Its been awhile but I have managed to clean up quite a bit and get the tank back on all 8 or 12 Cylinders. Some of the changes I made after the UV fiasco are:


  • Took the UV completely out. I put one on the tank because my fear was that a bacteria or something was running rampant in my tank and would prey on the already weak SPS frags I had, causing them to stress even further. I found a couple of threads discussing it and I had an 18 Watt laying around. Big mistake!




  • I went back to gradually adjusting my Dosage using BRS 1.1 ml Dosers to match my tank consumption. In an effort to go with something a bit more reliable, I decided to hook my doing up to the Apex DOS. I love this piece of equipment. I no longer need to use a separate website to help me with the Apex coding for the Doser. I literally tell it how much to dose and the time frame and the wizard does the rest. Of Course I have to go into the Advanced coding to add a few more lines, like if the pH is higher than 8.50 to shut down the Doser. Once I get a 1 link cable, I can also free up an outlet on my apex system. With the BRS dosers, I had to have a separate outlet for each doser. I was using 3 for my tank!




  • I tried to keep my hands out of the tank as much as possible




  • Religious water changes on my system. I every week perform about a 30 gallon water change to my system with fresh Kent Marine Sea Salt. In an effort to make it easy to do and therefore allow me to be religious about WC, I have made the process super easy and only takes about 15 mins at most. I'll have to post a video of my water change process tomorrow during my weekly water change




  • After speaking to a fellow reefer buddy at the last frag swap, JJ, I have been religiously dosing the following in my tank every morning. Not sure if it makes a difference but since doing all of the above and this daily dosing, the tank is doing extremely well:
    • Kent Iodide 1ml
    • Kent Pyhtoplex 2 ml (One squirt on each side)
    • Kent Zooplex 2 ml (One squirt on each side)
    • Kent Chromoplex 2 ml (One squirt on each side)


The tank is doing so well that I fear in a couple of months, I might have to go back to using a Calcium reactor to offset my needs and use the DOS as a backup. I 'm hesitant to go this route due to the issues I had in the past but my tank is consuming Alk and Calcium like crazy and I will have no choice but to go with this more reliable method. I'm currently Dosing the following amounts:

Alk: 85.1 ml throughout the day
Ca: 181.4 ml during the daylight hours of 0930 to 2030

Alk and Ca Dosing with DOS 7-12-18.JPG

To make up for the loss of frags and space, I've been fortunate to have some great local reefer friends that have given me some corals but I also put a couple of orders with Joe's Knows Corals and Golden Basket.

From Joe Knows Reef the following

BC Indigo Stag


Event Horizon


BC Secale


Apocalypse Now


Tyree Pinky the Bear


PC Rainbow

Wild Irish Rose - This is my favorite coral from him and the reason for the whole order

All of them in my BAO frag case, which makes it so easy to dip, transport and hold frags


Finally a pic of them on a temp frag rack before placement in the tank