heading in a good direction

Jade the Emerald Crab

Hermie Hancock

I haven’t posted for a while about my progress. I’ve been adding 20ppm Calcium everyday while monitoring the KH and the PH. So far so good, I’ve managed to bring the calcium from 280 to 340 and the Alkalinity has stayed between 7-8KH and the PH around 8.2 and 8.4 at 8pm. Another 4-5 days of calcium dosing and I will be in the desired level 420.

It’s 24 day and the Nitrates have been zero for quite some time and also the Phosphates are undetectable.

There was new addition to the Clean Up Crew:

1 Fancy Nassarius

3 Ceriths

3 Margaritas

1 Tri-color Tonga Hermit

After some researching I found out that the Margarita snails were more of a temperate water inhabitants and they are found from Baja to Alaska. They live around a month in a tropical aquarium. So they got acclimated in the bay next door and let them live in more temperate water than my 80F Nano-Reef.

So the total of the CUC for now is:

2 Fancy Nassarius

5 Ceriths

2 Trochus (my favorite)

1 Scarlet Hermit

1 Tri-Color Tonga Hermit

1 Emerald Crab

I wanted to add peppermint shrimp, but the LFS were out of them. I still want to get hold of some Nerites to create more bio-diversity in the CUC.

Equipment wise, one of my balast for the Actinic lights just stopped working. I’ve emailed Oceanic on saturday and I haven’t recieved any emails from them yet. I will give them few more days.

As it turnes out, the ballast failure happens to many BioCube owners. Sooooo I went and ordered the nano-tuners ballast upgrade, because I don’t want to deal with ballasts quiting on me.

Also the Coralife Power Center timer turned out to be junk. One of the dials would get stuck and thats unacceptable. So now the lights run on digital timers from a hardware store.

I am glad that I played it slow (its day 24) and I haven’t added any fish or corals yet. I want the tank the be as stable as it can get. Also I had time to learn more about properly maintaining the tank, whether is changing water, correcting values, acclimating critters and being able to react fast in case something goes out of whack.