Have any one ordered from http://www.reefcleaners.org/, I am thinking to place order for 100 or so snails and looks like this is the place to get it from.
i did a while ago and was very happy.
i have and couldnt have had a more positive experience with them. they are awesome!!! very helpful with making sure your cuc order is the right one for your tank. id say go for it.
I did not too long ago and their customer service is great…very hardy snails and ill be ordering again soon…
pretty good sizes, but the stuff that is advertised as small def is.
response sounds good. Sooo, are you possibly making a small group order, while you are at it?
I’m with Ken - sometimes it’s just not worth it to order just for yourself >LOCO<
It’s a much better idea to get 5 or 6 members together and go in as a group - decreases shipping costs and often times will get better pricing.
Thanks everyone for reply, much appreciated. They have free shipping on snail packages, I ordered 2. I had to order diatom eating snails asap, can’t stand looking at “dirty†sand bed. I put skimmer back on 6 weeks ago, didn’t help, I put carbon and gfo back on 2 weeks ago, don’t see any change. After doing some more research I came to conclusion that I may be going to many water changes and feeding silicates to diatoms. Any way, my yellow tang and fox face graze on it but it’s not enough. I’ll keep you posted. Otherwise everything is great, no losses. Just sand bed looks agly.
Treating a symptom wont solve the problem, snails eat algae but they have to poo too.
You say you are feeding the tank silicates with water changes? Are you using a Ro/DI unit and if so what are your TDS? If not then your are in for a long fight against algae in general.
The other day I was curious about how much TDS was in my tap water so first I tested my saltwater in the tank, 315 TDS. Then the scary part… tap water was 261 TDS!!! thats almost as much as salt water! Then I tested a bottle of Wawa spring water, 31 TDS and finally my RO/DI, 0 TDS. (all PPM of course)
So on that note, if you are using tap which I’m just assuming you are only because you mentioned feeding silicates with W/C’s then I’d invest in a ro/di. Just snails will just eat some of the algae and poo and feed it back to the system.
Good luck!
I think you are wrong Tim, I have 6 stage BRS RODI, with 0 tds. J.Sprung talks about this issue in His Reef Aquarium and algae solving guide book, and you will feed silicates with every water change using RoDI. Snails are the solution, silicates feed diatoms, snail poop is not silicates and will be used as food web for corals.
I could be then, I was just assuming you didn’t have one as I posted.
How is it that they say the silicates are getting in? I was pretty sure ro/di eliminates everything. Could be wrong.
Rosti, how frequent/volume of water were you changing to lead to elevated silicates?
[quote=“andrewk529, post:11, topic:3503”]
Rosti, how frequent/volume of water were you changing to lead to elevated silicates?[/quote]
3gal on 150g tank daily, I switched to every other day now + snails, will keep you posted.
i have a feeling its probably a cyano bacteria growing not a true diatom type. Your RODI will remove all silicates. the RO Membranes are about 98% effective and the DI gets the rest. its probably the bio-activity in the sand bed feeding the cyano. You could get a sand sifting goby. i have a diamond spot one and he moves sand all day long. along with improving my fuge and the goby, the cyano has gone. oh i did a whole lot of phosphate removal too. for a while i dosed tiny amounts of Lanthanum Chloride to precipitate it out and filter out. then massive GFO change. and lots of sand bed cleaning. seems good now.
DPA has horseshoe crabs in stock if your looking for an invertebrate “sand-sifter”. I actually bought one today when I was in there.
Thanks for reply andrewk529 but here is 2 problems, I will not be back to DPA and horse shoe crab are not desirable for DSB and they grow to big. I got large snail order from reef cleaners, so let them eat it up.
How deep is your sandbed? Limulus takes about 20 years to grow to full size. They also won’t burry under a few inches comparatively to body size. Disturbing of the anoxic zone with smaller specimens is unlikely.