Tips

Winter in Brisbane means the AC and heaters are both working overtime, and a lot of reef keepers use the cooler months to finally sort out flow instead of just topping up evaporation. If you bought a powerhead based on tank length alone, there is a decent chance your corals are either getting flattened or sitting in a dead zone behind the rockwork. Sizing flow properly takes about five minutes with a calculator and a tape measure, so there is no excuse to keep guessing.What you need: Tank volume in litres (not the display size on the box, the actual...

Brisbane winters aren't brutal, but the gap between a heated tank and a cool lounge room at 6am is enough to turn your aquarium lid into a dripping mess. If you're wiping condensation off the glass cover every single morning, the fix isn't a bigger towel. It's airflow and a couple of small hardware tweaks.Why winter makes it worseWater inside the tank sits at 24 to 26 degrees thanks to your heater. Room air in a Brisbane winter can drop to 14 or 15 degrees overnight, especially in older Queenslanders with poor insulation. That temperature gap forces warm, humid air...

A gunky skimmer neck is the number one reason skimmers start overflowing wet foam all over the sump. The neck is the narrow tube between the body and the collection cup, and it collects a film of proteins and salt that gets thicker every day. Once that film builds up, foam bubbles stick to the sides instead of bursting cleanly, so they climb higher and eventually spill over the cup. If your skimmer smells bad or the cup fills with thin, watery skimmate instead of thick dark gunk, the neck is usually the culprit, not the pump.What you need A...

Winter in Brisbane means slower metabolisms across most reef tanks. Water temps sit a touch lower, corals feed less aggressively, and any food that misses its target lingers longer before bacteria or your skimmer catch it. That lag is exactly when target feeding starts fouling water instead of growing coral. Get the timing and technique right and you can dose Reef Roids or Reef Pulse straight onto polyps without spiking phosphate the next morning.Broadcast feeding is easy but wasteful. Target feeding puts food exactly where a coral's mouth or polyps are, in a small enough dose that nothing drifts off...

Picture a 300 litre mixed reef running a single pump in the wrong spot. Sand dunes form on one side of the tank, acropora tips bleach on the flow-facing edge, and a torch coral three inches away isn't moving at all. One pump, wrong spot, wrong angle. That's the whole problem in a nutshell, and it's fixable in an afternoon without buying more gear.Wavemaker placement gets treated as an afterthought because the units are small and the instructions say "mount anywhere on glass." Technically true. Practically, where and how you mount it decides whether your corals get gentle, randomised movement...