so
hey guys just suddenly got in a good mood you know you ever notice when that happens you might be a
little down or a little depressed and then something happens inside and all of a sudden
you get that surge of i feel good right all right
so we're back water change wednesday new viewers my name is tom welcome
and water change wednesday is a question and answer format so what you do is you ask a question
below the video and i'll answer it out there and i'll answer it here however however what's
been happening guys i'm getting a lot of repeat questions and i'm starting to go a little crazy
because they would be the same on video all the time and you guys that have been following me
right you're gonna hear the same thing so my new rule is this the new rule will be you ask
a question below the video if i've answered it before and i have a video that explains most of it
then i'll put a link to that video so you can get the answer and maybe i'll give you a quick
answer out there but i won't present it here because it's just getting a little
redundant here and i don't want you guys to be bored that's all if i'm not getting
new questions and ones that we haven't answered what's water change wednesday going to be so if
you want to ask any kind of question then we'll take those two it doesn't have to be about reef
and come on i've been out here a year with some of you guys over a year now any kind
of question you want all right all right all right so let's get into the video water change wednesday
so
i think what i have to do today is um my ipad is occupied i don't know if you guys have seen
this your questions my thoughts this has been on my desk i'm going to read it off this jyb 47 asks
me should he use a bacteria starter even though he has cultured live rock from an established tank
and he's concerned about before he puts any corals or fish in there should he put a
bacteria starter it's not necessary as long as it's been in the tank for a while so you have
surface area on the glass you have a lot i know how we feel sometimes you want to add that little
extra you know you think it's a boost to help and i could say do that uh see ken makes a product
it's called stability and i told him if he wants to if he feels a little more comfortable
follow the directions you can add a little bit to your already cultured tank and it helps with
spikes you know so if you're putting fish in or corals and corals i wouldn't worry about
it's the fish that give off the ammonia and uh that could be a problem but i've never had it
happen but it's not necessary jiv47 you're only dealing with it i think his tank was 10 gallons so
you're not putting that much of a bio load in 10 gallons where you're gonna get a spike of anything
all right here's the 3.5 gallon pico reef i wanted to show you what's going on in here
look at that royal grandma he's got great colors doesn't he anyway uh the pocillopora are these
small little clumps you see here and what happened was i put a small piece in when i set the tank up
and you can see what they do pocillopora drops these spores or releases the spores
and they reconnect on the surface and they begin to grow a new colony some
even say it's a little bit of a problem for them but i like the way they look
and as long as they don't over grow the tank you can see i have one in the back
there
i also have the colostria in the back there that's already splitting that was two and now it's three
they grow large and then they split they continue to keep splitting it's almost split to four
i don't have a good shot of it there they have the pipe organ there i have the duncan corals
up top i'm feeding them three days a week the hammer coral chris asked if there's an order of
putting your mechanical filtration in the backs of say you're all in one i guess in a larger tank
it would be like your sump area but in his case it's he has an all-in-one usually the skimmer
is the first part of the mechanical filtration you want to get that water that goes over the
overflow it's got all the compounds from the top of the water and some of the organics that flow
over that's the perfect spot for a skimmer and a lot of reefers will put that same skimmer in the
sump jeez i'm getting a feeling i've answered this before see what i mean guys like just last week
hmm anyway then i would say refusium is your next step along the back in the center compartment
and then finally i would say any your gfo or your carbon things like that you put
in the return pump area because think about it it's called creating a flow through that
area and it's ready to flow back up into the tank all right let's take a look at what i did in the
20 gallon i have to say there was some cursing going on yet all right so this is what happened
in the 20 gallon if you look i'll show a comparison here here's the piece that's left
and then i had to move these around what i did is i moved my acros out to the front a little bit so
they get a little bit more light so that's what's going on if i step back here you can kind of see
the apostle of pores a little bit smaller now in there and i cut off so you can see the cut i made
and obviously that's the track because of that cut i put it in a cup with some
small fragments of marco rock that'll probably attach to that within a week
now here's the couple fragments apostle oppore i put in there i don't know if i'm gonna leave
those in there i'll probably bring them back to fish guy mike i want all new stuff in here
so this is ready for sunday it's gonna go from here up to here guys right there
all right jason asks his phosphate is 0.48 sounds like me a few videos ago i mentioned you know
about chasing numbers don't worry about high numbers if everything is looking really good so
he must have saw that and realized okay mine's .48 that's pretty high and it is high the way i
approach that is if everything looks good then i would say okay if it gives you peace of mind
work on taking it down a little bit at that point i usually do a water change and i siphon and
vacuum my sand bed and that usually brings it down say if it was 0.48 it would bring it down to maybe
0.3 if it doesn't that's when i go to lanthanum and i'll put a few drops of lanthanum it says it
on the box and i'll drop it down to 0.1 like right now i just did a test yesterday mine's at 0.3
i just did a water change maybe i'll test again and see if it went down a little bit and maybe
add a couple drops of lanthanum i don't chase the numbers guys i go by what the tank looks like now
if it's 0.48 or 5 and you got some hair algae or unwanted algae going on around there then you
got to get in there manually get rid of it and work on lowering it because obviously your tank
is being affected by the higher phosphate all right simulated reality i call him sr
he's running zero nitrate and zero phosphate in his tank and he has a skimmer
and his question was should he continue to run the skimmer he said since he's turned the skimmer off
he's noticed his corals to color up and look fuller and look better so
i would say and what i told him was then if everything looks good turn the skimmer
off there are some reefers that kind of periodically turn their skimmer on and off
that's fine you know it's all about what your tank looks like so i would say that's fine if you
want to turn the skimmer off i've always noticed that the skimmer just adds a tiny bit of clarity
to my water and i like that and don't forget it also is oxygenating your water a little bit more
if you have a good overflow box into where the skimmer area is or if it's a larger tank obviously
into a sump then you get a lot of oxygen surface to water oxygen that way the skimmer
wouldn't be that so i have to show you the kenya tree it's made a full recovery
really nice the sad thing is guys is i'm not sure what i did it's still zero nitrate zero
phosphate i just tested everything yesterday so i don't know it's probably was the light that's
the only thing i can think of that i changed substantially i cranked the light it used to be
about here in the video you really can't tell let me see if you'll be able to see it there
to there i mean that's like a good amount but you can't really see it in the video so there it is
i'm gonna get some more of these rock flower anemones
you know load them maybe i'll put them in the tent i don't know
all right guys
i think that should do it right come on say it with me now i agree all right new viewers
this is what i say at the end of the video have a great rest of the evening guys
and sunday i'm going to work on it i've been getting we have snow out here today
stop now we have snow out here today so no work for me and i'm going to be it's going
to be cold i can't do too much work because i'm doing stuff outside so i'm going to really work
on that peninsula reef tank video next video you're going to see it up here
all right take care all right take care now guys have a good one all right take care guys have a
good one all right take care now guys have a good one have a good one guys take care now one more
have a good one guys take care
you