future posts.

Happy Reefing!

Hello to all. My wife is a bit of a blog-aholic, reading, writing, designing and redesigning blog pages any chance she gets. This, however, will be my first “real-time” foray into the world of blogging. I’m an active member of several online reef aquarium forum style sites. Those tend to be more question and answer related as opposed to blog entries, which I view more as the random ramblings of my mind tied around a general theme.

I suppose the obvious place to start is a little background about myself. My name is Jeff, I’m 39 and I am a reef-aholic. I really can’t pick on my wife too much for her time spent blogging as my addiction takes up just as much free time and costs substantially more to maintain. Seriously though, I’ve been keeping aquaria off and on for about 25 years. My very first tank was a 20-gallon “loaner” aquarium used to conduct a hermit crab behavior study when I was still in school. I lived in Stamford, CT at the time and simply went down to the local beach and came home with some sand, rock and a bunch of hermit crabs. After the paper was written, I enjoyed keeping the critters so much that I kept the tank going for a while with various crabs, macro-algae’s, stars; pretty much whatever I could find in the tide pools at the local beach. After that aquarium, I kept a number of mostly freshwater tanks before again entering into the world of marine/reef tanks. Since then, I’ve kept tanks which have included many different approaches including a cold-water tank with local specimens (this when I lived in Washington State and had access to livestock from the Strait of Juan De Fuca).

When I moved back to the Midwest from Washington I got rid of all of my livestock and most of my equipment. I initially setup up small tank after moving but that didn’t last long and in February 2008 I can across a deal on the current 125-gallon tank and stand that was just too good to pass up! The new tank is plumbed to a 55-gallon sump that is located in my basement just behind and below the display. There is also a 10-gallon fuge/frag tank plumbed to the system. I’ll add more info on equipment in upcoming posts. In addition to the 125-gallon reef tank there is also a 12-gallon nano reef and a 10-gallon freshwater-planted tank in my home.

As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll end this first post by including a FTS (full tank shot) of my pride and joy.

Happy Reefing!