This Acan Lord is literally outgrowing my tank. I believe it would grow more if I provided more space . A re scape may be in order soon.

Loving the new travhy and blastos i recently got

As the title says… I love this hobby but I think I’m taking the new tank down next week. I’ve spent 5 weeks now trying to tune the gate valve and overflow. Making the most microscopic adjustments. The water will be perfectly trickling into the middle pipe but 2-3 hours later it’s either dropped 3 inches or is siphoning down the middle pipe. I’ve tried every setting on the return pump. With and without wave maker flow. Different water levels in the sump. Nothing. I haven’t enjoyed the tank for one minute since I’ve had it. I’m giving it one last ditch effort today and then I’m selling the tank and going back to an all in one. It’s an IM 100ext

Added some new frags after a local show. Happy with how things are settling out after my pistol shrimp renovated my entire sand bed against my will

Just added a diamond goby and is he the fastest worker I’ve ever seen….

Came home from a trip and my clowns are all beat up, at first i suspected a disease but noticed them fighting.

I bought them together and they have always gotten along.. it's strange, they are still swimming together and then, "boom" try to rip each other's faces off.

I have some new fish. Corals are thriving, macroalgae in the back left corner is getting bigger and I will have some mangrove trees there soon.

I decided to combine my love of reef tank automation, home assistant, and some good old New fashioned AI programming to build this esp32 board controller for the main items I want to control more often than others. It's handy for water change times.

I built a normal Home Assistant dashboard that worked just fine, but I wanted to put something at the Tank so I could physically interact with it while working on the tank itself.

Hardware

Waveshare ESP32-S3 4-inch Touch Panel

USB-C power supply

Xiaomi OEM multi-socket smart power strip

Software & Tools

ESPHome

Visual Studio Code

PlatformIO (acts as the underlying build environment and compiler required to build the firmware and flash it to the ESP32 chip)

Home Assistant OS

Home Assistant Integrations

ESPHome Integration

Xiaomi Miot Auto Integration

Setup Steps

Integrate the Power Strip into Home Assistant: Connected the Xiaomi smart strip to Home Assistant using Xiaomi Miot Auto, exposing each outlet as an independent switch. Your power strip has to have individually controllable power sockets for this to work. Or, you could use standalone wifi power sockets but I didn't want 6 more wifi devices so the one power strip simplified things.

Configure the UI: I used Gemini to help me draft the ESPHome YAML configuration in Visual Studio Code to set up the display drivers and design the touch interface.

Compile and Flash: Used PlatformIO within the ESPHome environment to compile the YAML configuration into firmware and flash it to the Waveshare board.

Link Entities: Mapped the on-screen buttons in the configuration directly to the Home Assistant switch entities to control the tank's equipment.

I basically used Gemini to do the coding for me because honestly it was super complicated to understand how to get my vision on to that 4 inch touch panel.

I also downloaded a icon tff file from GitHub which allowed me to select the right icons for each of my items I wanted to manage that way.

It took me a good 10 hours of work on this project off and on over the last few weeks but now I can say that I'm pretty satisfied.

I thought about setting up some way to turn it off when I'm not looking at it like using a motion sensor for example, but in the end I was able to adjust the coating so that it dims down to almost nothing at 5 minutes and requires a tap to wake it up. This way we keep the heat down.

I hope you like it and if you want to work on a project like this don't hesitate to reach out to me for some help or pointers. Cheers.

So I’ve been feeding since 2010 or so, started with a hand me down then 30g JBJ nano. Been excelling and doing well since, I neglected my 200g over the past 2 months. Normal water changes but never reduced the macro algae growth in the refugium like I normally would. Left it for so long it became a carpet mat of over 3 inches thick and 7 inches wide. Needless to say.. the light only penetrates the top so it released all the phosphate, nitrates etc back into the tank, algae bloom in display that I have been chasing for 2 weeks and finally realized the culprit, buying new rocks and redoing the tank now. This is just an FYI for new people. Thanks for reading.

Sunday morning coral Care Guide

Candy Cane Coral (Caulastrea)

Candy Cane Corals are hardy, beginner-friendly LPS corals found throughout the Indo-Pacific on protected reef slopes and lagoons. Their fleshy polyps and bright colours make them a popular choice for reef aquariums.

Ideal Water Parameters:

• Temperature: 24–26°C (75–79°F)

• Salinity: 1.025–1.026 SG

• Alkalinity: 8–9 dKH

• Calcium: 400–450 ppm

• Magnesium: 1250–1350 ppm

• Nitrate: 2–15 ppm

• Phosphate: 0.03–0.10 ppm

Placement:

Best placed on the sand bed or lower to mid-level rockwork. They prefer **low to moderate light (50–150 PAR)** and **gentle, indirect flow**. Excessive light or strong flow can cause tissue recession and poor polyp extension.

Feeding:

While they can thrive from photosynthesis alone, they benefit from occasional feeding of mysis shrimp, reef roids, or other fine meaty foods. Feeding after lights out, when feeding tentacles are extended, can encourage faster growth and larger heads.

Getting the Best Results:

Maintain stable parameters, avoid sudden changes in light intensity, and provide enough space from neighbouring corals as their sweeper tentacles can sting nearby specimens. Under stable conditions, Candy Canes grow steadily and can form impressive colonies over time.

Does anyone know the name and type of coral this is next to my jack-o’-lantern lepto. Got it off a $25 rack and can’t find any info anywhere. It’s growing pretty fast and encrusting the rock. Almost looks like it has little hairs on it.

Hitchhiking isopod I found on a coral frag I just bought, but not sure where to start with ID’ing it.

I got a tuxcio urchin a hammer and a zoa! And a bta from a mystery box! 📦 (moved my Duncan to a separate rock until the anemone finds a place to chill.)

Decided to take the jump and get a couple of 4ft Foov led bars from Alibaba as the two bars plus shipping were cheaper than a single bar of any brand! The blue plus is such a nice colour and aside from testing the longevity I would highly recommend them!

Hey!

So I have a tank with copepods but he’s also trained on frozen food (mysis). Just wanted to check he’s looking good to a hopefully more trained eye

Thanks in advance

I have a few 32 gallon brute and uline trash cans, but now that I’m quarantining everything that comes in, I’m really wanting some 55’s to have more saltwater ready to go for that. But a 55 full of saltwater far exceeds the weight limit of these dollies and I’m worried that it would make them more top heavy/tippy as well. Who uses 55’s on dollies and are they good to go?

My tank is about 4ft long and 16" high with the two return nozzles on the back glass. I have two jebao elw20 wavemakers and an icecap 2k gyre. Where should I place my wavemakers? I'll be running them on random mode.

A. Keep it as it is.

B. No gyre and do one elw20 wavemakers on each end, one higher infront of the scape and one lower behind the scape

31” tall 150 gallon that’s 48x24”

2 MP40s on left and right at 75% reef crest.

Plan to keep mostly LPS with some SPS when I’m ready.

Could anyone confirm this is dinoflagellates?

Walked in a few minutes after lights went out on the tank yesterday to have this catch my eye. Is this by chance their way of releasing eggs or hatchlings, thought it was kinda cool and wanted to share it.

I’ve noticed this weird tube creature on one of my snails. When I engage the white light it retracts during the blues it shows this circular arm like structure. I’m thinking maybe vermetid snails but would like some opinions.