Hey All,
As the title says I am new to salt water aquariums; however, I have grown up with FW setups since a young kid and always wanted to venture into the mysterious SW world. I went into my SW setup as an experiment, and ended up wanting more. But, I'm moving in the near future and it would be worthless to setup a decent tank then to tear it down in 6 months. So this is my "experiment".
This is my current setup at 3 weeks old! I have a FOWLR tank, and fighting hard not to get Coral especially this early, 20 gal. tall tank with a AquaC Remora protein skimmer, 65w Coralife 50/50 PC light, ~20 lbs. of live rock, an inch layer of samoa substrate, Koralia 1 pump, 2 green chromis and 2 blue legged hermit crabs.
So far things are good, never experienced an ammonia spike (bought the LR from a LFS) but I'm still checking ammonia once a day, still at 0 for 3 weeks kinda scaring me!! Nitrites 0 and Nitrates ~10 ppm. My S.G. is at 1.021 at a tempurature of 77 F using Instant Ocean Salt mix. Im unfortunently NOT using RO/DI water, but I buy 5 gal. water jugs from the supermarket. Now that I have several jugs Im going to start aquiring RO/DI water from my LFS.
Im starting to grow brown algae on the tops of the LR, due to the new light (purchased this past Sun.) and maybe the water Im using :angel1:
SO!! My first questions are can anyone ID these pictures. The first picture is of what I think maybe some sort of algae? They have a black/brown base with these green/brown branches growing out of it. I have about 25 or so of these things growing on my LR. I've looked for them in pictures, and Im just not finding it.
The second picture is of a clear "slime", in the middle of the photo, between the two rocks, located on the upper rock. I tried describing it to a LFS owner today and his thought was a sponge and showed me some that looked similar to it on a clam. The "sponge" is on the harder side, I thought it would be mucousy before I touched, but its hard.
Thank You all, and I have been enjoying reading many of the post on here, very informative stuff. "BigAls slow chronicle" was my first read and Im still reading through it.
James
As the title says I am new to salt water aquariums; however, I have grown up with FW setups since a young kid and always wanted to venture into the mysterious SW world. I went into my SW setup as an experiment, and ended up wanting more. But, I'm moving in the near future and it would be worthless to setup a decent tank then to tear it down in 6 months. So this is my "experiment".
This is my current setup at 3 weeks old! I have a FOWLR tank, and fighting hard not to get Coral especially this early, 20 gal. tall tank with a AquaC Remora protein skimmer, 65w Coralife 50/50 PC light, ~20 lbs. of live rock, an inch layer of samoa substrate, Koralia 1 pump, 2 green chromis and 2 blue legged hermit crabs.
Im starting to grow brown algae on the tops of the LR, due to the new light (purchased this past Sun.) and maybe the water Im using :angel1:
SO!! My first questions are can anyone ID these pictures. The first picture is of what I think maybe some sort of algae? They have a black/brown base with these green/brown branches growing out of it. I have about 25 or so of these things growing on my LR. I've looked for them in pictures, and Im just not finding it.
The second picture is of a clear "slime", in the middle of the photo, between the two rocks, located on the upper rock. I tried describing it to a LFS owner today and his thought was a sponge and showed me some that looked similar to it on a clam. The "sponge" is on the harder side, I thought it would be mucousy before I touched, but its hard.
Thank You all, and I have been enjoying reading many of the post on here, very informative stuff. "BigAls slow chronicle" was my first read and Im still reading through it.
James
