what not to get talked into buying without a real good reason [FYI]

[Sk8r]

1. a filter of any sort. No Penguins, cannisters, wet-dry, bioballs, etc. If you are a FOWLR there may be a use for same, but even so, get on RC and talk it over. Coral reefs don't use them. Your live rock and sandbed are doing that job. Let it do it, so it stays healthy.

2. a sand-cleaning device. NO marine tank needs this---period. At very most, have some nassarius snails [sandbed burrowers: you will have to ASK your lfs about this, because you won't see them in the store, until the lfs owner waves some food over the sand---and don't get them from Ebay, by what I've heard: somebody out there is selling the wrong kind.] Do not get a diamond goby, a sandsifting star, or anything of that sort: they're too much for most tanks and may clean your sand way too much, then starve. [A yellow watchman is safe.] A little crud won't hurt you. Just figure out why you're producing crud, because you don't want your tank to run too 'hot' or too 'rich.' Bristleworms are a tremendous asset. They multiply in response to food supply and die back if not needed as much. A proper sandbed is several inches deep [mine is 3-4"] and layered like a torte cake of bacteria each doing a specialized job. Treat it like the fine bio-machine it is, and do not screw it up.

3. live sand. Any sand surrounding live rock is going to be live enough to do the job in the length of time it takes you to cycle your tank. Live sand that comes in bags is too often more like dead and rotting sand, and I wouldn't let it in my tank, let alone pay extra for it.

4. test kits that don't produce readable numbers with decimal points in them. You need more accuracy. Yes, they're pricey, but will last a year, sensibly used---and let's put it this way: you just spent megabucks for that tank. Don't stop now: this is what keeps your tank alive and nice-looking, not a stinking swamp of death. Testing IS life---and a logbook of results will show you how FAST changes are happening: that's almost as valuable as the readings themselves.

5. a swing-arm or floating salinity measure. Get a refractometer. After you've bought several of these bargain stopgaps, or lost specimens because of bad readings, you'll almost have paid for this little jewel. When acclimating, the whole name of the game is to match salinity of bag water and your tank water to within .001 salinity. Got it? Get it.

6. distilled water or tap water conditioner. No. Go for the machine in the kiosk at Walmart, your grocery store, or the machine kiosk in the parking lot. Better yet, get your own ro/di filter. That pays for itself, literally, in money you're not laying out by the gallon. Initial payback may take a year, but by the time you make your first filter change in that unit, you will have paid for it in money saved. If you haven't killed your tank or produced an algae farm with Bad Water you can factor that into the bargain, too.

7. miracle cures for ich, red slime or miracle potions to produce coralline. In the first case, quarantine all your fish on purchase, no matter how anxious you are to see them in the world you've made; in the second, NEVER dose your main tank. There is a flatworm cure, but it's dangerous---use it only with expert advice, and let us walk you through it. There's one for red slime. It is NOT for tanks under a year old. NO in-tank fish cure is safe. Period. Treat in quarantine with no carbon in the filter, and get advice on RC about dosage and methods and diagnosis. In the last case, get your params to these: salinity 1.025, temp 80, alk 8.3-9.3, calcium to 430, and magnesium to 1300-1500, and you will GET coralline, probably more than you want...especially in an acrylic tank, where it is real hard to control.

HTH. Discussion, as always, welcomed.

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

what not to get talked into buying without a real good reason

Chemical supplements aside from calcium and alkalinity (and magnesium if you determine that you need it). There are a very few others that may be useful for particular situations, but trace element mixtures are not generally a good idea for new folks to dose.

This article has more:

The “How To” Guide to Reef Aquarium Chemistry for Beginners, Part 2: What Chemicals Must be Supplemented
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-04/rhf/index.php

[Sk8r]

Thank you, Randy!

[McTeague]

5. a swing-arm or floating salinity measure

I have TWO of these craptastic pieces of garbage. They both read completely different for the same water.

I could not afford a refractometer but I got a floating style one like the below, are they junk as well?

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

IMO, certain floating hydrometers are very accurate. Those made by Tropic Marin, for example.

[dsn112]

Sk8r, I have a diamond goby. How do I get him out, I want to sell him back, I agree with you on all points, the diamond was a rescue from a friends tank that cracked.

[Sk8r]

Catching one is going to be a PITA. Bottle trap won't work. Eats only detritus. Hides in burrow at first move. I hate to say it, but you may have to move rock to get him out. The only thing that might work otherwise is to use a fairly potent pump to pump water out of your tank: you create a deep 'well' in your sand in the front corner; you de-water the tank lightning-fast, and hopefully ALL fish will go to that low spot. The only drawback to that is that he will have created his OWN low spot in his burrow and it may be as low as YOUR low spot. Ordinarily, with any other fish, you could net him as he joins the others in the fish pile---then you lay a garbage bag over your sand and rock, and pump the water back in fast...[the bag protects your sandbed from being kicked up by the waterfall, and is a way to add a lot of water without a dust cloud. It floats higher as water increases.]

But with this fish---everything he is and does militates against your being able to trap or catch him. You may have to get some white polystyrene buckets [Lowes], prepare new salt water, pull your rock to the buckets, and net him using two nets and fast action. The ONLY advantage you get is that his action will have that sandbed so hyper-clean its not going to be as bad or dangerous a kick-up as normal. Catch him, replace your rock [darn, it's bad to have rock sitting on the sandbed, rather than on the bottom: if you've eggcrate under that sand, kind of oooch the sand over so you can get as much bottom contact as possible. Ugh!]

I would still have on hand: Amquel, and carbon: to be able to nip any ammonia spike in the bud. :Test strips, used every few hours if it does kick up: and :keep that bucket water handy for your other fish if you get a spike.

If you can run a one-micron filter bag immediately after catching him, you may be able to clear your water within an hour.

But I do not envy you this job, even in a 28. There are few fish harder to catch, because of his lifestyle.

[dsn112]

wow, that sounds like a royal pain. It will have to wait till after the holidays.

[Sk8r]

I wish I had better advice for you: please, anyone who's caught this species without tank disruption, chime in here and help.

[dsn112]

Thats what you get for helping a friend in an emergency. Is it bad to leave him in for a little while till I figure this out. Will he ruin my sandbed. I don't want him to starve, but I don't have time to get him out if he is going to be that difficult. Poor little guy

[Sk8r]

In a 28g he will mess things up, but will not absolutely kill the sand under and within the rock structure. Nor can he get food from it. He may be pretty unhappy in a few weeks, but he should last until after the holidays. I wish you luck. Maybe somebody else will have a good capture technique with this species, but he will not be easy.

[reeferoo]

A trickle down filter with a little crappidy skimmer in it (wooden airstone and bioballs, woot!) Although this was good for a first purchase since it took time and experience to learn that I needed a sump with a real skimmer and I could never have gotten the right stuff on the first try. The trickle down was fine for a FOWLR, which my tank was for the first 3 months while I saved up for the lights.

2. Live rock scrubby wash toxic stuff you have to wear gloves to use. So as far as I understand, any dead crap on the live rock will simply help start your first cycle. After that I should really only be adding cured live rock and so there is no need for this stuff.

3. Powder calcium suppliment. I use two-part daily doses now, would like to get a kalkwasser reactor.

4. A 4"+ GSM clown as our first permanent resident (and subsequently getting her a mate and an anemone has made her much grumpier)

5. Bumblebee snails, red footed local cold water snail, emerald crabs, hermit crabs (maybe good for cleaning up after initial cycle, but immediately decimated my snail population)

6. Twice now I have ordered the in-take pH readers that are only for freshwater (somehow I convinced myself otherwise...)

7. One of those large blue very difficult to pour RO jugs from the grocery store and a long skinny funnel (unused)

8. A used stand which turned out to be full of cockroaches. We caulcked every crevice after sweeping/blasting and then several coats of black enamel. Still using it, and it was a great deal, but ew!

9. A petco saltwater fish. Died within 24 hours

On the other hand, I have bought some awesome things for really good deals (mostly through other RCers- like my 5 yr established fully modded 12g nano (lights and fans like DX- 2x24Wpc, 10k and actinic, stock pump replaced with maxijet 900 with tests, buckets, watchman goby, serpent start, rock, and everything you could need for $140)
The trickle down has been replaced with a Eurofil sump with a sock kit, a mini-g skimmer and a mag 7 return. We have chiller on standby (1/10hp) for when it gets warmer and the halides are on full time. We got 2x150W with 2x110w VHO suppliments. We also recently bought an orange and green bubble tip anemone which our newly mated clowns don't leave.

One weird thing- our big evil GSM female (Clownshoes) has been taking huge chomps of our itty bitty pulsing xenia stalk. She spits it out right away, and has been furiously re-aquascaping. I have heard of fish nipping at corals, but this seems like an aggressive action. Has anyone experienced this?

[reeferoo]

and of course I got live sand, a swing arm hydrometer, hard to read test kits (all API so far, some of the dip strips were more like indicators that I needed to do further testing), water conditioner (use for my betta when I am out of RO to topoff with), and even a miracle cure (formalin/malachite green, well researched, used to dip for Brook)

[sunfish11]

Well, I also did a silly thing and added a Sleeper goby to my tank and didn't consider the possible ramifications. I am usually so good about that. The tank had been up for 2 years and I thought he would do a nice job cleaning the sand. This one fish single handedly was destroying my 210 gallon tank. He stirred up so much fine sand and junk out of the sandbed and fogged the water to the point that my fish were just swimming in a haze and my nitrates went through the roof. I was on the verge of taking the rocks out to catch him when he finally jumped out. I removed my jump guards and tried to scare him out of the tank. It worked. Thank God! This is not a perfect solution by any means and if I wouldn't have gotten lucky, I would have had to tear the whole thing down just to get that one fish. That fish was the worst $20 that I ever spent. Even after being in this hobby for years and having multiple tanks, somtimes I just do something stupid, like buying that fish.

Good Luck!

Lisa

[Sk8r]

That is the most original fish-catching method I have ever heard of! Lol!

And yep, clowns ARE damsel-ish, and WILL take to nuisance-nipping certain things that either attract them or annoy them. They'll do almost any darned thing, which makes them amusing...most of the time!

[zippopunk1]

what tests do u guys use and where do i get them

[jefnalyssa]

sk8r What brand of test kits do you use?

[Sk8r]

Personally, I use Salifert. Others recommend, i think, Elos. The way the good ones work is by a definite, visible color change in a vial once you've dripped in a reagent [chemical]. Once that color change happens [you'll know it when you see it!] you read how much reagent is left in the measured dripper, [a numbered scale on the dripper] and compare that against a chart. it will give you exact numbers to one decimal...eg, 8.3, or in the case of the bigger readings, no decimal, but accurate to 1 point out of, say, 500 or 1000. That kind of accuracy is enough for our hobby.
You need, for a stony reef: ph meter, refractometer [salinity], dkh alkalinity, calcium, and magnesium.
For fish-only or softie tank, you can skip the calcium and magnesium. But it wouldn't hurt them at all, particularly the softies.
A stony reef must be regularly supplemented with calcium, buffer, and occasionally with magnesium.
A fish-only needs buffer, particularly.
You dose these via additives, or a reactor or kalk drip.
If you are tempted to buy an additive not on this list, [and I do, just very occasionally use a certain one] you FIRST buy a test for that chemical and see how much your tank actually has before you ever think of dosing in any extra. The mantra is, "If you can't test for it, don't dose it!" Your salt mix is more than salt, and actually supplies everything in the way of trace elements you need for fish, if you keep up your 10% a week water changes.

Check out our sponsor's list among the buttons on the banner---I've dealt with Foster/Smith, had good luck with them, if your lfs doesn't have something.

[Zestay]

i guess each fish is diffrent. my diamond goby ate flake food all the time. lived happliy in a 40 gallon breeder. was as healthy as a horse. but i guess for a small tank a diamond gobys a no go.

[Sk8r]

They can be a problem: they're like mandarins---some will eat prepared food, some won't. Yellow watchmen, no problem in a small tank, and an excellent small-scale sand janitor. But a diamond very, very often starves to death; and in tanks with fine sand, they can blow it all over sensitive corals and undermine rock that's iffy. I just don't recommend them for the fish's own sake...and the prospective owners. If you have one and can't get it out, you might try a little small grade Formula One Sinking Pellet food and see if that tempts him at all.

[Sk8r]

I'll add one. A UV unit. They're not a magic fix for every ill. The problems they are intended to solve can often be solved otherwise, and it's something certainly to get the pros and cons of before laying down the bucks.

[bellusangel3]

sk8r.. could you tell me what is really wrong with canister filters? So, I can show it to my stubborn husband why we need to stop using our xp canister filter. His arguement is that the lfs uses it and their display tank looks awesome. He thinks our ammonia levels will go up if we get rid of the xp canister filter.
We have a refugium and just bought a very nice new skimmer..shouldn't that be enough? It makes perfect sense to me to get rid of the filter system but I don't know how to explain it to him.

[Sk8r]

Quite the contrary...re ammonia and nitrates.
Ask him this: what does the fish store SKIMMER look like? I'll bet it's bigger than yours. And that impacts your waste-disposal ability.
Here's what you need a filter FOR: large fish. Large fish with messy habits.
Here's what you need FOR a filter: a person hired to clean that sucker as much as daily. At least weekly.
Here's what a filter robs you of: 1. a steady supply of stuff [food] to keep your sandbed on even keel. It's constant feast and famine [with cleaning] so you never quite let the sandbed grow as it should. 2. pods. Copepods travel the full cycle of an unfiltered tank---into the sump and out again, alive, and able to eat spare algae and feed small fishes. If there's a filter, they're stopped, and will die there---especially when it's cleaned.

If you have: one pound of sand for every gallon of display tank; and one pound of porous live rock for every gallon of display tank, and a skimmer, ideally with a sump, you will be fine with no filter UNLESS you have fish bordering on overstocking, or a tank full of carnivores that are very messy eaters.

Worst case with a filter: you go on vacation for two weeks and in the hands of a tanksitter, that filter does what filters do and spikes a nitrate rise that leads to a tank crash. YOu get back to a dead tank. OR you forget a carbon bag and leave it in too long and it rapidly returns everything it absorbed to the tank---a nasty trick carbon has. Same story. Corals REALLY don't tolerate nitrate, phosphate, or ammonia. If you have corals, even worse news. WHere a fish-only would be mildly annoyed, a reef can die, fast and then faster as things cascade.





If you wish to remove filtration, do it one layer at a time---remove a layer of media, then wait 3 days, and remove another, testing all the way. If your tests show 0 ammonia, 0 nitrate with less filtration, keep removing layers until there are none.

My tank is a 54g reef, and there is no filtration of any kind, except a big ball of live cheato that provides oxygen and happens to trap some particulates: I have crabs in that area to eat anything that gets trapped.

I have walked many a reefer through the process of filter removal, and nobody has lost a tank.

I have also answered many a post entitled something like "Nitrates! Help!" where the very first thing I look for is a filter somewhere in the system. And I will counsel them to do a water change, run carbon, and then phase out the filter.

Why? Sandbeds are layered biomachines: you never overturn them, never clean them: they are a biological torte-cake of types of bacteria. By the time debris works its way down through the layers, and it does settle, by gravity---it gets digested and redigested until it becomes pure, simple nitrogen gas. 90-odd percent of our atmosphere is nitrogen gas. It simply floats up as a bubble, through the water, up to the surface, and it's...gone.

If the same debris goes into a filter, there ARE no layers capable of that final step, the gas production. It just lies there, being nitrate, or worse, ammonia. Your corals get a whiff of it. Your sandbed would like to process it---but can't, because it's in your filter. And your sandbed doesn't 'grow'. It's being starved and weakened. The biomachine isn't doing as much as it should, and it's 'thin.' You change the filter, and it's all clean again, until the next nitrate buildup and filter change. But meanwhile your sandbed has never developed the way it should, and you go on scrubbing that filter to the end of time, with your tank really vulnerable to the first time you can't manage to get that filter clean in time.
YOu NEVER clean a sandbed, and it will deal with most any reasonable load you send it [excluding the output of large or numerous carnivores]. You clean a filter every week or else---no matter if you're running just two percs and a dartfish, or you risk your corals going south. That's the difference.

[bellusangel3]

Actually our lfs uses the crappy skimmer the sump came with. Yeah they have a sump too..no refugium. The skimmer that came with our sump ..we replaced it with a nice new one. It is so nice to have a skimmer that actually works..lol. I don't know how their tank does well with the filter canister. I really feel like the filter canister is the reason why our soft corals are not looking well. Hopefully this thread will help convince him the filter is bad. Thanks sk8r

[Sk8r]

Another thing to do, bellusangel, as a general help for those softies, is to meticulously test and log your chemistry. Softies are very tolerant of chemistry that would kill an sps---BUT---keep your alk to 8.3 to 9.3 and your ph at 7.9 to 8.3. And run fresh carbon every 5 days---which is what that cannister COULD be doing constructively. Softies spit at the world when annoyed. if you have stony coral in there as well, you can have wars going on. If only softy, I'd run carbon most of the time. Softie-spit is great in the open ocean, but in a continually cycling tank, it's a PITA. You have to figure out which softies are 'hottest' spit-wise [colt coral, and apparently Fiji yellow] and put them next the water exit, certainly not by the water-entry---so if they're going to stink up the place, the water is going straight to the carbon filter, not onto a neighbor.---oops, thread-drift here, but it is germane: there are ways to use a filter constructively, and that is as a chamber to run a small carbon sack, or polyfilter [if you have a metals-accident], to run a 1-micron filter [your nevvy dropped Cheerios in your tank] and to fill with live rock rubble for a little biological action. So there are uses for it. It's just not great for keeping a reef happy.