Welcome to sReef

New Das Korallenriff-Aquarium published

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 13:53:52 +0200

A new edition of Das Korallenriff Aquarium (Band 1) from Svein A. Fosså and Alf Jacob Nilsen has been published. The Modern Coral Reef Aquarium volume 1-4 (english edition) was and is the most profound and extensive book series about coral reef aquariums you can find. It is very well written and beautifully illustrated. Of course time goes by and things change and there will be time to update. Das Korellenriff-Aquarium Band 1 is a very good update to first book of that excellent book series.

I'm familiar with this book series from 1988 when the it was first published in swedish, Korallrevsakvariet 1-4. It and its english edition have had most influence to my reef aquarium hobby. It is by far the best book series of reef aquariums in my opinion. When I first started this hobby I did myself a protein skimmer according schematic diagram in Korallrevsakvariet Band 1.

In this new edition there is a portrait of my reef aquarium from 2007. I had then run my reef without a skimmer over a year. Had then nice growth of Cheatomorpha algae in refugium.

sReef in Der Meerwasser Aquarianer

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:36:13 +0200

Last summer I met a nice German reef hobbyist Stefan Lay who was at a business trip here in Finland. He visited me and learned more of my reef tank. He got the idea to make a reef tank portrait of sReef to well-known German reef aquarium magazine Der Meerwasser Aquarianer. In the article there is some pictures from sReef over the years and some story about couple of problems during years and experiences of using BioPellets and feeding my skimmer-less reef aquarium. You can read about them also from my blog. You can find the magazine here.

sReef in Reef Builders

Thu, 6 Jan 2011 12:11:41 +0200

Joost de Vries from Reef Builders® contacted me a little time ago for a short interview. You can read it here.

sReef three years old

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:24:28 +0200

sReef has now been running little over three years. To celebrate that I took some new photos which you can see in sReef Gallery. Photos were taken with Canon PowerShot D10 (white balance underwater), and the colors look very realistic in my iMac.

There has been maybe two major incidents this year in sReef. The first one was 9 hour electricity break this summer. This summer was abnormally hot in Finland with couple of major thunderstorms. During one of them electricity was cut for 9 hours during night. There has never been break more than 2-3 hours here in my time, so I have not been concerned about them before. So in the evening when the electricity cut begin at about 22.00 I was not worried and did go to sleep as usually. In the morning I woke about half past six noticing no electricity yet. I checked the aquarium and found out that all the fishes were in very bad condition suffering from hypoxia. Our gorgeous Snowflake eel was already dead. All the corals seemed quite fine. I started to manually oxidate the water the save at least some of the fishes and my wife continued to do so when I headed to shop to buy an engine-generator. During that time the electricity came back and I returned home. Slowly all the fishes recovered and no other losses than Murre the eel. After that it was interestingly seen peak in nitrate values indicating dead of many microfauna and bacteria. Phosphates remained near zero thanks to phosphate binding media in the filter. The nitrate value returned to near zero in couple of weeks. During that time no major negative effects were noticed in corals, some color changes and bad polyp extension was seen of course. After that I bought a power pack to drive one Tunze pump for 2-3 hours during electricity break. I know it is not much, but it will provides some additional safety.

The other problem and a big one was trying to extinguish Green star polyp coral, Clavularia viridis. I consider it to be most dangerous and pesky coral. Aiptasia and Majano anemone are nothing compared to it. It is quite easy to control Aiptasia and Majono anomone with natural enemies, but I do not know any animal to eat only Green star polyp and not every other corals also. It has spread in two different places in my tank and was rapidly burning and overgrowing everything next to it. To control it I first had to remove worts overgrown corals and live rock. It is nearly impossible to rip it of from porous live rock, but I tried anyway with no good luck. But somehow I managed to remove over 80% of it I think. The rest was managed by spreading thick calcium hydroxide paste over Green star polyp colonies once every two weeks. The water pumps were off for 30-45 minutes to let the paste stay some time over coral to kill it more effectively. Now I have done spreading calcium hydroxide four to five times and there is only some polyps left of that beast. I have nearly won that battle I hope, but with a lot of effort.

Otherwise the year has passed quite nicely. I'm more than happy of the current growth rate and the wellbeing of corals and fishes. The most important thing in achieving that was rejecting Two Part and starting to use classic Balling method to supplement calcium and alkalinity. That way I can now also do fewer water changes with no negative effects.

One thing I have changed in this autumn was stopping using RO-DI water. When making RO water about 60-70% of used water is waste water. In summer I can use it in my garden, but in every other season it runs to the sewer. I wanted to cut down wasting so I decided to end using RO. Now all my fresh water is tap water filtered thru activated carbon and iron based phosphate remover. I have being using it for over three months now and have not noticed any negative effects so far. Hope it stays so.

New photos

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:43:52 +0300

I took some new photos of current situation of sReef. You can see them in Photo Gallery. Also the Log was updated and some minimal text changes.

Everything is doing quite fine in sReef. There is summer here in Finland now and a lot of other interests, so sReef has to run nearly by itself. Little feeding of fishes and some times water changes and filter cleaning of course, but minimal maintenance is the word right now.

Happy summer to all!