I suspect you have higher alk usage at higher temps because shallow water acros grow faster but you may have a lot of other corals growing slower - great convo ;)
Adam try some copepods to eat that ulva. I tried to grow some in a refugium but the pods kept mowing it down. Might not work on your scale, just my 2 cents.
Hard to keep Speciosa when you do water changes fyi. Once we went no water changes, we are going on 1yr with some nice Speciosa and they are actually growing. Other sensitive acros seem to appreciate that too. Just my 2 cents
Also cleaning your racks is why you battle algae so much. Anything clean that goes into a marine environment is an algae magnet until it has a biome that covers it. Let the racks look natural and stop trying to keep them cute for instagram and you wont have to worry about algae as much.
Amino acids become just a nitrogen source to the system. Good for new low nutrient systems, not the best in all cases. Definitely not necessary for success in the long run. The trend of trace elements is just another fashion. If anyone could have extremely colorful corals under proper lights, like halides and T5s, without today's meticulous and expensive addition of any traces and aminos, during the 90's, it should be simple as that! It's a horrible thing what LED manufacturers and vendors did and are still doing to remove halides from the market! Metal halides will produce colors that no other light can. The reflection of blue and violet LEDs do a good job with reflection to please our eyes though. Put those corals under halides and they will produce the pigments as they do in nature without any trace elements nor amino acids dosed!! Fish food is enough for the input of traces and minor elements. So... people say they don't want to change bulbs because they don't want to spend the money and they are lazy. They say they don't like the heat from halides and T5s, but in some cases they need to use heaters, instead. They complain about the electricity bill, but to achieve similar results they would need to use more electricity with LEDs too. But they promptly have this weird idea that they need to spend a lot of money and time figuring out the ins and outs of adding trace elements and amino acids to get their corals colorful, spending more money sending ICP samples to be tested?? LOL! Some already think "LEDs make the corals more colorful" already. How many times we heard from chemists that ICP is not reliable? How many more times we need to hear that to actually know that is something we should understand and follow?? And they need those numbers from ICP to dose the elements? Some choose to say that is part of the evolution of the hobby. It's really the regression of common sense, knowledge and application. Pay more for less. Pictures under blue LEDs are just that: pictures under blue LEDs for profit. As we all know it became a system and the consumers are the ones to blame in it's majority! They ask for the name and high prices. LOL! Corals surviving with weird colony shapes and artificial looking colors. Very nice podcast!!!!!! Like #15!
Hey Alex, I totally agree on most of this! That said, I think ICP can be a good report card for pollutants such as heavy metals, also for proper testing of things like iodine where there isn’t a great hobby based test (although I’ll need to look into Shane’s method). For 90% of hobbyists, messing around with monthly ICP and adding trace elements is quite possibly a waste of time and money, however, I do believe some of the nuanced colours of certain SPS are derived partially from a ‘good’ composition of certain trace elements. ICP does give us an opportunity to learn. I think they are fairly reliable, as I tend to get fairly consistent results (using Fauna Marin). As far as metal halides, I did have a great success with them (can check out my RC TOTM sep 2015), but man, they do get really really hot! Yeah, they heat the tank in the day, but they sure don't at night! Depending on the space and the size of their system, they just aren’t practical for the average hobbyist anymore in my opinion. It’s also hard to argue with the controlability of LED’s.. I still love a blend of T5/LED though!
@@fraggarage5922 Yes, the majority of the elements utilized by the corals will be introduced into the system with fish food though, as in the 90's. No tests needed. If aquarium type ICP isn't accurate at all, per chemists, and if they say they can't rely on it, we shouldn't be relying on it either. I understand about the "pollutants", as for example caused by magnets. The best solution is to get magnets that will be 100% reliable, so we don't depend on ICP for that either. LOL! Right? The deal with halides is pure application. If we in HI can manage a good application for halides and Chis, from ACI in FL, also can manage that balanced application, anyone can IMO, because we both have warm weather throughout the year. It comes down to the choice and unfortunately the availability of choices for those applications today, I guess. If you are "happy" with your results, why change? Specially with the nice Acros you guys have.
@@fraggarage5922 I think if there was an actual, verifiable, "good" composition of certain elements aside from natural sea water numbers, everyone and their mother would be going that direction, including public aquariums. The sheer fact ICP is not reliable, kind of throws the theory of those ratios being beneficial out the window.
RO DI systems work with presure. When you turn the system off all of the residual crud you were filtering out creeps past the membrane as the pressure difference between both sides of the membrane equalizes. So when you turn back on the system all of that outputs through the resin and into your supply. Thats why your suppose to run the system for a bit before collecting the water. Hence auto flush kits or why you should pre and post flush RO DI systems. In your case Adam you basically are not getting much if any benefit of your RO System having it bumping on and off all the time due to it being directly hooked up. Luckly for you the water in your area is good already but for an RO system to work u have to dump a few gallons during inital start up (40 is excessive) and then fill a resivor and shut off the system until you need more water
Yeah that makes sense man.. My RO only tops off twice a day and I weighed out the pros and cons of that.. I just find the water pressure is so reliable vs top off pumps, etc.. I’ll probably stick with it for now, considering how good the water is in my city.. maybe I’ll ICP the water as soon as it turns on and see what kind of results I get. My system does do a pre-flush before it produces water, but maybe it defeats the purpose if its directly plumbed?..
Ok so your a little fancy with it. Yea if your only allowing it to top off twice a day (I'm assuming it's with a sensor) and it has auto pre flush your good unless you wanna split hairs. Most people who do it or alot of service companies I've see hook the RO up to a float valve in the sump and it's like on and off dribble dribble all day long. Deff not filtering worth a damn that way. Burns through resin this way too.
