Greenman
Reefing newb
So I recently got a 3 gallon fuge on my tank. How often should I clean it. It has a ton of algae on the walls and a huge ball of chaeto and rubble rock. I'm assuming these things are made to turn ugly lol
thats in a good way, rightThanks, One of her easter pictures. Acts just like her mom.. scares the hell outa me.
I go completely against this. Fuge are on the bottom side of a tank and needs a pump to get the water to return. There is no way live copepods can make it through a pump. Copepods will thrive in your sump, but that doesn't mean your dt will be full of them. I've said this before, stick your finger in a running pump and see what happens to your finger, same to a copepod.fuge is a great food supply. cranks out tons of copodes for your main tank. if you want to keep dragonettes or secretive possum wrasses it can literally make the difference between life and death
thats what i have. pump puts water into the refuge and it runs through the material and drains back into the tank. i also have about 250 lbs live rock in the tank. my fuge is 24" long and there is tons of copodes in there. i have 2 dragonettes a secrative possume wrasse and a starry dragonette in my tank. they are all nice and fat. i think the fuge is what makes the difference. any time i get a chance to buy pods to put in there to reseed i do. i even have what looks like mysis shrimp breeding in there. put some rubble- from a couple different sources if if you can get it, little bit of coarse sand, some cheato,a lite for the cheato and forget about it. it will just keep cranking out copodes for your dragonette. different sources for your material in the fuge gives you a better chance at a mixed bag of pods. when i get a chance to buy a piece of live rock i usually ask for a couple handfuls of rubble-sand from the rock tank and i put it in the fuge. thats how i got mine started. give your fuge a month or so to get up and running before you start relying on it for pods. with a productive fuge and a decent amount of live rock in your tank you should be able to keep ONE dragonette happy in your tank. i would not get two. those little beggers are eatting machines. one of mine was eatting frozen when i bought it. after it got into catching live pods that was the end of that.Mine is a HOB fuge so it just drains directly into the tank. May be a little different than under the tank. But there would be no pump so they'd fall directly into the DT. Dunno if that would work with the pods or not.
my light is set up oposite to the tank. tank lights start to dim at 10pm, out at 11pm, fuge comes on at midnite, til about 6 am, tank starts to come on again around 10am. i only lite the fuge for about 5-6 hrs a nite but i have good natual lite in the room. my fuges main purpose is for podes more then anything else. i don't prune my cheato very often. still helps keep phosphate down though. if i was using it for phospate i would still run the lite a t nite but i would run them a lot longer. if you lite fuge oposite tank it also helps with ph drop at nitehow often do you turn your light off in the fuge. i've been keeping mine on 24/7 and my chaeto is growing like mad (not to mention a ton of other algea in the fuge.)