Hi everyone, My wife Clare and I Gordon hail from Conway. I remembered attending your fragging get together at Pet Country when the previous owners held the get together there. We are the proud owners of a 135 gal with a 55 gal sump saltwater aquarium. The system is seven years old and we still have the blue chromis we used to cycle the tank up. The tank is stocked lightly with one whiteface brown tang, maroon clownfish, foxface, and one blue chromis. All the fish are 6 years or older. Clare and I are retired now and want to restore the beauty of our tank. Long story short we were in Bremerton Washington for three months to assist my son with his new home. My wife's best friend was looking after the tank and used our saltwater to replenish our tank basically killing every coral we had. I was surprised to see the fish still alive when we arrived home. The salinity was 132 and the nitrate was 160ppm. Lesson learned for us, make sure the person that is going to take care of your tank knows what they are doing!!! Well we are on the journey of bringing the tank back to its original glory. Changed out the water (still doing that at 20gallons a weekend), Testing twice a week and hopefully in April everything will be stabilized to once again start adding zoanthiids and mushroom corals. Our Orphek LEDs will arrive in April as well. The current hood uses 96 watt compact bulbs and they are hard to come by and expensive as the technology is being replaced. Clare loves your frag meetings and we actually had two of the frags doing well until the incident. We also wanted to get together with like minded people that love their tanks. So hi all and we look forward to meeting some of you!
Hiya, Welcome back...and so sorry to hear about your tank issues. We'll be having another fragging event at the May meeting at the Fish Tank. So, maybe by then you'll be able to start restocking the tank. If not, one of us will be happy to hold your frags until your tank is stable. Kim/Benton, AR
Thanks for the reply Kim. We will be there for the fragging event. The system is doing fine except for nitrate. Going to change out 40 gallons and see what happens. Strange all of my other parameters are fine but that. I think it is from her using tap water as I tested our and it indeed has nitrate in it.
Great to have you GCTIII! I live in Conway also. Would love to see your tank. Our next meeting is April 16, tentatively scheduled to be in Cabot. If you would like to go there are a couple others of us in Conway and we could car pool. Keep us updated on your nitrate issue. I'm curently using Marine Pure ceramic blocks and low dose carbon dosing with some success.
