Author Archives: Justin Fox

Latest FTS.

I’ve been dosing the tank with a teaspoon of sugar for the past few days and today I did a nitrate test and I’m glad to say it’s finally come down! My nitrates are sitting at 25ppm now. I’m not 100% sure it was the Prodibio I was dosing. I’m thinking it was the sugar which caused my skimmer to go a little crazy (I’ve been pulling out a lot of smelly wet skimmate daily).

This is the Piranha Float, my new magnetic glass cleaner. I’ve been using shit ones ever since the 90’s but I read some rave reviews on this American product (due to the strength of their magnets) and I decided to splurge the crazy $68 to buy one. Turns out it’s ridiculously awesome and I doubt I’ll ever have to get the razor out to scrape algae off the glass ever again.

My camera really struggles to capture shots of anything inside the tank. This is the only macro shot that worked out of the 15 or so shots I took.

Shot looking down the right side of the tank. You can see a whole lot of cyano bacteria growing all over the place. Combination of high nitrates + too much light too perhaps.

Also, these LED’s came in the mail from eBay/Hong Kong. They’re 1.8W E27 38 LED Blue Light Spotlight Bulbs so they screw right into a lot of lights. They’re super bright and cost just $5.85 each shipped! I just need to figure out how to hang then in the hood now!

We’re still keeping Mia in her room at nights and she sleeps through the entire night but come 6am she’ll meow. Her meow is more of an “oooooooyyyyyyy!” It’s so cute that it doesn’t bother Christina and I much!

It took only 4 days for the Bysen/bsled LED’s to arrive from China.

How they sit on my stand.

The timers were impossible to figure out but with the help from this forum I’ve set them up nicely (blue lights on in the morning, white blue then white white blue then white blue and blue again at night, very nice).

They’re crazy bright, so much so that I’m not sure we can handle them (we had dinner last night with all house lights off and just the LED’s running!).

A few things: The timers look so dodgey. One of them even uses different screws to the other two. Each light has 3 manual on/off buttons on top and one of the buttons on one unit doesn’t work (but the light still works). My stand is bowing a little at the middle which was to be expected (dodgey!).

EDIT: The glare from hanging them was just too bright and I didn’t trust my stand, nor the thin cabling used to hang the lights with so I decided to whip out the jigsaw and hack up my old hood. Here’s the result:

No glare, units stay cool and away from salt water which is great considering they’re not made for this harsh environment (they are originally designed to grow plants!) and it’s a safer set-up for Mia (imagine coming home to a dead kitten in your tank?!).

Mia’s getting really good at jumping. She can now jump up onto the kitchen bench and dinner table too. Here she is about to jump up onto the box Christina’s new iMac came in.

And on top of the box, checking out the garden.

PS: Yes she’s getting bigger every day!

Algae bloom.

I did a huge 120litre water change the other day, tested my nitrates and they were still sitting at about 50ppm. Over it I decided to take some more drastic measures. I’ve read a lot into carbon dosing, basically, if you add something carbon based (such as sugar or vodka), bacteria will feed on it and their number will increase. The bacteria will be consuming more and more nitrate to build their cells and the excess bacteria in turn will be skimmed out by my skimmer, resulting in lowering my nitrate reading.

I decided to try putting one teaspoon of sugar into the tank. The next morning the entire tank was cloudy, this was a good thing as it was most likely an algae bloom and too right my skimmer went nuts and was pulling out more crap than usual. I’ve tested for nitrates again this morning and the reading is looking a little better. Sad thing is I lost my clam. Everything else is doing fine though.

I’m so over this crappy tank. I’m starting to seriously think about doing it right straight off the bat. IE: A custom tank made to my dimensions (I’d like a deeper, not taller tank), a proper weir + sump and plumbing set-up and with some serious tech equipment to boot.