400 Gallon Reef Tank Update Aug. 2022 #reeftank #reefaquarium #kalkwasser (detail in description)

11 months since the fish were moved into their new home.
Still trying to knock down the Aiptasia. Since I have such an epic quantity of Aiptasia to kill, currently I am mixing 5 TBS Kalwasser powder, ¼ tsp pure Sodium Hydroxide, with water to make about 70ml of solution. I am mixing this with one of those little battery operated handheld milk frothers/blenders. ##If you attempt this make sure you use safety equipment since it is very caustic and can burn skin or eyes etc.##. I am shutting down all the flow and using a 100ml syringe to try to lay down a coating on the Aiptasia and then siphoning out as much as I can after about 30 minutes. This only covers about a square foot. Seems to be working but I only apply it about two times a week. I think I have cleared out ¼ to 1/3 of them.
Keeping up with the Calcium and Alkalinity demands of this tank are getting much easier with minimal adjustments. Abiotic precipitation seems to have mostly stopped with some sand clumping still going on.
My Classic Apex head unit died on me (it was very old, maybe 15 years or more) so I had to get a replacement. Sucks that I had heard a rumor that a new Apex was coming out and had hoped to make mine hold out till then. Missed it by just over a month. Was pretty straight forward to move all the code from the old unit to the new one using the code stored in Apex Fusion. Still took a while since I had so much code in there.

System Description:#reeftank #reefaquarium #kalkslurry - This 400 Gallon Reef tank was all hand built by me over about 5 years. The build wouldn't have taken that long except for my busy job and some remodeling to the room that I did myself including tiling the floor around the my former 240g reef tank, moving that tank to finish the floor and moving this tank in. - The tank dimensions are approx. 60.5" x 60.5" x 24.5" and is set into the stand a few inches to hide the sand bed profile. There is also an external overflow that I built into the tank. I made it mostly from 1/2" cell cast acrylic although the top ad bottom are 3/8" thick. - The stand structure is powder coated steel that I welded up. There are many more wooden components to the stand including hinged doors and magnetically attached panels. Wood is all poplar with the exception of the plywood under the tank. Still need to paint those parts before installing them. - The sump was designed and built by me and has a total volume of around 150 gallons. There is a frag tank on the end that is integrated as well as an ATS(Algae turf scrubber) that is also plumbed in. - The aquascape has two islands on the right side that I built up from mature live rock from my last system and the structure on the left was built from Marco rock in 3 or four parts that I conditioned in a lit and heated stock tank for a few years that was seeded with some live rock and coraline algae. - The coral all came out of my former, very crowded, 240g tank. - The fish were a combination of my fish, some beautiful fish I adopted from a friend, and some that I had waiting for the build to finish. All fish were quarantined in some petco glass tanks using protocols I got off https://humble.fish/community/index.p.../quarantine.2/ and the new corals and aquascape were run fallow for 6 weeks at 80.6 degrees before adding these fish. - The filtration comes from the ATS, 7" - 10 micron filter socks, protein skimmer, and lots of rock and sintered glass biomedia in the sump. - Return pumps are 2 Coral box DCA 12000, system will run with just one but the ATS or the frag tank with loose out depending on which one goes out. I have the APEX connector but haven’t bothered yet.- Power heads are mostly Coral Box QP-16s with the Aqualink A1 Apex adaptors and run though some custom Apex profiles I made up. There are 6 plus a battery backed up Jebao.- The lighting is from 12 Maxspect Ethereal lights in a custom rack that I built plus one over the frag tank in the sump. -Supplementation is done 2 part plus magnesium. Also some additions of Iron, potassium, strontium, Tropic Marin part C, and Iodine. 3 APEX doses in my garage do most of the dosing. - Monitoring and automation is an Apex classic and a KH Guardian - Let me know what questions you have in the comments. Thanks for watching!