Marcus and Camille's 75 gallon (1 Viewer)

Luck was on my side at the Christmas party so I won the Hanna nitrate checker. Thanks again to everyone for setting that up. At first glance it's pretty intimidating. Even the black box it all comes in is about twice the size of the normal checker. Took me about 15 minutes to figure out what I'm doing for my first test.
The crazy thing is that all the difficulty comes from getting your test solution ready and the checker zeroed, after doing that it is the same procedure as the Hanna phosphate checker, but it takes 8 minutes instead of 3. The first step is adding something super strong like either urea or ammonia to the liquid, so gotta make sure not to burn your nose on that in the following steps.
With my salifert kit I read somewhere between 5 and 10 ppm nitrate; with the Hanna it told me I was out of range my first time. This was expected as it only reads up to 5 ppm, but I figured I'd test the normal way first then follow the instructions to do the dilution.
Dilution added another 2 steps to an already long process to bring my total time from opening the box to getting my results to around 20 minutes, compared to about 5 for my Salifert kit. Though I'm sure with a bit more practice and memorization I can get it down to around 12-15 minutes. The biggest pain was needing to dilute with "nitrate free saltwater" which I don't keep readily mixed up, so I guess I'd need to start with that. The result after all this work was 5.2 ppm. Or right about what I was reading off my Salifert. Good to know my eyes aren't failing me I guesss.
Overall I'd say it's probably not worth getting this product unless you're trying to run some Nitrate based experiment where consistency and accuracy is key. It's not a particularly hard test to run, but it is very tedious with measuring everything out, mixing, remeasuring, and filtering.

Post freeze everything seems to have survived. We lost power for about a day and the apartment temperature got to 55F. We used a 400w inverter and car battery to keep a heater and pump running but still had to spend some time boiling water with a camp stove and the water still dropped to around 74 from a usual 78-80. As soon as we got power back we ordered a 2.2kw generator.

The tank has really exploded since we started using dosing pumps and an ATO. Our zoas are almost done taking over their rock and we've started to frag some of them. I have concerns about the carpet anemone on the right taking up a whole rock and fighting with the bubble tip but they've both been there for a few months so they seem to get along OK. The elegance in the center has also gotten massive and claims a large area of the middle of the tank with it's tentacles. In the bottom left our goniopora is doing the same thing. We might need to find a new location for the hammer/frogspawn garden soon. The digitata in the top left broke when I was cleaning the tank but seems to be doing find as two separate pieces. We recently got a NY Knicks torch that is kind of hidden in the center right but I am really excited for that to start growing out as well.

In sadder news, the carpet anemone has eaten our pintail fairy wrasse a few weeks back. That was a big loss as it was one of my favorites. I hope the clowns keep the rest of the fish away, but they seem pretty busy headbutting each other. It's strange behavior because they've been paired for over a year and just started doing that but I guess clowns will be clowns.