Beginners Guide To ‘Cycling’ A Saltwater Aquarium

Nitrogen Cycle For Saltwater Aquariums No we don’t mean strapping your tank to a bike and taking it for a spin! Cycling your saltwater aquarium is a critical process all aquariums must endure before they are ready to be populated with…

Blue Life new FX Advanced Regenerable Resins for Phosphate, Nitrate and Organics

Over the last several years Blue Life USA has grown to become one of the country’s leading supplier of water conditioning medias. With the FX Advanced Regenerable Resins line Blue Life is making it both cheaper and easier to condition…

Basic Water Testing—Nitrates And Phosphates

Water Testing Testing your water isn’t the most exciting part of reefkeeing, but it is an important weekly ritual. Without water testing, it is difficult to know what’s happening in your aquarium and what corrections you can make to create…

Aquarium Automation: The Theiling Rollermat and Other Web-Filtering Technologies

The problem For the longest time, I have been trying to lengthen the maintenance interval for the filter socks on my 450-gallon system, which currently clog every two days. I tried eliminating filter socks completely for a period of time,…

Salty Q&A: How Long Before My Tank Is Cycled?

Question The fish store dealer who’s helping me through the setup of my first saltwater aquarium told me I need to give the tank time to cycle before I put any fish or corals in it. As of right now,…

Salty Q&A: Is RO/DI Water All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

Question I’ve been keeping saltwater aquariums for five years, and in all that time I’ve never used RO/DI water for top offs or mixing up clean salt water. I just use tap water treated with a dechlorinator / dechloraminator, and…

Nyos Phosphate & Nitrate test kit review

NYOS is a progressive brand of marine aquarium products which has recently teamed up with Ecotech Marine to make inroads in the American side of the marine aquarium hobby. The Reefer line of marine aquarium test kits are some of…

Open Source Nitrate test kit is a great chemistry learning tool

If you’ve ever wanted to learn how our chemistry test kits really work, from the inside out, you could consider building your own Nitrate test kit thanks to a new open source project by Joshua Pearce. The guidelines for this…

Can Live Rock Be Added Directly to an Established Marine Aquarium?

“Caribbean Chris” and I are very frequently asked whether it’s okay to add new pieces of live rock directly to an established system. Ever erring on the side of caution, we generally discourage this practice. Instead, we recommend curing them…

Bubble-Tip Anemone Safety Tips

The bubble-tip anemone (Entacmaea quadricolor), or BTA, is justifiably popular in the marine aquarium hobby, being relatively hardy and easy to keep as anemones go as well as being a suitable host anemone for many clownfish species. But to horribly…