Christy's Reef

I seem to be fighting a losing battle with this new ca reactor system. The calcium is still at 345 ppm or so, alk at 5.1 (which is why I'm getting TN) surprisingly the mg levels are still fairly high (1290 ppm). I've dosed the tank with some baked baking soda while I get this whole thing figured out. I noticed some tissue necrosis on my all time fave coral (here it is pre TN which is starting at the bottom branch to the left) so this means war! Of course if I can't get the reactor figured out I have no idea what to do. I guess I'll have to incorporate some washing soda into my topoff or something.

Anyhoo, more on this reactor thing. So I bought a new needle valve and installed it on the weekend, turns out it turns itself off too. Sheesh. Nice waste of $25. Anyway, apparently theres some nuts on it that you can turn down to the knob to keep it from turning itself off, and hopefully I got it licked. Also I discovered that the impeller shaft on the reactor pump was broken so I swiped an impeller off a different pump and it seemed to be okay. Guess I'll have to look into getting a new one from somewhere. I guess that didn't exactly help the situation but mostly I'm more concerned about the alkalinity than anything else.

So thinking that the whole flow thing was affecting my purple cross I took off a pretty good chunk of my tan cap. Quite frankly I think the tan cap is kind of ugly and while it did have sort of a purply rim on it, it was pretty washed out, and only after I fragged it and set it on the bottom did I realize that the lights sort of washed it out, and it does indeed have quite a striking purpleness to it in lower light (even more so in natural light ie. the bag I put it in to tote it off to its next home :P). Anyway, the flow seems to be a bit better around the PC, not sure whether this will help or if its just the low alk situation thats causing the problem. I'm thinking I might score a larger piece of PC anyways, hell its only money right? ;)

So a friend of mine is taking down his tank and moving soon. He wants to either redo his tank or start a new tank, he hasn't decided which but I'm keeping a few corals for him in the meantime. I didn't upload any of the photos though cuz I'm so smrt *sigh*. Anyway, most of them are pretty browned due to a power outage last winter (29 hours and 50-60F water) and they just haven't quite recovered. I got a stylophora (apparently originally pink), a brown pocillipora (orig pink) and a couple of other brown acros. Be interesting to see what they do in my tank. I'll have to get the "before" and "after" photos on here soon so I can track their progress.