How We Test our Water Parameters! Essential Tips for a STABLE Reef!

what's going on reefers Blaine here it is early in the morning and we are going to get ready to get into a full battery Friday today we're going to be doing a ton of testing all throughout the day here at topshelf Aquatics and we're going to remind you again why you should be testing your tank at home let's check it out [Music] I know it's hard for you guys to see me and Evan look at that lights are on Amazing the lights are coming on it is super early in the morning here at Top Shelf Aquatics it is 7:57 we're just getting ready to start pulling water samples here with Evan Evan what do we got going on today grabbing water samples full battery Friday baby let's get into it and let's start talking sampling [Music] okay so Evan obviously we have a lot of Tanks here in the farm out of all the samples we're grabbing there's so many tanks in here how many samples do we grab on a single full battery Friday uh all together I think it's uh a solid 33 33 so every single time people are at home complaining about their single tank they have to test we've got 33 of them I'm going to let you get back to it though let's keep grabbing all of our samples then we'll get to testing [Music] so Evan I've seen you do it a couple times now you're swishing out the cup every single time can you explain that to everyone that's watching the biggest thing would be contaminants so that could be just anything from these cups sitting out on the Shelf all day to a little bit of salt water left over you get a little bit of salt creep inside the cup you grab a water sample you know it could throw off your salinity alkalinity anything gotcha so basically just washing it out getting it nice and fresh for that new s yeah you want to keep them clean and uh Cory was just saying too these just got bleached yesterday so perfect how how often do you guys bleach those cups every month every month or so often yeah you know second we start seeing a little bit of discoloration throw I'm right and bleach gotcha so Evan obviously we have a ton of reef tanks here in the farm but we also have a nice selection of some quarantined fish and quarantined tanks we obviously need to test the quarantine tanks too right so what are we testing when it comes to these systems so every day we run copper you know whether it's a little high or a little low we're always testing it and we're always making sure we keep it above therapeutic so right now these guys are sitting at a solid 2.6 the other fish system over there we just added some brand new fish to them we're slowly bringing the copper up but same thing every single day we're testing it you made a great point I think most people forget this when it comes to Copper I think it's super essential that you know that's a test that you are not skipping at all especially if you're trying to get them to the Copper levels that are therapeutic the last thing you want to do is a either be underneath that therapeutic level and you're not really getting an actual quarantine done or B if you're going way over you know you're definitely you know harming the fish yeah for sure well nice so cool to see that we obviously have quarantine fish setups too here in the farm so Copper's on the list as well curious obviously this is our aptasia wall we've talked about this system before are you testing this just as same as you would any reef tank even even though this is just an aptasia setup right we're growing out aptasia we want to test all the normal parameters too Y and also if you noticed I don't have the regular bins with me yeah and that's for cross contamination because we have uh the the bergia systems over there the jars and we don't want bergia anywhere near this system very bad if we got bergia in our aptasia yeah they would go they would definitely enjoy that a little too much Evan you guys got a ton of Tanks over in the farm you're lucky enough to have me join the team and more tanks have joined even more so we've got two here in the studio you're testing every single system right we grabbed the samples before from the store before we did a little bit of filming but we've got tanks all over the place here at Top Shelf Aquatics right so it's not just what's going on in the farm we've got tanks everywhere all right Evan we've collected all the samples you can see them all lined up next to you there are a lot of samples we're going to go through we've set it a couple times now as we're grabbing samples full battery Friday I love hearing you guys talk about it here in the farm it cracks me up every time can you explain to everyone what's a full battery Friday here at topshell so on every Friday and Tuesday we collect all the water samples we get every if it has water and Coral in it it's going to get tested and that that happens so every Tuesday and Friday so today's Friday um you know we get all the water samples then we run through all the systems and do alkalinity calcium Magnesium phosphate nitrate salinity okay so y so you just mentioned it we test every single parameter possible and then on top of it like we said too if it's a quarantine system we're testing for copper as well so we are testing for a lot of parameters here we talked a little bit about it offline I know a lot of times some people will think testing can take so much time right I think this is an awesome example of us showcasing yeah testing is going to take some time but you got to do it to be able to maintain and make sure your tanks are nice and happy we did say too offline what were maybe two of the parameters right sometimes people don't have a bunch of time in their day to test what would be maybe two test or three test that you would focus on to kind of check your parameters and see how your Tank's you know doing and working I'd say the most important would be alkalinity and phosphate it's going to be top two if you have you know five or 10 minutes you get home from work you're feeding the fish you're you know relaxing you're at home you know if you say I Got 5 minutes I want to test some water I'd say alkalinity and phosphate without a doubt and now we've got the 30ish or so samples how long does that take you to go through every single test all the tanks I know it's going to take a while right full battery Friday right so that's probably I'm guessing it's an all day venure yeah so if I were to do this completely by myself do all the parameters it' be at least 3 and 1/2 four hours easy um today I'm going to have a little bit of help so we have another testing sheet right here and it's all the phosphates all the nitrates so while I'm doing all the titrations I'm going to have a partner right next to me who's going to be doing the phosphates as we've said it before the titration station we are basically an ICP test in the form of a couple humans we've got Cory the farm manager we've got Megan we've got so many other people that I see jump in on this and help you out obviously it's nice to have multiple on it too right I think that's also a good addition you know if something may seem a little bit off by one person you know they make a test that next person could do that same sample again test again and maybe you know kind of bounce off each other and figure out those numbers I know a lot of people are going to be curious you know what we use for test kits testers here at the farm people are going to you know trust in what we're doing obviously we have so many tests we go through so I see some salifert next to you we've got Hannah Checkers go ahead and explain to us some of the test kits we utilize the checkers we use and also how we're going to be able to measure our salinity levels too so for calcium alkalinity magnesium we're running all sfur across the board um for us the titration is really the the best most accurate and the most efficient way um for phosphates we're going to be using the Hannah Checker and that's going to be the hi7 I believe yeah hi 736 which is going to be uh the ultra low range and phosphorus which measures it measures the reading in um parts per billion which we convert to PPM and then for the salinity we've talked about it you know there's a lot of ways people can check salinity right there's your conductivity through your probes on your Apex your hydros you've got the Hannah Checkers there's many ways to check but there's also the tried andrue old school method that we use here at topshelf what are we using to check our salinity uh refractometer yep keeping it simple right so we use that all the time nonstop obviously we're going to have a couple other elements that'll showcase some of our salinity levels but that's going to be the ultimate tool for us to get and we calibrate it every single morning and that's something too I think people forget right is these tools whether it be your Hanah Checker your refractometer you need to re-calibrate these right you know over time they're going to get out of calibration and getting back to that area is going to be super important I want to make mention to Cory the farm manager once again said the funniest thing ever about the Hanah Checkers in my opinion right so we we use them we're a farm right so we're using them on a grand scale these Hanah Checkers are probably seeing more tests in their life they would ever see in three days than they would see at any home aquarium right so how many tests from this just this one hand Checker are we going through in maybe two or three days so in a full week it's going to be a full battery which is around 30 tests we do that twice so we're already at 60 we're already at 60 that's only 2 days of the seven days of the week and then I'd say it's at least another 20 a day after that so what close to 150 I bet tests a week so and another thing that a lot of people forget you know when it comes to right I think a lot of people remember this and like work trucks work tools right we are a farm so these are getting used and abused right because we need to use them constantly all the time I think that's a great Testament to the Hannah Checkers that they're to kind be resilient enough to last throughout all these tests we're them obviously 100 plus tests in a couple days they would never see that in a home aquarium so really cool to see that shout out to Hannah also shout out to salfer for having some amazing test kits and keeping us locked in all those are going to be available on our website if you want to grab those up but Evan do you have any other final thoughts before I let you dive into this I'm going get to it as soon as I can right I know I've been holding you up so I'm going to let you get to it uh I want to say thank you again for you know jumping in on this with us we'll check in with you throughout the day and see how it's going [Music] all right we're checking back in with Evan he's about 2 and a half hours 3 hours into this he's working through some stuff he wanted to grab me for a minute though we're going to talk a little bit about some of the adjustments we might be making these are things we're making on the fly as we're testing I'll let Evan take it over so I was at a weird stopping point I just happened to glance over at some of our phosphate numbers I noticed there were a couple systems that were a little bit too low for our liking um pretty much our our cuto off I don't want to say emergency but our cut off for you know when stuff needs to happen pretty much immediately is under 10 parts or billion of phosphorus which is going to be around 0.03 so what we're going to do is instead of waiting until the end of the day to feed we're not going to waste any time we're going to feed these systems right now gotcha so these are quick adjustments we're going to make I did want to ask you a question though I said it to you earlier why do we test right I know a lot of people at home you know they have this question you know it's like why are we even testing in the first place obviously top shelf Aquatics is a very special situation we're providing corals to a hobby we're trying to you know fulfill everyone's tanks around the country but everyone you know why do we do our testing consistency we want to nail these numbers every single day day after day and we cannot you know waste any time so like you know in this scenario right now these phosphates are getting pretty low and we don't want to waste any time you bought them out your phosphates you're in trouble especially some of these systems pretty much all AC report you never never want your phosphates or even any number too low or too high you always want to have that consistency and when when you start to go off track that's when you want to start you know taking the time and energy to you know correcting those I think that word really good we've talked about it on the channel a bunch you know here I think consistency is super important right you know being stable right you don't want to go outside and make a bunch of big changes if you see something wrong but if you do see small adjustments you can make them what are some of our Baseline numbers we're looking for I know everyone in the comments if I did not ask this question is going to be blowing me up asking me what are going to be our Baseline numbers kind of across the board for most of our parameters so salinity is always going to be 1.026 33 um alkalinity we're going to be shooting for 8.9 and that's not 8.8 it's not 9.0 it's always 8.9 if it's a little high if it's a little low we always making adjustment no matter what um calcium is going to be 435 magnesium is going to be 1350 um phosphates are going to be 0.06 to 0.09 and then our nitrates are going to be around 15 to 20 awesome well let's go ahead run over there let's make some adjustments and then I'm going to let you get back to your testing okay as we mentioned Evan we're making changes on the Fly we've talked about it in previous videos utilizing Reef roids benets a lot of these different foods we use them as Tools in our farm what are we doing right now so the reason why we're using refo like I mentioned before our phosphates are pretty much in that little danger zone so Reids are a really good tool to get a good amount of phosphates in your water very quickly um you know it is Friday nobody's shipping today so we could pretty much feed these systems like whenever we want so we want to get these refs in the water soon so that our phosphates do not continue dropping right on so obviously we were over in the farm F we just utilized reefs we clouded up the water big time what are we using over in the store now so same thing with this system right here the phosphates were pretty close to that danger zone so what we're going to do is we're going to get those phosphates elevated quickly but since we can't use Reids the store is going to open soon like 10 or 15 minutes so we can't you know really cloud up the waters feeding all this food but what we can do is give herself a little bump in phosphate which just some straight up activate so I'm going to go ahead and add a couple milliliters this just to get us out of that danger [Music] zone Evan has worked his way through all of the tests so many of them now we're at the point we're sitting on front of the computer and we're going to start putting the numbers in right so after we start putting the numbers in this is really where we're going to start to see some of those changes some of those things that we need to change obviously this is our little program we've developed here at topshelf this is called what again the reef shark the reef shark so obviously it's not something we can just go out and share with everyone but these are you know especially Cory had mentioned it too was this is kind of you know equations and things that are catered directly to our sisters right I mean it's not one of those things you could plug in play for anyone's tank um but specifically we created this reef shark for topshelf well better yet let's not talk about the reef shark you know myself let's have you explain it a little bit better so pretty much this is an Excel document each tab at the bottom is its own separate system and then from there you have this whole page so I guess I guess if you wanted to see how much we actually test here um I was just talking with bla and it looks like pretty much every day this system got its phosphat tested every single day every single day um you know you can see so sometimes twice a day too right that's right yeah yeah um so with here you know you can definitely see on the full battery days where we were Target and we didn't exactly have to do a follow-up test but say if it is a little bit high or a little bit low we would go through here and you know do the follow tests with you know calcium mag phosphate nitrate um and alkalinity as well alkalinity is going to get tested every single day no matter what if it's if it's got Coral in it we're going to be testing the ALK every day I think our alkalinity too is really special in the fact that we have such big Colony sizes and amounts of corals I think you know you even mentioned it earlier you know you can have a swing of DK within an hour or so it's you know you for most tanks at home it might be over the of one or two days you might see a change but here it's in the matter of hours like some some of your tanks at home you know some people get you know3 DK you know a day 0.5 you know but here we could turn our dosers off like say for example our alkalinity is like half a DK over Target we turn the caer off for like an hour two hours and we're back to Target it's down half a DK in an hour which is that's crazy how fast things change around here I mean obviously another Testament to the fact that this is a farm situation we're doing things on a larger scale saw you mention some things about some of the phosphates we talked about it earlier about how we are adding phosphates into some of the tanks you said you mentioned you saw a tank that was a little high so what are we going to do to kind of go against that counter actively 0.12 is going to be our cut off for no p.m so all these systems get fed every single morning it's pretty much guaranteed they're going to the fish are going to get fed but if the phosphates do not allow us we will skip a PM feeding in order to drop those numbers after that if the if you know say the phosphates still are Rising once we get to 0.15 that's when we're going to start doing the more aggressive techniques such as gfo you made a great Point too once again a lot of these things that I keep thinking of you know I think of just tanks at home we feed all the time I do it to my tank all the time I'm constantly feeding whereas we kind of treat each system specifically like they might not get a feeding in a day because they're not within the parameters we're hoping for so really interesting to kind of hear that you know sometimes even though you're looking at your tank your fish might look really hungry and you know wanting to eat it might be better actually to skip a day and allow your kind of corals to catch up with all the nitrates phosphates things in the water column we don't want to trash our water quality to feed just to feed right just to make the fish happy that's kind of the last thing we want to do I mean obviously we want to make sure we're keeping all the animals here at Top Shelf happy but we're definitely honing in on our fish being workers really they're not just fish right they're more so tools that we're utilizing to maintain certain numbers algae control all those kind of different things so we're really strictly with the numbers focusing on making sure the corals are happy absolutely so when we're implementing the numbers you were saying that reef shark kind of is smart enough to know what's going on that's right so it does have its own program so you know we do have our own set of targets but all of the you know additives are going to change with system volume so with those system volumes in mind reef shark will do that calculation you know like say you know our our magnesium is you know 20 PPM under Target reef shark will do that calculation of you know the two-part additive per to hit that Target gotta per that specific water volume yeah Evan we're at the point you've put every single number in I've watched you you're typing away getting everything into the system now what are we going to do start making our small adjustments you said you're even able to basically make a lot of these changes staying right here in the office space yeah so pretty much we spent all that time testing we put in all that information and now it's time to you know actually use these numbers so you know let's say you know for example this system I'm looking at right now the calcium was a little bit low this morning so on top of a manual adjustment it's just it's just us dumping in two parts you get a little bit of a bump but we are also going to turn our for dosers so let's see I could hop into magnesium that one was a little low this morning it was sitting at around 1300 our Target's going to be 1350 so we're going to do a 5 to 10% increase um so pretty much from Apex you just hop in here modify the interval and then from 85 you know let's say I'm going to go to 90 I'll just add you know 5 milliliters boom and then it's sent so I made that adjustment and then tomorrow I'm going to go through I'm going to double check that adjustment as well right so obviously after you make an adjustment super important to go back and make sure that that adjustment was exactly what you needed maybe you might need a little bit more maybe a little less or you were right on the money so obviously good to go back kind of double check and hit on those points before we wrap things up here in front of the computer I wanted to open up a can of worms pH is one of those parameters things that we think about a lot here at the farm it's something that's talked a lot about in this hobby let's talk just a little bit about pH how we kind of work with it here at the farm we have a lot to combat whether it be huge amount of CO2 emissions that are in the air whether it be the amount of corals that we have trying to maintain that number let's just get into pH a little bit so majority of these systems they all start out you know with a backbone of caer for alkalinity and even a little bit of calcium um we do also utilize the straight up uh two-part alkalinity if say we we reach our evaporation with cawas we could go ahead and add alkalinity on top of that and if we want to get a little more pH boost we will use um a blend of hydroxides as well and then we have our refugiums too which are kind of helping with that too you know I'm a lot of the ones that we see here in the farm are running that reverse light cycle so at night they're up and running whereas all the tanks are kind of shut off when we're looking at some of the pH numbers of some of our systems here I know we're maybe transitioning some of them off caler we have a bunch of them on Calas even some of them are soaking up it's going to sound crazy here on the video but 18 gallons worth of Calas in a day what are we doing to make these small adjustments on ph and how do we look into it on our Apex so what we're going to do is so this is going to be the dosing intervals for one of our systems this one right here it's it doesn't it's 10 gall a day which which isn't the most but it's definitely a lot right in comparison to what most people are dripping it's a lot but my point is that you know this morning the alkalinity was 8.45 while our Target is nine we're going to want to do an increase but we're going to be doing a very very small increase so you know this this system gets you know 10 10 gallons a day we're only going to add 250 M to you know the dosing schedule throughout the day however there are are three separate dosing intervals so three separate dosing intervals for your caler right yeah yeah and that's going to be split up throughout the day so it's midnight to 8:00 a.m. 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and then 8:00 p.m. to midnight and then it starts all over again and we're doing our biggest amount dosing during the night period and then it kind of scales down from there correct so once the light turns on we'll go ahead and use an interval we're not dosing as much Ca gloss we want to dose the most amount of cauler during the night time in order to buffer that pH right that's the biggest thing right that nighttime a lot of reefers will see there's that huge dip in your pH at nighttime so caler opposite schedule of a refugium that's a really great way to kind of counteract that do a little bump up to try and maintain those pH numbers exactly well I'm going to let you start getting to your changes and all those things and we'll probably end up circling back here again soon once we get into maybe some of the manual changes and shifting and then maybe some of the PM feedings [Music] yeah okay I've gotten back with Evan again we're checking the time once again we're at 2:30 at this point we are just finishing up our am testing and Evan what are you doing right now so I did all reef shark I did all the adjustments in apacks and now if anything was low I'm going to be going ahead and going through and I'm going to be adding smaller um manual adjustments just to give us that little bit of an edge to get closer to Target like we mentioned before you know small adjustments is going to be the best thing possible for your reef tanks at home you don't want to make these huge changes right if you make giant changes there could be way too much that's going to shift over that course of that huge change so Minor Adjustments here and there is definitely going to be the best thing possible I know you got some more testing to do right cuz we just talked about it earlier in the video he has PM testing to finish his as well I want to say thank you again Evan appreciate you jumping on this has been super fun if you guys have any extra questions for Evan regarding testing here at top show Aquatics leave a comment down below we'll make sure we get all those questions to Evan and we'll figure it out and again if we want to continue and open that can of worms we can talk about pH as well if you guys have hung out all the way till the end I want to say thank you so much be sure to like subscribe and hit the Bell notifications so you don't miss out on any future uploads [Music]