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Tap water looks clean enough in a glass, but for a reef tank or a heavily planted freshwater setup it is loaded with dissolved solids that tap testing rarely flags as a problem. Chlorine, chloramine, phosphate, silicate, copper and nitrate can all be sitting in mains water at levels that seem trivial for drinking but are more than enough to fuel algae blooms, stall coral growth, or throw off carefully dosed alkalinity and calcium levels. Reverse osmosis deionisation, better known as RO/DI, strips almost all of this out before the water ever touches your tank.An RO/DI unit works in stages....

Coscinaraea is one of those corals that gets overlooked on a crowded stock list, mostly because it does not scream for attention the way a rainbow Acropora does. It sits low, grows flat, and wears muted colours that shift with the light. That understatement is exactly why a lot of experienced reefers keep coming back to it, especially for spots in the tank that need something calm rather than something loud.What does Coscinaraea actually look like?It is a plating or encrusting LPS, meaning it grows outward across a surface rather than up into a mound or branch. The skeleton forms...

Walk along any wall of large polyp stony corals in a display tank and Platygyra is usually the one that looks like a topographic map. Instead of round separated corallites, this genus grows in continuous meandering ridges and valleys, which is exactly why it earned the common name maze coral. It is a genus that rewards a slow, attentive keeper without demanding advanced skills, and it happens to be one of the more forgiving LPS options for someone building confidence with large polyp corals.Reading the Maze PatternPlatygyra colonies form a network of fused walls rather than individual mouths sitting in...

Favia and Favites sit in the same family and get mixed up constantly at the shop counter. Both are LPS corals with a distinct pineapple look, walls of fleshy polyps separated by ridged skeleton that genuinely looks like the outside of a pineapple. Once you know what to check, telling them apart takes about ten seconds.Favia vs Favites, the quick tellFavia corallites (the individual polyp cups) are round and sit apart from their neighbours, each one distinctly separate even where the colony is dense. Favites corallites share walls with the polyps next to them, so the skeleton looks more like...

Goniopora is one of the most photographed corals in the hobby and one of the most quietly returned. Its long, tentacle-tipped polyps sway like a bed of tiny flowers, which is exactly where the common name comes from. It also has a reputation, earned over decades, for looking magnificent in a shop tank and then fading over the following six to twelve months in a home aquarium that isn't quite ready for it. This isn't superstition. It's a pattern experienced reefers have watched play out again and again, and it's worth understanding before you commit tank space to one.We regularly...