Sutton Reef - Diary February 2006

I got down to building the egg crate stands for the live rock. I used left over 32mm pipe, drilled holes and used B&Q plastic glue to stick them on. The glue set in 5 minutes. Then I created the walls using 6mm acrylic. I used aquarium sealer to stick these to floor of the tank.

The sand used for the main tank was Caribsea Argamax sugar sized sand. Before putting the sand in the tank I used a magnetic algae scraper to find any bits of iron. To my amazement, I actually found quite a bit.

Reading the forums there seems to be a lot of debate as to whether to wash the sand, put the sand in first, put the sand in last. I decided to put the sand in first. Once the water was in and the salt mixed, I stirred up all the sand using a piece of left over pipe.

I used a mix 60/40 using Caribsea Argamax sand and ultra fine marine white sand purchased from STM for the DSB.

WC 8/5/06

This week I mainly concentrated on filling the tank with RO/DI water, equipment, electrics

WC 8/05/06

Had quite a bit of vibration noise from the Sequence, decided to order some anti vibration feet from RS Components. This made a big difference. Will be adding this type of feet to all the pumps.

Took all week to fill the tank with RO/DI water, mixed and ready for live rock at the weekend.

Luckily Acropora House was having an open day on saturday and selling live rock at £5 per kg. Collected it, excellent stuff. Put in approximately 110kg.

WC 15/05/06

Asterina stars are starting to appear on the glass and also what I thought was a large turbo turned out to be a hermit crab (see the Hitchhikers section for pictures). Decided against the 2 bommies idea didn't seem to leave enough room for corals. Will have one large bommie through the centre of the tank. However will need to order another 50kg of LR to complete.

Testing everyday, don't seemed to have an ammonia spike, had a small nitrite spike (.1 ppm). Nitrates starting to climb from .5ppm initial to 2ppm (Tuesday).

Emptied the tank to below the weirs to replace the weir I took off. Stuck the old one back in place.

Started on the hood frame.

WC 22/05/06

Lighting

Added another 50kg of liverock

Macro algae starting to appear

More polyps starting to appear

The dreaded hair algae starting to appear, cleanup crew hopefully will be added this weekend. If I don't get an ammonium spike from the recent liverock.

Saturday (27/05/06)

Added some of the cleanup crew 25x Turbos, 25 x Hermit

Sunday (28/05/06)

Brown diatoms starting to appear on sand and some of the rocks.