Author Archives: Justin Fox

Our baby Russian Blue kitty Mia will be with us next week and Christina and I have been getting her room ready (she’ll stay in this room for at least a week until we slowly introduce her to the rest of the house).

Yep I’ve got to get my guitar gear outta there quick smart.

Pink? OK but only if I can have skulls on it.

My Uncle John, who like me, also spends a lot of time in his man cave (which is his shop!).

Today I visited my Uncle John at Beach Aquariums in Bondi Beach. He had a LOT of stock from 2 aquarium shops that have recently gone down (Coral Sea from Randwick and another from out west somewhere). He’s basically helping these guys liquidate their stock so I picked up some bargains.

I picked up some salt mix and 4 100W heaters. I would have gone for 2 x 200w heaters but they wouldn’t have fit in my tiny sump. These 4 will fit just fine and I can now remove the massive Jager heater in the tank (which has done good for the past few years despite the condensation happening inside the heater).

Heaters in place in the sump.

My new nitrate test kit read 50. 50?! 50 is really bad as it really should read 0. There are a lot of potential contributing factors: I’ve realised that the RO unit I’ve been running for top-up water hasn’t had cartridges changed since 2007 (my bad). I’ll sort that out ASAP. No water changes for months, no skimmer maintenance and old filter media in the canister would not have helped and the huge rock wall I had in the tank was always against me (so much detritus build up back there).

I decided to remove a LOT of rock work to aid flow and I’ve basically made islands (no rock is leaning up against the rear glass any more).

Latest FTS.

More updates (and water changes) to come!

2007 – The tank (when it was amazing!).

Initially my 6ft tank was a freshwater set-up and in 2007 Christina (who wanted nemo’s!) and I started over and set it up as a marine tank. It was in it’s prime by the end of 2007. I was obsessed with aquaria (even hanging out on fish forums) and I was changing 10-20% of the tank water weekly with natural salt water which I collected at the boat ramp in Botany (heavy and depending on the tide, sometimes dangerous work!).

2008 and a lot of the hard corals had died off.

At some point I failed to keep up the tank maintenance and all of the more fragile corals started dying off one by one (pretty sad as most if not all of it had been plucked from the ocean). I only just realised today that it’s been 8 months since I’ve changed any water (!) and I hadn’t serviced the equipment nor did I change the light bulbs (pretty important in a marine tank as many corals feed off light).

2009 and the anemones are shrinking (read: dying).

I spent today taking everything apart. Before I did anything I took a photo of my current set-up:

Neglected tank.

Amazingly all my fish are fine. I put it down to the system I spent a lot of time designing when I was super into it in 07/08. On the left is a small canister filter which runs filter media which reduces phosphates. The white bucket on the left is filled with highly filtered tap water and when the tank volume drops (due to evaporisation) a sensor triggers the pump inside this bucket to fill up the sump. Next is my remote deep sand bed which is designed to reduce nitrates, next to that is a protein skimmer which is hanging off a sump which gets water via an overflow box on the back of the main tank and a pump in the sump redirects water back into the main tank.

Whilst it’s a largely automated system, it turns out my protein skimmer was completely non-functional (blocked up) and 2 out of 4 bulbs had blown. I used to have a light and a lot of green seaweed growing in the sump which produced a whole lot of micro organisms which in turn fed the fish and critters in the tank but that all died off ages ago. The media in the small canister would be long expired and as you can see there’s a lot of salt creep all over the sump and skimmer.

I’ve cleaned everything up and ordered new filter media for the canister, new bulbs too. I’ve serviced the skimmer and it’s now working as well as the first day I bought it. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to get the tank into such great shape again but I’m at least going to attempt to keep a monthly routine which will include servicing the skimmer and preforming a 20% water change. More updates as they come!

My new anthias which have added a lot more movement and colour to my tank.

My blue chromis have finally picked each other off and there’s only one guy left (there were 4 of them initially) so today Christina and I dropped into Kims in Ashfield in search for some schooling fish to add to the tank.

Schooling fish tend to be quite dumb and not afraid of people walking up to the tank, this helps the more intelligent and sometimes jumpy fish to calm down (my yellow and blue tangs tend to bolt for cover when I near the tank).

We spotted these beautiful Anthias. They school, they’re hardy and they’re placid too. The males and pink and females are orange but they can change sex too (and thus change colours). Pretty interesting huh? We bought 5 of them and we also got a whole lotta morphs too (Kim looked after us with a nice discount as well).