In this episode of Mr. Saltwater Tank TV, I tour Austin Aqua Farms and get to see what makes this place so special.

Did I mention I happened to walk out of there w/out breaking out my Mastercard?

The post raised some good points about automating systems and keeping your bioload low so that if something goes wrong, your tank won’t crash quickly. However, what the author is really pointing to is that when the time you can devote to your reef is changing, then what you really need to do is change your tank personality.

When you change your tank personality, you’ll know how your tank will react. In the case of the author, he was going from a reef junkie to a tank dabbler. His tank isn’t his life anymore, but he still wants it to look good. He knew he’d be giving up going to every reef club meeting and selling frags, but that’s o.k. because selling coral isn’t the big thing to do on his list. What did he do? He trimmed his corals way back so that they wouldn’t be touching each other and so that he didn’t have to work on them every week. Will his tank look less grown out? Yes, but that’s not important to him anymore.

Another way to think about changing tank personalities is that it gives you permission to make changes in your tank without the guilt. If you are changing from a reef junkie to a tank dabbler, then you know you aren’t going to be staring at, or working on your tank all the time.  The author of the article calls it “neglecting”, but really, you are just changing your tank personality and your approach to your tank changes with it. Its not neglect, its just a different level of care for how you are approaching your tank. No guilt needed because you aren’t neglecting anything.

Changing your tank personality in the other direction has the same effect. If you know you are going from a tank dabbler to a reef enthusiast, then you’ll need to be testing your tank more often, dipping corals and watching for pests. I.e…more time spent on your tank and your tank is now part of the family.

Hint: make sure your spouse/significant other/friends understand what’s happening so that they don’t think you’ve abandoned them for a box of glass.

There’s nothing wrong with changing your tank personality and changing the level of care you give your tank. By knowing which tank personality you are, and which personality you want to end up, the changes will feel less like neglect and instead more like a simple shift in your tank.

Read more here (nytimes.com)

The after math

My whole top center of my tank came tumbling down. By removing the piece of rock (yellow arrow in pic below), the arch in the center of my tank rotated forward, sending the rock on top of it (pink arrow) tumbling to the bottom of my tank. Next thing I know, my 30 minutes of tank maintenance becomes 2 hrs and I’ve got several frags on plugs to show for it! (See all the small pieces on my sand bed in the pic above…yeah, coral carnage)

Tank Before the Fall

The #1 rule of aquascaping is that if you change anything – move a rock, rotate a rock, move your tank – you’ll never get the aquascaping back to how it was before. I was rudely reminded of this rule yesterday as I tried to get my rock back to EXACTLY how was before with no luck.

In the end, I rotated the large piece on top (pink arrow in the above pic) and stuck a piece of rock behind it to hold it up (see below). I’m still warming up to the new aquascaping as I really miss my old setup, but the new setup is stronger and less likely to shift as now I have epoxy on my side.

new wedge

Moral of the story:

#1: Don’t mess with your rock work unless absolutely necessary.

#2: Epoxy is your friend. Even if everything looks and feels rock solid, add in a piece of epoxy to hold everything together. This brand is the only brand I’ve found that actually works. Below are some pics of where I epoxied to rock to keep it all in place.

Epoxy on the rock that caused the fall

More Epoxy for backup

It’s the same premise for changing your vehicle’s oil (you do change it don’t you?) – before there is a problem, you change the oil to keep everything humming along smoothly.

For example, I harp on replacing lighting every 6 months. Perhaps your bulbs still have some usable life in them, but you won’t know until corals start bleaching out and dying off. The time you’ll have to wait for your corals to recover is a lot longer (and painful to watch) versus just ponying up some cash and changing out your bulbs.

There are plenty of other items in/around your tank that need regular replacing.

Take RO/DI filters for example. You won’t know they are shot until you start seeing issues in your tank – nuisance algae, diatom outbreaks, etc. By changing your filters regularly, then you won’t have an algae issue to battle. Cost of RO/DI filters? $25-$50 depending on your system.

Being proactive towards preventing issues will save you TONS of money and headaches in the long term. Sure RO/DI filters aren’t sexy or fun to look at, but algae outbreaks and dead corals are worse.

Below is a list of items to replace on your tank and how often you should replace them – just in time for your weekend tank maintenance (you are doing that – right?)

Here’s an example of a common place people try to cut corners: The use of grocery store items as supplements in place of buying name brand supplements.

Money saved…a couple of dollars.

Potential disaster to your tank = immeasureable.

When you stop to think about it, you spend LOTS of money on corals and fish for your tank. Why would you risk the investment you have in your tank to save a couple of dollars?

Grocery store items such as epson salts (a Mg booster) and picking lime (a kalk substitute) aren’t pure. They may contain lots of other compounds that we don’t know about and aren’t listed on the bottle. So when you dose the salts or the lime, you are dosing the unknown compounds as well. The result = potential for tank crashes, bleaching corals, etc.

Name brand supplements are often pharmaceutical grade pure so you can know when you are dosing the supplements, you are JUST dosing the supplement. No unknown compounds to wreak havoc on your tank.

Your tank is an investment. Don’t try to cut corners to save some money. Instead, treat the tank as the investment its worth and it will pay you back in folds.

Why this bends people out of shape, I’ll never know as buying and selling is basic capitalism at work.

Yes, someone is making money off the people buying the frags. Which they should – the person who took the risk to buy the whole colony, not knowing if they’d make their money back – gets rewarded. This action is basic economics at work- more risk -> more reward. The people buying the frags could have bought the colony, but they didn’t. Probably because they didn’t want to pay the price – i.e. take the risk

Also, the person buying/fragging out the colony provided value (again basic economics – more value -> higher price) to the frag purchaser. The colony purchaser took the time to buy the colony, pick it up/pay for shipping, make sure the colony was going to live and is pest-free, cut/mounted the frags, posted the frags for sale, etc. For the added value, the colony owner gets rewarded with a higher price.

Reefkeepers on the other side of the table argue that people shouldn’t be making money off a hobby. This idea is insane. If you can provide value and take on risk so that others don’t, then you should be rewarded for it. If you can make a couple of bucks while you are at it, more power to you. If you can make a full time living off of doing it, let’s write a book about it!

Now, if you are ripping people off by mis-representing your corals by saying they are 1″ when they are actually 1/2″, then you deserve to not make any money and there is no room for you in the reef keeping world if you are selling frags or even trading them.

But to shun fellow reefkeepers because they utilized basic economics is just wrong.

Both of these tanks had additional live rock added to them after the tank was already up and running and 100% cycled.

What happened next?

Green hair algae outbreaks, mini-cycles, and bleached corals. Oh, then owners then got frustrated and quit the hobby.

If your tank is established, do not add significant amounts of new live rock to it. If you want to add some small (3bs or less) pieces, that’s fine, but any piece over 5 lbs and no more than 10 lbs total should be added to your tank.

Adding “new” of live rock will cause a mini-cycle, nuisance algae outbreaks and cause headaches for you and your tank.

However, If your tank doesn’t have enough live rock (a good rule of thumb is 1 pound per gallon) then add new pieces slowly – 1 piece every 2 weeks.

And if you haven’t setup your tank yet, then plan on buying dead rock instead of live rock. (Read here to find out why). Also plan on buying enough rock all at once so that all the rock can cycle together.

Your tank will thank you for it.

Here’s an example.

A reef keeping friend of mine was battling bleaching SPS corals so decided he wanted to start dosing the Zeovit system. He tried it out for a week. He didn’t see any results, so he switched to doing heavy water changes. 2 weeks later…no results. Then he switched his lighting and waited 2 weeks…nothing. Then he heard about bio pellets and tried those. He started seeing some results after a week so then he decided he wanted to add back in the Zeovit system, etc…

Get the picture? He was constantly changing what he was doing with his tank.

When you choose a path for your tank, whether its your tank personality, carbon dosing, dosing 2 part solution, change of lighting or (fill in the blank for the path you’re headed on), the best thing you can do is stick to that path for at least 2 months.

Why?

Because:

1. Changes take time to affect your tank so you won’t see immediate results.
2. The more you change, the more you are throwing your tank for a loop and it doesn’t like that – it likes the same thing, every day, every time. More changes = more stress = not a happy tank

The only reason you should immediately change the path you are on is if you see negative results in your tank!

I.e: fish die off, corals bleaching or retracting, large algae growths, parameter (pH, ammonia/nitrite/nitrate) spikes.

Among ocean going vessels, there is a saying for this – “Skipper, hold your course”.

Hold your course, your tank will thank you.

In this episode of Mr. Saltwater Tank TV, I go to my friend Mike’s house, a die-hard reef junkie, to check out his 120G tank and all the glory that goes with it.