Miss Wiggle And Big Ian's First Marine Tank!

[BigIan]

it would have taken like 4 hours to run 5 gallons off....
so no. didn`t know we had to.
Well atleast were at the bottom of it, we were pretty sure a couple of weeks ago that it was the RO. and we`ve been looking at new ro units and membranes, so within a foughtnight hopefully we`ll be sorted

 

[pipatic]

yeah, deff can help,
still you got your meter now,so test your water in a glass or something, see what your tap water tds is!
i ll always run off about 5 gal if i haven't use it for a while, or i ve just replaced the filters

 

[osmotics.co.uk]

Quick hint....

If this is your RO unit in the picture then you won't be able to flush it correctly unless you completely remove the fitting on the waste line. The fitting contains the flow restrictor and must be removed to flush the membrane properly.

All our units have a manual bypass flush valve which is much easier, the one in your picture does not have a flush valve which means the membrane will foul up over time as you've seen.

You may still be able to revive the membrane if you remove the waste fitting as indicated and flush it properly.

Ro unit...

yellow pipe is mains feed, black pipe is waste and blue is RO

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Quick hint....

If this is your RO unit in the picture then you won't be able to flush it correctly unless you completely remove the fitting on the waste line. The fitting contains the flow restrictor and must be removed to flush the membrane properly.

All our units have a manual bypass flush valve which is much easier, the one in your picture does not have a flush valve which means the membrane will foul up over time as you've seen.

You may still be able to revive the membrane if you remove the waste fitting as indicated and flush it properly.

aaaaah ok, well we'll have a little look at that tonight see what we can do.

and yes we know your unit's have the flush valve, one of the things we were pleased about when we were looking at them

yup tested the tap water too, something like 200ppm well at least our RO is betetr than that........... marginally

well we can't afford the new unit until friday so we'll tinker some more this week and if we can't get it down by fri we're getting the new RO unit. Fingers crossed after that the nitrates should start to come down within a week or so. Hope so cos these waetr changes are killing us!!

 

[Miss Wiggle]

well, since we got the TDS meter and found out our RO is rubbish we've decreased the frequency of the water changes, just figured what's the point putting more nitrates in..... but then again it's still lower nitrates than what's in there at present so we've still been doing some. About every 3/4 days really. Anyway we've been saving up and we can get our new RO unit this weekend which should make the world of difference. Hopefully with a week or two of every other day water changes with decent RO we should get things stabilised a bit.

We had great fun killing our aiptasia this weekend as some were getting a bit big and out of hand, we had wanted to wait until the ntirates had dropped and we could get some peppermint shrimps in to do it naturally, but we were getting worried particularly over 2/3 big one's that were getting a bit close to the candy cane coral. So we went and got some joe's juice and killed them. Still gonna get the peppermint shrimp but not until everything's stable and it's safe to add livestock.

So plans.....

new RO unit first and then a few weeks of letting the tank settle. Then when things are settled a bit more clean up crew will come first, some snails and crabs. Then our first fish, we think a purple firefish as they're fairly easy to get hold of, seem to be hardy and are relativley cheap.

And then we get to buy some coral which I'm very excited about. Found an amazing shop for coral's, everything's gorgeous and healthy and they've got info on everything and are dead helpful so we're quite confident buying from there. We're really not sure what to go for though, there's so much choice. Anyone got any coral suggestions for would be good, criteria are - pretty and hardy!!

so yeah, we're reasonably pleased with the progress, everything's looking really healthy. Gonna get some pics sorted soon but need to buy a blind for the living room first (just got new windows put in, can't put the old blind up, can't take pics without a blind cos of the reflection from the window) before I can get any decent ones.

Just really looking forward to the fun stuff like new fish and coral shopping!

 

[voo]

This is an interesting read, seeing how a tropical aquarist copes with the conversion to marine

I hope to be in the same situation one day. Best of luck to you

 

[SkiFletch]

Sounds like a great plan guys

You actually have a lot of choices for hardy corals under metal halide lighting. Any soft coral would be a breeze in your tank. Yellow fiji leathers, other sacrophytons, mushrooms of any type, green nepthia, devils finger, xenia, kenya tree, spaghetti leather, star polyps, zooanthids, palythoas. They're all a breeze under any light, but in my experience really only yellow leathers, zooanthids/palythoas, and some mushrooms are really colorful.

For LPS, you could go with any brain coral type (open brain, favites brain, or standard encrusting brain) although I hear some open brain types are illegal in the UK . You could also consider Any of the Euphylla genus corals (frogspawn, hammer, torch, galaxea) as they tend to be very colorful specemins (and often mistaken for anemone's ). BUbble corals are alo great LPS for beginners. I'd stay away from elegance corals, goniopora, blastomussa, echinophylla, or acanthestrea corals as all are very expensive and some are exceptionally difficult to keep. One word of caution with Euphylla or bubble corals, they are very aggressive species and should be kept away from other less aggressive corals, lest they start stinging. I still think they're some of the greatest corals though, so I keep them, just have to watch their placement.

And you guys even have the option of SPS with your halide lights. Some of the easier SPS corals include acropora millepora and pocillipora genus corals are generally easy to keep as well. Some montipora species are easy to keep, but maybe best reserved until after you get some experience under your belt

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Sounds like a great plan guys

You actually have a lot of choices for hardy corals under metal halide lighting. Any soft coral would be a breeze in your tank. Yellow fiji leathers, other sacrophytons, mushrooms of any type, green nepthia, devils finger, xenia, kenya tree, spaghetti leather, star polyps, zooanthids, palythoas. They're all a breeze under any light, but in my experience really only yellow leathers, zooanthids/palythoas, and some mushrooms are really colorful.

For LPS, you could go with any brain coral type (open brain, favites brain, or standard encrusting brain) although I hear some open brain types are illegal in the UK . You could also consider Any of the Euphylla genus corals (frogspawn, hammer, torch, galaxea) as they tend to be very colorful specemins (and often mistaken for anemone's ). BUbble corals are alo great LPS for beginners. I'd stay away from elegance corals, goniopora, blastomussa, echinophylla, or acanthestrea corals as all are very expensive and some are exceptionally difficult to keep. One word of caution with Euphylla or bubble corals, they are very aggressive species and should be kept away from other less aggressive corals, lest they start stinging. I still think they're some of the greatest corals though, so I keep them, just have to watch their placement.

And you guys even have the option of SPS with your halide lights. Some of the easier SPS corals include acropora millepora and pocillipora genus corals are generally easy to keep as well. Some montipora species are easy to keep, but maybe best reserved until after you get some experience under your belt

excellent, loads to go on there.... wil get on with some research into those and see what we like and can get.

Don't think I fancy agressive coral's just yet, we want to have loads, a really thriving reef, and I wouldn't wanna block off an area of the tank with an agressive coral I can't put anything else near maybe if we had more room it'd be cool.

thankyou as ever Ski

 

[SkiFletch]

If you want to really jam pack the tank with corals, I'd choose a type (softies, LPS, or SPS) and stick with it. Usually corals of the same type can co-exhist regardless of their aggression levels. I'll try and take some picks of the two show tanks at my LFS (one LPS, one SPS) to give you an idea of what I mean when I'm there tonight. I prefer LPS since they can tolerate water quality issues better than SPS

 

[Miss Wiggle]

If you want to really jam pack the tank with corals, I'd choose a type (softies, LPS, or SPS) and stick with it. Usually corals of the same type can co-exhist regardless of their aggression levels. I'll try and take some picks of the two show tanks at my LFS (one LPS, one SPS) to give you an idea of what I mean when I'm there tonight. I prefer LPS since they can tolerate water quality issues better than SPS

cool, we were having a bit of a chat about this last night, think we want a mix of softies and lps if we can. We would like a lot of coral's in there but it's gonna be a long time before we get to that stage, not gonna just throw everything in at once! Chances are we'll change our minds and re-arrange the tank a fair few times before then! lol

 

[Miss Wiggle]

well today marks the start of things getting better for our little marine tank.

after a few weeks of nightmares (ian lost his job, car's buggered , big stress in work) we finally got the money together for our new RO unit. It arrived yesterday evening. Did our first water change with decent RO. I'm amazed how quick it is, the old unit would give us RO in individual drops... this actually has a flow, filled a cm of the bucket in 5 minutes. I was getting very excited by all this last night.

Did our first water change with decent RO and tested the nitrates a bit after..... reading looks a bit under 50ppm.... OK so still well higher than it should be but a marked improvement from 100! give it a week or so and we should be getting back to a much safer level.

 

[SkiFletch]

Yey for RO water B). Glad you guys got yourself a good unit . Sorry to hear about all the life crazyness, I was wondering where you guys were. Hope things are getting a little back to normal.

 

[BigIan]

i forced my self to get a job in an lfs simply so we could ahve aces to a staf discount so we can get only the best corals, and livestock for our tank
(really it was a struggle to accept the job thats been offered to me for months at the fish shop.)
with all the gear for the hightec planted on the way and the marine tank on its way back to health things are looking up

all i have to do is spend about 2 or 3 days scraping the alge out of the maine tank

 

[Siamese Fighter05]

Sounds like a good move, you'll get first picks on everything

By the time i get in my LFS all the staff have reserved the good stuff and the crap stuff is left on display for months

 

[Mr Miagi]

Sounds like a good move, you'll get first picks on everything

By the time i get in my LFS all the staff have reserved the good stuff and the crap stuff is left on display for months

Ask them when their orders come in. Sometimes I end up driving home around at 8pm after the LFS has finished unpacking all their boxes. Muhaha. Just get to know the people at the LFS, and you can watch them unpack it all!