All is well

So all is going well as of late. About a week ago EcoTech Marine announced their wireless wave controller and I ordered one of them for my Vortch pump. It's already been charged to my credit card but isn't supposed to ship until the first week of September.

Hopefully my lights will be shipped that week too, if not sooner.

Here's a side shot of the tank, looks pretty neat. The coraline algae is growing in really well. It's still hard to get the fish to hold still long enough to get them in focus :)

Black and White Clownfish in QT

So my local reef club, CTARS, sponsored a group buy of Black and White clownfish from LiveAquaria. I purchased two and put them in quarantine on Friday.

Before putting them into quarantine, I gave them a quick dip in 1 gallon of fresh water mixed with Methylene Blue. This was to help knock any parasites and diseases off them.

Not long after getting the fish home, it was reported by other members that their fish had Brooklynella. Since others did it was a good bet mine did too, although they weren't showing any signs. Since showing signs is probably too late to start trying to save them, I decided to take some action.

Fortunately when I was setting up my quarantine tank, I bought a few medications just in case, one of them being Formalin. Formalin is a 37% solution of Formaldehyde and water. To treat the fish, I gave them a 'bath' in 1 gallon of seawater and 1 ml of Formalin with plenty of vigorous aeration. After 30 minutes they were returned to their tank.

It took a while for them to recover, the smaller of the two looked like he took it worse than the larger, but I'm happy to say that after 30 hours out of the bath, they appear very healthy, swim around the tank continuously, and eat heartily.

I harvested a bit of calerpa from the refugium and put it into the quarantine with them to allow them to graze on an copepods that might have come along for the ride. I'll be discarding of the calerpa soon so it doesn't foul the QTs water.

Vortech Pump

Been a while since I posted an update.

Last Sunday I installed my first Eco-Tech Marine Vortech pump. This picture is the driver/controller and the battery backup. The controller lets me set between 300 and 3000 gallons per hour of flow, and the battery backup will provide 30 hours of flow at 50% speed in case of a power failure.

So far I'm really liking the pump, but just this week they put the first batch of the wireless wave controllers up for sale and I was able to order one before they sold out.

With the wireless wave controller, I should be able to set it to provide random varying amounts of flow to simulate the wave motion on a reef. I can't wait. And if I were to get another pump and controller ( and I would like to ), I can set them on opposite sides of the tank either in sync or out of sync to provide some interesting flow effects.

The wireless controller also gives a 10 minute feed window which will be a massive improvement over having to unplug everything to feed the fish.

I also have some Black and White clown fish in quarantine right now. I'll take a picture tomorrow and blog about the efforts I went through to save them from Brooklynella. Fortunately, I think it is working.