Luke33

I feed every other day. I want my fish to work on the tank for half the time. When I do feed I feed blood worms, mysis, LRS frenzy and LRS herbivore. I also throw squid, brine, and various veggie frozens in there as well as black worms on occasion. My fish are extremely plump doing this.

Good write up. When I have a fish that won't eat after all of the above my last resort is live black worms. I then ween them off that to frozen blood worms and eventually get them to eat lrs and do try the eggs too but I hate the skimmer reaction to the eggs!

The only thing about a 39x8 fixture is it will only really cover 24" wide tanks. So a 36" i believe you would need 10-12 bulbs. If I was in your position I would have a canopy built and would stagger 12 60" t5's using these retrofit's. I would run 4 e5 type of led's on dusk/dawn and the rest as your daylights. This way you would only have to replace 8 bulb's a year. It would allow you to grow pretty much anything in that tank pretty easily and would run around $900 for the retro's and $160 for the t5's and $300is for the e5's. http://www.bulkreefsupply.com/t5-ho-miro-4-retrofit-kit-let-lighting.html

Daylight the orange hammer is just a light orange. Under the blue LED that is what it looks like. Pretty sick looking hammer! I don't really frag my sps much and my lps hardly ever get cut! I am starting to run out of room with my lps corner as the hammers and frogspawn are all softball sizes and growing really fast. As far as my coral colors go, idono, i don't really do anything crazy. Big skimmer, good glow, good raw water, and most importantly consistent parameters. I also think my lighting is solid as i run 5 t5's and 3 e5's in my fixture. When you ramp up and down on these fancy fixture's I have never had luck. I just like the simple, its on its off approach. I don't run gfo or carbon or any other crap, just a fuge and a skimmer for nutrient export. I believe your tank just mature's and you kind of wait for it to find its water chemistry spot, then you work it from there.

Sounds like it will be a sweet tank! I love MH's but that will cost a fortune in electric and heat WILL be an issue if you want my opinion. Instead of the eco have you looked at the photon v2 or any other led, or are you set on the eco's? I have never been impressed because they have intensity spots all over and you have to use a ton to get good coverage. I like the idea of t5 and led as you will be able to grow anything without shadowing issue's.

I would get the par meter asap as those will push some serious par if you jump up the %. On a shallow tank like that i could see the intensity doubled at 45 & 25% vs a 70w mh.

Makes you wonder what they actually pay for a gem tang. I have seen them recently for 1k regularly, but $50......dang

Wow, that's a deal!

Dang.... baller! Let's see some pics, where did you get it?

Not a bad looking milli after it finally colored up : )

That stinks! Sounds like its a driver that went out for the blue's. You could more than likely get a replacement driver and pop it in and it would fix your issue. Hope your sps can recover!

Got it, sure that will work just fine for GFO.

I think your confused about the gfo/carbon filter. I don't believe there is such a thing. Your rodi generally has a carbon block, sediment filter, ro, di resin and sometimes multiple ro, multiple di, multiple carbon...etc. There isn't any gfo block though. I think someone said you could run gfo in your reactor. As far as where you want to be with your rodi water, 0 tds is your goal. You should get a rodi that has a ro rejection rate of 95-99% efficiency and your di pulls out the other 1-5% which will allow your di to last a while.

Honestly 15 is better than I thought it would be. I would still recommend getting your own rodi and having zero tds. None of the other measurements surprise me. My fridge pulls down tds from 300-275ish.

lol, we don't need to know what you intend on doing with that!

I hate to say it but if you want led's out of the above I would run the 2 x ecotech gen 4's. But like Jacob said i'd go with a 8x24w t5 ati fixture. You could use two led bar's in the dusk/dawn switch to get that blue pop if thats a concern, and you wouldn't have to replace those each year. Maybe even use three led bars and 5 t5's.

Whats the dimensions on the cube?

You only want to use the tds meter in the freshwater. Can't wait to see the post!

I think cleaning the rock is a band aid until you find the root cause of the algae. But that is the simple solution until then. A sump sounds grrreeeeaaaatttt! I would really really like to see you get a tds meter on that raw water your getting from petco.

I replaced two hydor ato's with two smart ato micro's a year or so ago. I really like the micro. So i have a couple used hydor's laying around. They worked fine but just didn't work well for me due to the 3/4" acrylic and the magnets that came with them.

Sounds like your doing all the right things. I've never been a big biopellet guy as they just seem to clump together after time. I would put the output right next to the skimmer input to get the max performance from both pieces of equipment.

FOWLR, I don't think trates are to worrisome unless they are getting ridiculous but I've read many times where they are 100+. 40 doesn't seem to high unless your getting unwanted algae growth everywhere, which would be one of my concerns in a FOWLR. Other than that just keep those pellets tumbling and you should be fine. I would also run a large skimmer if it was me.

All I drink is that delicious Taxman beer and RODI ; ) This reminds me of the ich debate

The drinking RODI water comes up in every forum atleast once a year. So far I have survived 10+yrs of drinking ro and rodi water. My dogs have not died because of it either. You'll have a 50/50 mix of people who say its safe or isn't safe. You have to think about it in the fact you get your nutrients from your food, not your water. Sure if you sat around and only ate rice and rodi water that would not be healthy, but if you are drinking rodi, fruit juice, coffee, other drinks and eating a healthy or somewhat healthy diet you'll be just fine. I have heard people say if you only drink rodi that the water will start pulling ions and what not from your body.....i find this pretty funny personally but to each there own! I think people should be more worried about stuffing McDonalds, taco bell, cigarettes, alcohol, processes foods or non organic foods......vs pure water : ) Also growing up in Southern Indiana and seeing such a high cancer rate and such a polluted water source (Ohio River) its not just a coincidence imo. This is why i started with ro and rodi water, because I then knew what i was drinking.

FWIW, I have around 300g worth of tank's and my water bill is generally $25 a month, sewer around $60. I don't think it will make much of a difference having an RODI. In fact I think you will save quite a bit vs buying the water from petco, not to mention time : ) Waste water is different for every system, some are 1:4 and some are 1:1, depends on system, temperature of raw water and PSI.