Always something to worry about

08/16/04
“What is that smell?” A day after installing the new refugium, we began to notice a smell. I couldn’t place it, but was worried. I ran a few routine tests, everything seemed ok. About 1:30 a.m. last Monday morning, I woke up suddenly thinking I knew what it was. (Just before waking up, I was dreaming that a wall in the house had collapsed from the pressure of water and a giant wave swept everything away, but THAT dream is not what this story is about, that is material for a shrink someday…)

Anyway, I woke up realizing that the smell was like the smell we used to get when the live rock was curing—sort of like rotting flesh and salt mixed together. If that was the smell, then maybe the refugium mud had dead creatures in it, and maybe their decay would raise ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, all not good for my reef. Really worried, I got up (yes, in the middle of the night) and ran tests for all these things. (When I told my friend Lisa about this one day, she said “and you call this hobby FUN?”). Fortunately these three tests were negative, and stayed that way in subsequent days. I’m happy to report that today, a week later, the smell is almost gone, small creatures are starting to multiply in the refugium, and I’m looking forward to the day I can disconnect the old refugium.

Thinking about that, though, I realized I have a lot of live sand in that old refugium that I shouldn’t let go to waste; i.e., I can’t just take it out and drain the water, cause all the good guys in it would die, and someday I’ll need them. And someday I want to do a seahorse tank. So maybe I should take the old sump (a 10 gallon) tank, and put the old refugium sand in that, throw in salt water, a heater, and filter, and just keep it cooking till I need it. And just to figure out what I do need to have seahorses, I ordered a book about them today. All good projects start with a book.

In the meantime, I’m ready to take down my failure freshwater tank that is in my office. I never succeeded in controlling the algae in it, but thankfully, the other, 50 gallon freshwater tank has been a success. My son and daughter in law kindly took some excess freshwater fish home to Washington with them, so I can drain this puppy and scale back to just one freshwater tank, one reef tank, one saltwater quarantine tank, and one live sand holding facility. I have never known a holding facility to be empty for long. Stay tuned.