What is your PH, and why should you care?

What is your PH, and why should you care?

PH Test kit

Well if you have a marine fish tank, PH is something you should know about.  A reef tank has to be more careful than a fish only tank.

First let us look at what PH is – PH is the acidity or alkalinity of the water.  The higher the number, the more alkaline the water is, and the lower the number, the more acidic the water is.  The acceptable levels of PH is 7.7 to 8.4 for a fish only tank, and a reef tank should be between 8.0 and 8.4. Acids in your tank usually come from three main sources – excess CO2, nitric acid from biological filtration and organic acids from fish poop. As acids first work on lowering your buffers in your water, such as calcium. However, once your buffers run low, then your PH number will start to drop and the health of your tank may be in jeopardy due to poor water quality.

ph test kit 8.3

Here is a sample from The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide Demo tank. It reads 8.3, which is a very healthy reading. It is rare that your PH will go over 8.4, and it is much more common for the reading to go lower.  8.3 is a great number for a healthier habitat for your fish and corals to live.

A good practice to keeping your PH up is constant partial water changes as this refreshes natural buffers and restores trace elements into the water. The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide also recommends using a calcium reactor to help put back in trace elements and keep your PH levels at a high constant.

Rotate Pump Parts

Rotate Pump Parts

After months and months of use, pumps build up calcium deposits that are difficult to clean. Even if you scrub them by hand and look clean, they still have a layer of build up.  So what is the best way to clean the build up off your pumps? Soak the pumps for a few days in white vinegar.  It is cheap and extremely effective.

Soak Your Parts

However, you can’t have your main pump turned off for two days while you soak your impellers and back plates. This lack of circulation could kill off your whole tank.  So what do you do? The friction caused by the calcium deposits lessens the pump efficiency, until eventually they often won’t even start turning.

Try buying a spare impeller and back plate. The

new parts

cost is about 1/3 the price of a pump, and should literally make your pumps run like new. Now you can soak the other back plate and impeller as long as you want as now there is no hurry to get them back, as you have two sets. Replacing our two BlueLine pumps impellers and back plate, took no more than half an hour. We run a 70 for our main pump and a 55 for the protein skimmer.  The water level on the protein skimmer shot way up, showing an increase in efficiency.

Now we can let the

new in, old out for a wash

old parts soak for a good long time and not have to worry about a quick return. The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide is very big on protecting your investment in your tank, and this is a good way to keep keep costs down while giving you another layer of protection for your reef tank.

How To Take A Great Picture

For people who have wrote in        and  said such nice things about  our pictures in our blog, we thank you for the compliments. I have been making my living for over twenty years taking pictures, both still and moving,  and this article will give you some of my tips on how to take a good picture.

There is one tip that is far more important than any of the others. It is a tip that is so simple you will think that it is silly, but it is my best tip I could give you. It is a tip every professional photographer must practice if they are to be good at their craft and will help the amateur improve immediately.

The golden rule: If you want a good picture, take a lot of them.

This sounds childishly simplistic, but it is the #1 rule to taking a good

Good pictures

picture. If you take 100 pictures of, lets say a fish, than you have 100 chances at getting a good shot of that fish.  If the fish stays away from your camera and in the live rock, and you only get two pictures of the fish, the odds go way down on you getting a good shot.  Why do you think when you see a movie premier and the stars walk by the photographers there is this huge flashbulb frenzy? Because all the pros exercise this one rule. Even though you think you have a good shot – keep clicking. Many times when you get back home and look at the shots on a big screen,  you see the imperfections. With a fish perhaps they are out of focus and the live rock behind them is in perfect focus. With a person it could be that their eyes are half closed, or they are not looking the right way.  The digital age has really made a tremendous difference in this whole concept.  When we shot film, it had to be processed and was expensive to make a mistake. Now, your mistakes cost you the time it takes for you to delete them, which is not long and does not cost any money.

If you are shooting your family on vacation, I have used the pocket cameras with great success. They are small, light weight, inexpensive and offer very good quality, especially for the money. However, if you want to take some nicer shots of your fish tank, a single lens reflex camera is the way to go. The single lens reflex are the bigger cameras that have interchangeable lens. When you push your finger on the shutter button, the picture takes almost instantly. Where as when you use a pocket camera, you find yourself sometimes wondering if the camera is working after you have pressed the button. Zooming and focusing are far superior on an SLR camera which are crucial for shooting fish. The brand I have found most popular with the professionals, including myself, is Canon. Nikon, too, has many loyal pros and has since caught up to Canon in image quality.  There are many Nikon fans who will disagree on my choice, but they are both excellent and reliable tools.

Next we should talk about lighting. As we mentioned in The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide, your fish tank and your lighting is one of your brushes that you use to create your masterpiece.  To shoot fish in a tank, it is important to point out that fish move. And because they move, it is helpful to have more light on them, as this allows your exposure time to decrees. You want a fast exposure while shooting a moving object as to cut down on the blur.

There is also something that is important to have, and that is a good eye.

Freddie

Some people have it

right away and others have to develop it.  While we were on vacation, my older son took one of the most beautiful pictures I had ever seen. The composition was perfect, with clouds, beach, a ship & mountains. Everything just worked to make the shot great. Any professional would have been extremely proud of the shot.  However, my oldest son was six years old. My advice to him before he took the shot? “Son, don’t touch that camera, that is not a toy”.

yellow tang

There are all sorts of rules of balance, and proportion. These rules  can help but I think you can learn more by experimenting and finding out what works for you. Going back to the golden rule – take a lot of pictures.

Finally, take time to learn the camera itself. Each one has a different

clown family

manual, and each camera does somethings different. These manuals are the most boring reads on the planet. I am a professional and I dread them. But I read them because it makes sense to know your tools that you are using.

I hope you have found these tips useful. Please keep writing me and let me know what you think!

Comming Out Of The Dark

Another way to enjoy your tank’s beauty is to add a little night light.

Night Lights

Night lights not only allow  you to observe your fish, corals and inverts in a natural way at night,  but they help your scavengers who come out at night looking for a meal. These night light help your hermit crabs, shrimp and other clean up crew members  survival in seeing and finding their food.

We give high marks to Currant Lunar Link  Light System. The system is expandable, so if you want to add more light you don’t have to get a whole new system. You just buy the amount of lights

Night Lights

you want. We started with four units on The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide Demo Tank. For about a year or so this was fine. However, over time, all lights dim.  When we changed out one end, we noticed a very large difference between the old and the new.  So we would recommend you really looking at your night lights every 6-12 months to see if they need replacing. Now we have seven night lights on the demo tank and it is brighter than when we first started the tank.

green carpet florescing

We chose to use the blue light for aesthetic reasons. However,  one real treat we noticed when put in the new lights was the amount of  corals and anemones that were florescent under the blue light. Our green carpet looked even more magical at night that it did in the day! There is truly an “OH, WOW” factor added to your fish tank.

Florescent Favites

Of course, some corals don’t fluoresce at all, while others much more so. Here you can just see where around the eyes of this Favites coral there is some fluoresce.

While with this Pink and Green Tip Torch

pink & green tip torch

is very highly fluorescent. The tips of this coral move around a great deal, even at night. We had to use a tripod and time exposure to get this and many of these pictures for this article.

In conclusion, night lights are a inexpensive way to improve both the beauty and health of your tank. If you are thinking about a color for your night lights, blue might give you another magical moment to enjoy your tank.

Increase Water Flow

We wanted to increase the water flow of the Demo tank from The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide.  Water flow helps give oxygen to the tank ,  helps to  remove waste and aides in the feeding of corals. In many tanks, more water flow is better. It is rare that a tank has too much water flow. How ever, if you have Seahorses and other delicate species, too much water flow is not a good thing.

overflow

Some people like to drill into the bottom of the fish tank and put returns into the bottom of the tank. I have heard that there are many fans of this method, but we feel that the less holes in the tank, the less likely bad things are to happen, such as a leak, a crack, or faulty check valve during a power outage.  Fans of below the water line tank returns might be screaming now how safe it is and how good it is for the tank, and how much neater the plumbing looks. Hey, there are many ways to set up a fish tank. There is no one correct way. This is part of the fun of having a tank. Do it the way you want! Don’t worry. Either way the tank will be fine which ever one you do, as long as you do a good job.

If you have a good pump running the return from your sump back to your tank, you might be able to increase your water flow.

Blueline

Running The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide Demo Tank we have a Blue Line 70. This is a very reliable, powerful pump, that we were not using to it’s fullest .

sump and pumps

However, when we opened up the valve from the Blue Line 70 to the main tank returns, the water level on the tank got high, as the water was not going over the overflows quickly enough. So what did we do? We went to our tool kit and got a file, and filed the overflows to widen the space between the plastic spacers. This increased the water flow. Now we were able to turn the valve open to the tank returns from the  Blueline to allow more water to go back into the tank quicker, thus increasing our water flow.

Be careful not to knock out a large hole in your plastic overflow covers as this can cause excessive noise from the uneven rushing water. Another option to filing is drilling a hole or holes with a power drill and bit.

“Easy Blade is a must have!!!”

Easy Blade

I read a review of Easy Blade and decided to give it a try.  The concept seemed great: attache a sharp metal blade to my existing MagFloat and it would be easier to clean my glass.

When I got the package through the mail, I was surprised by it’s small size and simplicity. The directions were easy enough – just Super Glue the plastic handle to the back of the glass magnet cleaner.  I did this in just a few minutes. After the glue dried, I put the blade on and then  the small plastic cover,  screwed it together and gave it a try.

Wow! What a time saver!

Easy Blade

This products is absolutely Great! This simple little product will save me hours and hours every year. Also I won’t have work nearly as hard to clean my glass.  Fantastic!

The one thing you have to do after you are done is take the blade out and dry it as it is metal and if left in the tank will rust.

You could not invest your money better in any tank maintenance product. A must have!

Like New!

after cleaning

Stains are gone! Make the old new! Works better than new! Will take you kids to school, walk the dog, cook you dinner and floss your teeth all for three easy payments of $19.95!!!

What are we talking about here?

The hot new cleaner on the market? The can’t miss must have new product? No! We are talking about plain, boaring white vinigar. And it doesn’t even cost $19.95 or even close! Just get it at your local suppermarket for under a couple of bucks and you are ready to start cleaning your pumps.

before cleaning

Let it soak!

Please note the before and after pictures. This represents about 1 1/2 years of use as these two pumps are covered in purple and green algae. We have been extremely happy with these two SEIO M820 – they have been true workhorses. However, even though we have cleaned the interior several times, we have never really tried to do anything about the exterior, until now.

We poured 1/2 a bottle of white vinigar into a bucket, and the hottest tap water possible and let the pump soak for five hours. Although it was slow going, most of the algae came off using a scrapper, toothbrush and sponge.

Not only are the pumps more pleasing to look at, but this will help their efficiency as well. Thank you to Scott Grossclose at Aquarium Specialty ( who also distributes The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide) for this tip, as when I asked him to sell me a product, he told us to just use the old white vinegar and hot water as he feels it works as well as anything you could buy.

The Free Tank!

The Free Tank!!!

If you stay in the hobby long enough, they will appear – The Free Tank!!! People move, people get busy, people don’t want to look at their dirty tanks anymore. And there you are waiting like the Rock Fish to ambush his prey and sweep up the free tank. Well, maybe not quite so dramatic, but you can get lucky and get some really cool stuff.

new friends

I got lucky a few weeks ago. A friend of Bob’s, the host of The Reef Aquarium DVD, A Set Up & Maintenance Guide,  was moving and did not want to take care of her 14 gallon Bio Cube Nano any more. I had always wanted a nano for my office and when this one came available I jumped at it.

little maroon clown

It needed a good cleaning as the algae had really built up, but as it was only 14 gallons it did not take long at all to clean. I kept all the fish and rock in the tank and just did a 50% water change, making sure the salinity and temperature were the same. In the 210 gallon demo tank, I am not as exacting when doing a water change as I change such a small percentage every week (5%) that the tank will absorb any variation in temperature or salinity.

Bio Cube Protein Skimmer

I added an Oceanic Bio Cube Protein Skimmer. It is not my MTC- HSA-1000, but at least it fits in the tank and I can still close the lid. The jury is still out on other things for the tank that I wish to add. However, it looks like everyone is doing quite well right now. There is a small Yellow Tang, two Blue Green Chromis, two Blennies, a Cardinal, a Cleaner and a Blood shrimp and a Maroon Clown. I thought it would be a little much for the tank, but they are all so small and everyone gets along well.

The Cardinal Rule

Don’t forget my Cardinal Rule! Make sure you know when you get into the hobby, that when you decide you want to get out of the hobby, all the money you spend on your tank will probably go right down the drain. Very few people starting out want to risk their money on a scratched used tank. Thus, resale on used tanks are almost nothing.

“That’s as heavy as a car!”

a lot of support

“That’s as heavy as a car!” is what the architect said when we starting talking to him about the weight of the  demo tank. With the 35 gallon sump and 210 demo tank that was 245 gallons. Multiply by 8.5 to be on the safe side, as water is closer to 8.1 pounds, we have 2,083 pounds. Add 300 pounds of live rock, and 250 pounds of sand, extra water standing by for water changes along with pumps, salt for mixing and everything else you need close by for a successful reef aquarium, we estimated the weight to be about 3,000 pounds.

What the contractor did was rip out the floor boards and run them east/west instead of north/south. This allowed the weight to be distributed on every floor board instead of just the two directly under the tank.

(An interesting aside: this riping out the floor opened up the downstairs floor to the sky. As you can imagine with a contractor, it took a while to close it up. The contractor sent one of his guys to protect our basement floor and he used one piece of plywood flat – no angle – and one little tarp. One night while it was open in the summer, at about 10 PM the skies opened up. I was there waiting with five buckets. At one area next to the window, it poured! It was like someone had turned on three faucets full blast onto the carpet. Fourtunately I had a Pythone and was able to siphone the water out from the 55 gallon garbage can. Needless to say, the contractors named was mentioned several times by the lady of the house in a not too flattering manner…)

We also used two steel beams bolted together (top part of the picture). This steel has kept the floor from sagging and the tank level.

Most tanks will hold up fine with regular construction. We know of a couple of 180 gallon tanks that are on a second floor and doing fine with no added support. But we like to recommend that you use caution and good sense. If you go big, make sure you are safe, because going light for support on a big tank can be a crash worse than anything the stock market can do.

Maintenance on your ozonator

Nitric Acid build up in ozonator

Be careful to have dry air go to your ozonator! If you don’t, it can cause a build up of Nitric acid, a sticky brown substance that will make a mess all over your plumbing and cause your ozonator to stop working. This was a mistake on our part, not attaching a dryer right away. This allowed the Nitric acid to build up over time and damage the ozonator. Here is our Ozotech ozonator with the top open and the bulb out. We cleaned off most of the Nitric acid which was on the bulb and the inside. Next we tested the unit to make sure the bulb still lit (it did).

dryer mounted

We hung the unit back in place with a toggle bolt and hung our new air dryer nearby, attaching it with clear hose to the air intake of the ozonator.

Crystals rurn from blue to pink

The crystals that Ozotech supplies with the dryer start off as blue then turn to pink as they acquire moisture. Once they gels turn all pink, you can either microwave or bake (recommended) the gels until they turn blue again. This can be repeated several times, but not indefinitely, as the gels eventually loose their moisture holding capability. Here you see the crystals that have turned to pink, so we put them in the toaster oven, turning them over every few minutes, and in about 40 minutes they were ready to go back to work. This 8” pie pan worked alright, but next time I would use a large cookie sheet to increase the surface area and decrease the cooking time.

dry crystals to blue

We just put the crystals back in the dryer, screwed it in, and we were in business!