Introducing Carbon - and The Great Prune.

Today was spent pruning the refugeum back. As you can see below in an old post, it had gotten pretty out of control. The guys over at the DFWMAS have been extremely helpful in giving me direction to improve the conditions of my tank. Here it is after the pruning on the left.

When I cleared out the 'fuge I found a white and black striped bristle starfish in there about the size of penny. ( his body ).. And his little legs streaked out to the diameter of a softball! Pretty cool. I introduced him into the display tank, so he could run free! ( well as free as a 75 gallon tank will give him. It's better than that little 10 gallon partion in the 'fuge.

It's also been suggested I run carbon to supplement my Calupra.
So I had some Reef Carbon left over, and introduced it to the sump near the pump in a little nylon tie-bag. Ideally, I'd have a fluval or something efficient to use as a carbon scrubber. I'll have to look into that in the future. For now.. a nylon sack near the return pump's intake will have to do. It's better than nothing.

I'm going to run it for a week, and replace it, and try that schedule...

Otherwise, I have a chiller coming this week that I bought off Ebay. It's a 1/6HP unit and I only have about 90 gallons of volume, so It should work excellent!!

I did a 50% water change today to help reduce my nitrates which have been creeping up in the last two weeks. ( perhaps from the overgrowth and die-off of the calupera? )

I also noticed my salenity was pretty high. SG = 1.028 So I am bringing back down to 1.024-1.025. I'm also considering an automated top-off system to help maintain the salenity. Since my tank evaporates a gallon a day!