Salt water tank help! Sand Only Filter & Additives to water?
Monday, September 21st, 2009 at
1:49 am
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Filed under: Water Filter System
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1. I only used the wheel for the first couple weeks of cycling to get the nitrites/nitrates working. Gives another place for bacteria to grow. Once that was done I took the wheel out and I still keep the filter cartridge in there but I also have a small bag of Purigen behind the blue cartridge. Or you can put bio-balls down in there, but you have to be careful not to override the filter or it might over flow onto your floor. You have to figure out what works with your filter.
Putting sand inside a bio-wheel filter system will ruin it faster over time. The sand will get trapped inside the propeller and not only will make it noisy but it wont work as well. Get a hang on the back refugem or one that goes under that tank if you want to do that.
2. The hands closing and opening sounds like a pulsing Xenia. I have one I have never fed it anything. I just make sure I do my weekly trace element treatments which consist of the iron, calcium, and other suppliments you listed. With a reef yes these suppliments are needed but no all corals need to be fed.
3. Anemones need good clean water and established tanks. I feed mine a small peice of frozen/thawed krill once a week. You can get a sheet of it for under $7 at Petco or Petsmart.
Live rock is better filtration than those blue sponges. Your lighting probably isnt strong enough for coral or anemones. Go to http://www.reefcentral.com youll find all the info you need
no it really isn’t good enough for keeping marine inverts alive, unless you have some live rock in the tank as well,
your water should be
sg 1.024 – 1.026
amo – 0
nitrites – 0
nitrates – less than 20 ppm (the lower the better)
phosphates – .03 or less
cal – 400-450 ppm
DKH – 8-12
mag – 1250-1350
your going to want 7watts per gallon if your growing sps or anemones
you can cut that in half if your using t-5 with individual reflectors
if your corals have a stony skeleton then yes you will need to dose calcium and magnesium, so if your "hands" are xenia then no you wont need to dose, but if its flower pot or pipe organ then you will
strontium may need dosing if your salt mix for water changes doesn’t contain any or enough, and there is a lot of debate on weather or not we should dose iodine at all, mainly because there are to many different iodine ions who knows if your dosing the right one and can you test for it an so on…..