FrugalReef Blog

Well, It’s been a long time since I’ve written about my corner tank!  The reason is, I’ve finally taken the leap and coughed up the money for a 150W Metal Halide light.  I purchased a frogspawn, a new clam, a feather star, and a beautifull pink hard coral I’ve never seen before.

Now that I’m going to make a serious attempt to keep corals I decided to start paying closer attention to my water parameters.   My calcium was about 280mg/L about a week ago.  I’ve been dosing with Kent’s Calcium Chloride mix and purple up.  I discontinued use of purple up after I read a bunch of nasty comments about it on the internet, as I decided that calcium supplimentation was probably all I need.

My KH has dropped from 13dkh to 11dkh in the last week or so.  I assume this is because of the calcium chloride as I’ve read that it will have this effect.

My nitrate has risen from 20 to about 40.  I hope this is just temporary because of the new livestock.  I discovered that the water source I was using contained nitrate at about 60.  I’ve switched over to the very high quality DI water provided by my LFS and hopefully will see my Nitrate levels fall to 0 over the next few months.

I’m happy to say my little dragonet is still kicking it around the tank.  I do see lots of pods at night, but he’s still very thin and I’d like to get him in a bigger tank as soon as I can afford it.  I lost my blue linkia and my emerald crab, but my orange starfish appears to be doing fine.  I’ve read that these starfish don’t often do well in captivity, had I known, I probably wouldn’t have purchased them.

My hippo tang, clown fish, and my little yellow goby are all fat and happy.  I’ve been alternating their diet between algae pellets, frozen mysis shrimp and frozen algae gut loaded brine shrimp.  I still dose my tank with a capfull of microalgae every other day or so.  I can tell when it needs it based on if my christmas tree worm is out or contracted.   If he’s not out I toss a in a splash.