Ritter's 75 Gallon Reef

Don't melt your lux meter. ;-)

Tagging along very nice

Thanks Deanb, glad you could pad up enough posts to put your tank up for sale.

Anyways...I guess it's not an all stony tank anymore since I've added about 10 different zoanthids.

These are some of the ones that I got from Coral Morphologic. I can't seem to get a decent pic of them but I've never seen any others like it.


Picked these up recently, Thanks Daniel!

Very nice! Are they baby blue like that in person? Amazing...

The middles are purple that fade to blue and then fade out to almost white. I wish I would have saved the pics on the site when I bought them. They were one of those that made me stop as I was scrolling down the page. They are called "Blue Oasis (rare morph)."

Lights are BRIGHT and the colors are rediculous. Only problem I have is yellows don't show up very well under the blues so my yellow tang looks bland which is odd since the frogspawn and one of my open brains look more yellow. Its also impossible for me to take a decent pic with my camera with only the blues on and that's about all I see since I work all day. My Garf bonsai is glowing like a light house and all the zoas are GLOWING. I need a canopy to mount the lights in because I have the light on yoyos right now and it's lighting up the whole house. Growth is the true measure of the lights and time will tell about that. I got a reef keeper lite and installed it yesterday and it's working well for what I need. All lights timed and the heater will be run when it's cold. My tank temp has dropped from 80 to 78 since the lighting change. No heater used at all.

Very cool... literally. ;-)

What type of camera are you using?

I'm using a cannon sd 1400 is. It's a good digital cam but it's not dslr or a good macro cam. BTW I HATE heaters. I lost a pair of large oscars and a large parrot cichlid that I had for 7 years to a heater that stuck on and I have never run a heater since. I'm hoping a good heater and a controller will work.

I did some research on your camera. Try using the underwater setting and manual white balance. Get the white balance as close as you can. It still won't look right, but get those pics to me and I'll edit even more blue out of them and increase the reds and greens. That should make the pics look at least close to your tank.

Ok thanks. I'll give that a try.

Good call on taking the pics Matt. Worked a lot better! Thanks!

Now thats cool Gabe, the settings really made the pics pop.

Very cool! I'm digging it!

Great shots!... at this rate I'll never win pic of the month....

Got the lights installed in the canopy yesterday. Looks a lot better than those hanging yo-yos I was using. Special thanks to Jason on the nice canopy build.

Looks complete

Very nice indeed. Good work on the canopy Jason.

J.Davis wrote:Looks complete

That's what she said...literally.

My tank is 2 years old today. This is my 3rd year reef keeping. I started out with a 45 gallon and upgraded to the 75 1 year later. Here are some progression pics of the 75.

May 2009. Back then I had a 150w metal halide on one side and a 2x65w power compact fixture on the other side. No sump. Sea clone skimmer.




January 2010






April 2011. I'd get a new picture but my son has my camera and he's in England on a school trip.

Very cool. I really love the tank gabe. Well done in every way. :-)

Great tank Gabe! Be interesting to see what difference the leds will make a year from now.

Thanks guys. I'm having some trouble with a few corals right now but I'm hoping to figure it out soon and get it right again.

I think I got rid of one problem. I had a good size colony of Fire and Ice Zoas that I've had for a few weeks that was getting overrun with hydroids. They must have been stinging the zoas because they were all closed up and some of them were starting to come loose. I don't know where they came from but I didn't know how to get rid of them so I tried Coral Rx dip. It looked at first like it didn't help any but the next day I didn't see and more hydroids and the zoas looked perfectly healthy again. This is not my pic but this is what the hydroids looked like that I was trying to kill. They just popped up one day out of the coral and spread like crazy. I don't see them anywhere else in the tank except a small patch on the liverock where the zoas where.


Now I gotta figure out what's wrong with my monti caps.

Gabe
Don't know if its rlated to your problem with the Monti caps but since I started dosing baking soda for alk my Monti caps look totally different. I haven't figured out yet if the change is for better or worse but definately a big change. I have noticed the color is not as bright but the white edge has returned and is very defined, they both have turned a darker brownish red instead of the bright red they were before and the polyps really show in the lunar lights. I will say though that they are growing even faster than before. Since i been dosing my alk stays around 9 DKH but with the bad Reef Crystals testing only 3 DKH I have to dose to be able to use it. What is the problem with your caps?