A few questions

[Nav]

I've been having these questions for a while, I know they're very different topics... would be great if your answers are numbered. Thanks

1. Is it ok to run a filter sock for 2 weeks? I have 2 drains, one going to ATS and other to sock... I've been doing every week but the sock doesn't get crazy dirty or clog. (I know people say its a nitrate factory)
2. When you feed OysterFeast, do you turn off your return so it doesn't go wasted into the sump? If yes, for how long? Do you broadcast feed or target squirt?
3. Plating monti encrusted vs Setosa monti encrusted. Who wins when they grow and are going to touch each other?
4. Acro with base encrusted vs Setosa monti encrusted. Who wins when they grow and are going to touch each other?
5. Acro with base encrusted vs Cap monti (not encrusted). Who wins when they grow and are going to touch each other?
6. How do you stop an encrusted plating monti from growing (or how do you kill it), I can't get the rock out of the tank to scrape it.
7. If a hermit didn't get a larger shell, will it stay in the same shell and keep molting?
8. Heater is set to 78/79 and in normal days it keeps it around 79. On these hot days, temp goes up 81/82 but I see the header still turn on and off in the sump once in a while?

 

[sfsuphysics]

1. Depends how dirty they get, I run the larger sized socks (more like a nylon stocking than a wooly sock) and I simply remove them every few days, rinse them out and put them back. Socks will capture particulate matter, and it will naturally break down (hence the nitrate factory). As to whether or not it increases your nitrates, one way to find out... look at your nitrates
2. Going off memory here, but IIRC the oils in oyster feast stop the foaming process of a skimmer so it won't get pulled out. That said, where do you want the food to go? In the display? Or to things growing in your sump. If you have a DC pump pressing the feed timer on it wouldn't be a bad thing, I wouldn't say you need to go so far as to shut off your pumps though.
3. Everyone is different, but in my experience setosas grow slowly compared to other plating montis so the setosa won't "win" but their warfare tends to be a battle of growth, who can grow over the other, not like LPS where they fling their guts and physically dissolve another coral from a distance away
4. Depends what grows faster, typically branching acros will simply shade out what's under
5. Depends how they grow, I've seen my fair share of acros that grow tall and the caps swirl around
6. Turn your pumps off, squirt some kalk paste on it, or put a glob of superglue on your finger and smear it over the surface of the coral should do the trick
7. You got me, from what I remember though, hermits need bigger shells because they get bigger when they molt.

 

[Nav]

Thx Mike. For 3, 4, 5, ignoring which grows fast and assuming they're almost touching each other I want to know if they'll be ok or kill each other...

Also added 8.

 

[wpeterson]

There's a lot of things to unpack here, but I'll share my experience with filter socks. I run a single 7" filter sock at a time in a chamber setup as the outflow from my drain chamber. I run the sock until it gets clogged with detritus and water won't flow through it (usually a week or so). My filter sock chamber is setup so that when the flow through the sock goes down, the water backs up and shunts through a secondary channel over the top and out the side of the filter sock chamber.

I have been running without a filter sock most of the time the last 2-3 months to allow food into the refugium and to allow smaller critters to escape the display tank in the water column and settle in the refugium. We've had a lot of snails and other critters growing up in the refugium and once they're over a centimeter or so I move them back up into the display tank.

The main use case for filter socks in our tank was filtering small bits of algae detritus when we fed Nori to our tang. Now that only happens when I scrape the glass. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to run a filter sock all of the time, unless I'm cleaning or doing a water change.

That being said, I bought 8x of them a while back on sale and it's easy to swap them and then wash them all with bleach when I use the last clean one - every 2-3 months.

 

[wpeterson]

You LFS should have bins of cheap snail shells of different sizes. Before they went out of business a few weeks ago, SeaScapes in Mountain View had 5-6 different sizes of snail shells in bins you could buy for $0.05-$.0.25. I would look for another LFS with snail shells and buy a bunch of different sizes to give your hermit a lot of options and prevent competitions or murder of living snails.