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Well, I think I have to call it. My jungle style of tank keeping, and the shade that it naturally brings, has caused the death of my single stem of Ludwigia guinea, single plant of Downoi, and probably my last remaining Erio of the two. I tried to float them in a last ditch effort, but they just melted away.

I really do need to get in there and clean things up, but it’s sort of one of those things where I don’t know where to start. It’s like a cluttered room that only becomes more cluttered. The only realistic option I think I have is to just tear everything out, but the amount of effort required for that is beyond the level I’m willing to give.

Oh, I may have to also add Glosso to the list of killed plants, not that I care much about that anymore, but the little bit I was keeping around has also vanished.

So my RKL arrived on Tuesday and I’m quite pleased with it.

Aside from the weirdness with the temperature comparisons I wrote about yesterday, the RKL is generally holding the reef tank within .1°F of the setpoint. I noticed that it was running the 25 watt heater what seemed like an excessive amount just trying to maintain the setpoint so I swapped that out for a 50 watt. The RKL with a 50 watt heater is doing a much better job at holding the temperature. I like that I can set alarms for if the temperature increases past a setpoint, I even have it set to turn the light off if it reaches that alarm point.

The other functions are basically just timers, having the display light come on, having the refugium light come on, and then there’s the standby function that’ll turn off the heater, Koralia Nano, and the AC70 filter for either feeding or water changes.

I’m leaning heavily toward getting one for both my 75 gallon and my 10 gallon shrimp tank. The shrimp tank is pretty simple, but having temperature control would still be quite nice.

The convenience of programming while holding the computer is worth the entry price, it would be great to not having to sit down with a flash light and try to program the timers underneath the 75 gallon.

The thing that turns me off a bit, as mentioned earlier, about getting one for the 75 gallon is that I need basically only five controllable outlets. I could certainly fill up two of the PC4 strips, but half the devices are on the same timers now, so just splitting the outlet is a lot less expensive. Unfortunately it’s that fifth outlet that makes the system more than just a set of glorified timers, since it’d be used for the heater. The previous four would be used to control the lights, autodosers, and CO2 distribution. The manual bypass feature is a bit of a pain to use as compared to flipping the switch to do maintenance on the filters.

I think I’ll get two more RKL level 1 kits, basically just keep the second controller for eventual use on the shrimp tank, and use the second’s power strip for the 75 gallon. Since, due to the summer sale pricing, the power strip is only $10 less than both the controller and power strip.

I’m going to think about it a bit more, see how the RKL works out for the reef, but I definitely think this is something that falls into the “must have” category when priced at $100.

Unfortunately it was a failure, the nest was inexplicably destroyed and eggs were seen floating around the surface of the tank water. Ethel is still being extremely territorial though, nipping at the smaller schooling fish and causes large splashes of water to hit the floor around the tank. She’s been very successful at corralling them all to the right side of the tank though. I may have even lost a couple of the smaller fish, their numbers seem a bit low, but they could be just hiding.

On the thought of losses, I killed one of my two Erios apparently. I’ve been very lackadaisical, as usual, about keeping the surface clear of floating plants. Apparently the Erio didn’t take very kindly to being shaded. I have the one left, it has some dead spiky bits also, but otherwise appears to be in decent health.

I desperately need to clear out the right side of the tank, it’s gone past the jungle point.

Thanks to the summer special at Digital Aquatics I was able to justify purchasing a Reef Keeper Lite tank computer for the reef tank! :D Finally, I’ll have compact timers and desperately needed temperature control.

Part of me wanted to get one for the 75g too, but the extra features are not really necessary. Depending on how long the special lasts I might still get another, but the current timer setup so far is working well and in order to take advantage of features like temperature control while still using the timers I’d need to purchase another outlet strip. Who knows, maybe I’ll like it so much that I’ll give in to the temptation.

The other day I realized I had zero algae in the 75g tank and that I hadn’t seen any for a couple of weeks. It had been quite minimal before that, basically only in the plants that grown to float across the surface, but in thinking about it, the algae pretty much vanished when I fixed the timer situation.

It turns out, much to my shock and horror, that the analog timers I was using were not accurate when used for the short durations necessary to run my dosing pumps. This testing came about when I had one of the timers fail, so I wanted to make sure that the new one would be working properly. It’s also one of those things when there’s a problem, when everything you’ve checked is fine then it’s time to find new things to check. Once I resolved the timer situation, by moving the lights to the analog timers and the CO2 system and dosing pumps to the old coralife digital timer strips the dosing pumps were once again accurate.

It would appear, that after all my trouble, it was ultimately a matter of not enough fertilization. Only about half of the required dose was making it into the tank. Changing the CO2 to mist and removing the reactor definitely helped, but it was fixing the dosing, as usual, that fixed the problem.

Sagittaria Flower

This is one of the few flowers that managed to bloom completely above the water line. Usually they’re partially submerged and more translucent. That’s “mini” water lettuce there in the foreground.