Here at the offices of olsen and colby, we will never stop fighting for you. Have you been subject to an unfair treatment by a wholesaler or local fish store? Has this ever happened to you? You're ordering shrimp from one of those other guys, but when you go to the checkout, you find out your promo code has expired. So you get in the car, drive to the store, but you're tired from staying up late, clicking on adult pop up ads, trying to meet local singles. So you stop to get coffee, but the coffee is too hot and you burn your tongue and you miss your offer a ramp. So you try to make an illegal uturn, but you don't have the clearance, and crash into the parked car in front of you, which turns out to be your boss, who fires you on the spot. Now you don't have a disposable income to support your hobby, so now you scavenge discarded shrimp from the dumpsters behind their local steakhouse to keep an old tupperware containers you borrowed from your cousin Karen, who's been asking about them since last Memorial Day. Even if you haven't had this happen to you, you may be entitled to financial compensation in the form of 15% off your next order at Joe Shrimpshack.com using a promo code aquariumguys at checkout Joe Shrimpshack.com. Make the right choice. Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast with your host, Jim colby and Rob dolson. Hey, guys, it is so good to talk to you again this week. I'm your host, Rob soulson.

I'm Jungle Jim colby.

And I'm Adam.

Elizabeth threw Adam off, didn't it?

Jungle Jim?

Why not? I gave you guys new nicknames last week. I called you the vanilla gorilla.

The vanilla gorilla.

I called Adam malibu Ken.

Malibu Ken?

Yeah. So I thought, I'd begging myself up your jungle gym.

I'm jungle gym?

Yeah.

Is that like a manscaping reference? Like, you should be keeping up?

I do it the old fashioned way. I just light up a torch and just kind of singe the hair.

That's why I smell the long hair every time you come to the podcast.

Exactly.

Well, guys, we're going to dive in, but before we do, our subject of the day is marine chemicals and how to actually dose your tank. So for this expert, we have Kyle from cobalt aquatics, also representing reflowers. Kyle, it's a pleasure having you on the show, buddy.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

So you said we talked to you a little bit before the podcast, and I've been talking with you back and forth for a while. So just to give you guys a little teaser into this, right. Reflowers have sent me quite a bit of plant fertilizer, because, again, I'm not a salt water guru. I've had them, I've set them up in the past. I'm by no means an expert, but I am, however, very evident plants and reeflowers plant fert have been working great for me. I have actually results in about a week and a half on my red ludwig. All different types of plants. They pushed away a lot of the other algae's in the tank, which I didn't expect. Me not using Fertz a ton because I've always tried to go, no co2, no mess using just the easy to use fert. You just assume that it's giving more food to the water and algae would go up with it. It didn't. And it's just beautiful results. And you guys will hear in the future weeks, we're going to actually do some sponsorships with reflowers. So certainly check them out. Reflowers us. The link will be in description. But Kyle, you were saying that I was asking you what your position is at the company, and you said you had a mysterious title.

Yeah, a little bit of a mysterious title. So a lot of people don't realize that at cobalt, we're just a really tiny company. Counting the guys out in the warehouse, there's 14 of us total. So we all kind of wear a bunch of hats. I like to call my title the Swiss Army Knife of cobalt. I kind of do a little bit of everything, but I'm the resident marine biologist and I do a lot of, like R and D and product development. I also work a little bit in sales. I work a little bit in some of the various state licensing type things. So anytime we make a chemical or a food or what have you, you got to go through a bunch of political red tape to get it cleared with all the different states and different countries for import export, all that kind of stuff. So all that kind of falls under my job.

Well, certainly I have a bunch of different questions from our community for you, for sure. But again, we appreciate you having your show and sharing the expertise with us, buddy. Because I need some help.

Absolutely.

He needs more than just a little help. You need mental help.

HR help, and I need my nose cleared after smelling burnt hair.

Hey, that's right.

Right. So let's get down to the questions. Each week we try to go through the podcast and people send us questions. So if you have questions for us, you can join this podcast live. We do it Monday nights at 07:00 P.m.. Go to coriangistpodcast.com. On the bottom of the website you'll see a link for discord. It's where we have our entire community on right now. There is an absolute ton of people in discord. So certainly join the debauchery and live chat. Otherwise you can send us an email, send us a text message, use a voicemail however you feel comfortable to give us messages, even on Facebook. So, question one. Hey, guys, I got a new question for you. My Acrylic tank has a sheet of blue Acrylic that was installed on the inside. I bought this tank used. anyways, I'm wanting to know if I can change the color from blue to black background. I've heard a product called Plastidip that's spelled plas ti dip, spray paint. He used to paint some decorations. What are your thoughts on spraying the inside of the back wall of my tank? As long as I mask the rest off. So I've never actually dealt with this. Generally, I always have some sort of clear background and I'm putting something behind the tank or painting the back of the tank.

This is the acrylic tank, correct?

It is.

I've got some experience in that. An acrylic tank. I don't know if there is a blue acrylic that is a solid blue, and if that's the case, you won't be able to get rid of the solid blue. But sometimes they'll put a blue film on it, which is just kind of like the same stuff that they use for blacking out your windows in your car to keep the sun out. And that is fairly inexpensive. We've put that in many acrylic tanks of my friend ty Tall Through. We've done that several times, and it's a blue thin plastic that we used to put on there. And then you have to smooth out the air bubbles. And once it's on there, it's on there pretty permanent. So it's possible that that might be on there now. But if it's an actual blue acrylic, you're going to be stuck with blue acrylic. But I would not paint anything on the inside of the acrylic because I think that would not be safe.

Well, I mean, even if you can find a safe paint, the possibilities of it chipping and just leaving debris in your tank. Even if it's harmless, it's still just garbage in there and it'll chip. So I think that for the most part, you're probably stuck with it being blue. Unless you're want to risk the inside paint that we don't recommend.

Yeah, unless there's a blue film on the outside that you can peel off and then you can switch it to black. They sell several different colors of the film that you can put on the back of those acrylic tanks.

Yeah, it sounds like this is pretty baked in. Yeah.

And you probably are screwed.

So here's my counter idea is using some sort of, like, plastic black sheet that you can put on the back on the inside. That way it's not paint and it's some sort of like, you know, just plastic sheet you stuck on. But even then you have risk of debris getting back. There mold of some sort growing back there, detritus. So there's no real good solution for this.

Yeah.

If you paint the black over the blue, you might possibly get a darkened color. I'm not sure what color is going to turn out to be, but I have used acrylic paint on the back of tanks, which will work for a while, but then, like Rob said it starts peeling off after a while.

Now I heard Kyle try to say something.

Yeah, I use plastidip all the time for car parts. I have a 1971 Volkswagen beetle that I'm working on turning into a baja Bug. But we plasti dip like two thirds of that car to keep it like, rust free, things like that. Problem with plasticip is the aerosols in it will mess up acrylic. It'll cause it to craze. So if you sprayed any plasticip inside or outside, it's going to send all the little spider web crazing throughout the entire acrylic.

Yeah, that doesn't sound fun at all.

When I first got into the aquarium business and stuff sell stuff called crystal glaze, which was you'd lay your tank on its face and then you pour the crystal glaze on it and it would crack and make kind of these really cool looking frosts like patterns and stuff. I don't even know if they make anymore. It used to be called crystal glaze, but that actually worked pretty well because it was not waterproof, but it was a lot better than using a paint. But I still like the cling wrap that you put on.

Something like adhesive vinyl is great. If you are able to peel off the blue in some way, you could put that adhesive vinyl sheet across the back.

Yeah, that works fantastic.

Winning. Also, I asked hey, may I answer this on the podcast? Anytime that you want to answer the question on air, you're more than welcome to You Guys Rock, even with the digger redu.

Wow.

Right?

Why are digger redu? I've been practicing the digger redu and I am 20% better than I used to be a year ago.

He even went on to say, I listened to about 20 different podcasts, all different topics, and this is my favorite one for sure. So, Jimmy, that means we're beating other non fish podcasts.

What does My did we do with this guy? At least that's good. Now, sometimes it's harder to find a good fan than it is a clorox wipe.

Oh, my God. All right, on that note, let's get to emails. So that one was from Facebook and again, wearing guyspodcast.com and contact info is there, but says, hey, guys, love the show. It's inspired me to get into fishkeeping, but my girlfriend saw how much fun I was having, so she wanted to get in and got a beta. I was so then I was jealous and got a beta as well. Long story short, hers is happy, thriving, and is in a little seven gallon set up. Both of mine, however, have died. I placed both of mine into a 28 with four balloon molly, so I'm assuming 20 high molly, and it's running a sponge filter, post isolation and a three gallon internal setup. Water is 78 degrees. Parameters should be okay, but I've come to the fish elves and the ENDLER hobbit for help. That one hears adam the ENDLER hobbit.

The ENDLER. Hobbit. And actually it looks like a Hobbit blanket tonight.

I think it's because we got her Beta from a local fish store, so it naturally just did better and it's pretty. But I got my fancy Galaxy koi from the only Pet co I had I think it's a failure of mine because it was a big store, but I should have found an online retailer. Excuse me, should I find an online retailer for my I think he misspelled this endless Beta. Yeah, it's definitely misspelled. So I don't know what that word is, but for his Beta, is there anywhere you guys can recommend for a good quality fish? Or is the fancy pretty Beta just weaker? Thanks in advance for keeping do what you do. And Jim stopped mooning children at Disney Cruises.

That was their own damn fault. You shouldn't be able to. I mean, honestly, if I'm drunk on the ocean, stay off the ocean.

That's just my that's the rule of thumb.

It is a rule of thumb. Kyle is looking like I don't even know what that's about.

I got my weak circle. Just like stay away from the Gulf Coast, right?

Just for people who don't know what they're talking about. My wife and I go on a rock and roll cruise every year called the monsters of Rock. 25 to 50 bands from the 80s, bands like Tesla, Night ranger, right?

And they decide that when they go off port, they're going to hang around children's cruises so that a bunch of drunk idiots can moon them off the side and give them a big old salute.

Now sometimes as you're coming into port, you meet the Disney Cruise and they're all waving. And then our 5000 people drop trial and moon them. Just part of tradition. I'm sorry, I should pull up some.

Like, picture analytics posted on social media to see if we can catch that.

It's a big thing up in Canada where they moon that certain train. I don't know if you've ever seen that, where there's hundreds of people standing alongside the railroad track and they moon the train.

I like how we're all supposed to be fish experts, but instead we're mooting experts.

There we go.

That's what people come for, really. But no, to answer your question, so number one, what do we think happened? Well, honestly, just because of the requirements, you said both of your Betas, so that means that you put two in the same tank. That makes me very nervous, Ryan. So if you have two females, great. If you have a male with any other, whether it be a female or male, they'll beat each other up. It may take a while, it may be increment fighting sessions because the tank may have a little bit of distance, but they'll eventually beat the crowd of each other. So if that's the case, there's your answer. Now, as far as Beta quality, the galaxy betas, the koi betas, all of these new pecat betas, all of different flavors. I have not particularly seen a variety that is, quote unquote, weak other than albino species. But albino species, no matter the fish, are slightly more temperamental to water conditions and quality. That's a given for almost any fish. I mean, besides like a bristlenose plato, I can say that those are probably close to as hardy as the other ones. Now, where you get your fish from does matter. If the local fish store takes better care, does water changes? Most importantly, keeps their betas under heat. They're going to be better at the get go when you buy it. They're going to be in better condition, healthier bar none. Now, something like a petco, maybe they had heat on them. Maybe the person they had did good water changes. I'm not going to shit on petco for having bad fish today. I'm in a good mood. But it can happen. You just have to do your homework. Look at the fish. Is it stomach protruding? Does it look decoloured? Is it not moving in the bottom of the cup? Is the scenario not part of heat? Does the water look filmy? You just got to make a judgment call when you purchase your fish. There are good petcos, there are bad petcos. Very bad pet goes. So if you're looking for a place online, you can certainly look at a lot of different places. I bought from a mix of places. If you want, you can go to Joe Shroomshack.com and the Bottom website. He has a telephone number. He keeps betas in stock. They are not listed on his website. But he can certainly help you get a beta of whatever you're choosing. Even if he doesn't have it, he'll order it in and get that shipped out to you. Just tell him that we sent him, and I'm pretty sure you can even give him the promo code for 15% off that beta.

The other thing that he said is that his girlfriend is in a seven gallon tank and his is in a community tank. If her beta is in a tank by itself, there's nobody picking on it. But if you're in the community tank, you might have somebody picking on that beta.

I was thinking the mollies were doing it.

Yeah, well, the balloon mollies aren't particularly aggressive.

They can be assassinators and bad, but.

When you have a long fin beta and they're hungry, they're dumb, I mean, honestly. And they'll just nip. It fin. Not for aggression's sake, but because they're very good about eating algae string, algae, hair, anything in the tank, they're essentially wide mouthed lawn mowers. Tiger barbs, check them out.

Tiger Barbs will shred a beta up. If you have a group of five or six Tiger Barbs, they'll shred up a beta in 15 minutes. And because in my store, I've had somebody throw a beta who didn't know what they're doing in the tank of Barbs, and the barbs just shred them up. So we don't know what he has in his tank. But I'm saying there's probably just a problem with whoever's in the community tank.

But yeah, otherwise, hopefully those help you out. Otherwise kyle, do you have any place you buy Betas from or do you keep Betas?

Yeah, I actually have one in my office. His name is Swim shady.

We should put Swim shady music right here.

I had one in college, too. That was clint eastwater. See, that's where I want to talk to you about, aka the outlaw, josie scales, aka. The high tank drifter. Aka the fish with no name. I'm a huge clint eastwood fan.

But I'll tell you, Rob eastwood is later.

He's the guy that does all those action movies. It looks like a nutsack.

That is correct, right?

He's the guy that had the pistol and there you go. Thank you. I was going to go Harry woody, but that doesn't seem appropriate.

But I usually get them at local fish stores are where I like to go. And if you don't have one around, there are a few places online. There are some specific actual Beta breeders that usually do real high end. Like Swim shady is a peculiar Beta that I got at a local fish store. But the other thing that's really easy to do with the Beta is to overfeed them. I've seen a lot of people that just, like, throw food and food and food on top of these guys, and they'll just keep eating and eating and eating, and that can cause a lot of problems. So I always recommend, especially if you're new to them, maybe every other day feeding instead of daily or multiple times a day kind of thing, just kind of cut it back because they can go a lot longer between feedings than.

Most other fish that and rotate their food because they already have slow digestion issues. So rotating food is a lot for them. So every other day feed them. But first day pellets, next day freeze dried blood worms, next day pellets, freeze dried blood worms. Or you can even mix it up with actual blood worms. There's a lot you can feed a Beta. spaghetti and meatballs, rotate out your food. It goes a long way.

What do you got, Adam? He got anything on Betas?

Or how about the comment of the ENDLER hobbit?

Does the ender hobble have anything on bedas?

No. I was just thinking that if he's got the Betas because he had two Betas with the balloon body molly's.

What?

It sounds like molly beating this out of them.

It's probably like all star wrestling in there at night when the light goes down.

You guys are just mean to rumble.

Have you ever seen molly's? Like, they can be vicious.

I don't know. I got balloon molly's right now.

Your Mollies are passive aggressive, clearly.

All right, so apparently there is a bunch of different questions. But before we do, Jimmy, do you have anything going on this week?

Do I have anything going on this week? I did this week. I was looking for my toy. They're laying on the bottom of my pond, and they're so cold. They're all wearing little scarves and hats and stuff. So eventually I'm going to have to go out there and drain that pond and try to catch those damn coy and bring it in.

Have to. And it seems a bit of a heartless word.

You just not they're knocking on the window, Robbie. I got to get him in.

Not quite sure if you want to leave them. Leave them there.

No, I don't. How cold is it up there today? It's 50 degrees as a high. As a high. And winds have only blown, like, 752 miles an hour from the north. It's miserable, terrible, and it's raining. And Mike coy looked cold, but they can suck it up.

Also, I heard that you saw Josh damal again this week.

I did. I forgot about that. So if you've heard of this podcast before, josh damal is a North Dakota native. We're in Minnesota. Josh is building a home right close to us. Right close to us. I can't tell you where.

Undisclosed location.

Undisclosed location. But anyway, I've seen Josh maybe six, seven, eight times this summer. I've shook dice with him at the local convenience store. My full time gig is I work for a bread company, and I deliver to all the stores and stuff. And so I ran into Josh. And so the other day, on Friday, my wife calls me and says, hey, let's go to zorbas, which is our local pizza joint.

It's pizza and Mexican. I don't know identity very well.

It's great food, so you could suck it, Robbie.

That's where I met my wife, was at a zorbas. Did you?

We'll talk about that later. Anyway, in this day and age, of course, now we're all wearing face masks, and as we go get down to their meal, we're walking out and Josh jamal and I lock eyes as we do with masks on, with mascot. And he goes, Fred, dude, how are you doing?

I said, great bread, dude.

Yeah.

And I go, what's up?

He goes better than muffin man.

Yeah. I go, what's you up to? He goes, still working on the damn house and stuff. And he goes, have a great day. I said yes. My wife stood there with her mouth open. She goes, thanks for the intro, asshole. I did not introduce my wife to Josh jamal. Well, I mean, I didn't even think about it.

I was just like, It is half your fault. I mean, she was sitting there just so excited to meet him frothing at the loins and then just about it.

Yeah.

So, like, I didn't hear that for 15 minutes in the car. You could have told them we were married, or I said, it ruined your chance of scoring with Josh jamal.

I was just more upset that I'm a big fan of movie. I think it's 42 or 43. I can't remember the number. But it's basically a bunch of these super alist celebrities that got together and got, like, the worst scripts of all time. They have Hugh jackman with testicles on his neck. It's some of the best movie you've ever seen. Super R rated. For those that are listening.

Are we going to talk about beesle?

Yes. Apparently at the end of the show, there's this whole scene of the very last skit, so to speak, and it's Josh damal with his animated cat Diesel. And it's a very inappropriate cat, very disturbing question.

Disturbing.

And you did not ask him those questions. So we're going to have to wait until next orbus trip.

You have told me time and time again, next time we see demoli, you ask him about beesle the cat, Diesel the cat. And then I watch Beasle the cat on the YouTube, and I'm not too sure I want to ask him about Diesel the cat.

It's pretty bad.

Yes, it is.

Hopefully he got paid well. But I have two things this week.

Oh, do you?

I do. So number one, I went to you were busy. This was all last minute because I didn't even know they were going to be open. But the fargo Exotic Pet Expo, I went up there, got to meet some fans. I was lucky enough to see one. So shout out to one of our users and discord Mad Cow, got to hang out with her directly and met some new people, for sure. And also solidified that I'm not a snake guy.

You're not a snake guy?

No, not at all.

What they show you, a garter snake?

No, I'm not scared of them. I'll hold them. I'm talking to them like, oh, so what do you feed these particular ones? And they're going through I'm like, oh, this one's mice. That one's mice. Yeah, this one's mice, too, basically mice. And I'm like, so you keep colonies of mice, live mice that you breed? Oh, yeah, we have a whole breeding program in our house. I'm like, yeah, no, I've heard of live food cultures, but just keeping mice to have, like, two snakes, that's a bit much.

I'm taking you to the zoo one of these days, and we'll talk about life, apparently.

Just not my cup of tea. That's why I'm an aquarium guy, not a snake guy. So anyways, shout out to that. Had a great time. And we had a sponsor for our 50th celebration episode. And the gentleman was so kind as to make this custom two and a half gallon wall mounted aquarium bracket. It's a fantastic bracket you can find on Barnwoodhardware.com. And I got the prototype right. I hung it up, and I got to put this out there. Anything you put on the wall is a lot of weight. So know that you're screwing things into a stud. Well, I have a shrimp rack that I put it on, and it's essentially two two X fours pressed together, and I just put the screws right in between, like the little slot between the two boards. Well, now that I have all these shrimp racks, started up my shelf, adjusted and spread apart those two boards, and so falls off my bracket. So the bracket is fine. Best bracket I've ever had. The dip who installed it, this guy had a shattered two and a half gallon aquarium with shrimp all over the floor. And I had to get new underwear. So make sure that if you're ever wall mounting an aquarium, put it into a stud. Don't put it in between a crevice.

Or make sure that you don't put expensive shrimp in the tank when you put a wall.

I mean that too. But also, if you look on the website Barnhoarderhardware.com, you'll see the picture of the two and a half gallon wall mounted bracket. That's my tank. And you can see the slip between the two boards that I fell off of. So bracket is great. It's definitely a shout at Barnwater Hardware, but don't do that. Just learn from me.

How about you? Yeah.

Teach me, Jimmy. Actually, he was here when I did it. He just giggled at me.

I'm the one that built the rack for him, so that's what I was laughing at.

Right?

So, Adam, did you have any hilarious stories or do anything this week?

No, I almost dodged a bite from a turtle. But that's normal.

I mean, that's just a Tuesday.

That sounds like you're at a bar and a turtle is just sitting there drinking.

That's just Tuesday.

No, I took my wife out and she got just hammered because she's a teacher and school is just such shit this year. But yeah, we're not going into that either.

Shout out to all the teachers that have to deal with these incremental covered laws. County per county, especially in Minnesota. We have this weird tier system that the more people get sick, the less people have to come to school. It's weird.

It's a win win for the kids.

I got her wine from the liquor store and I brought four bottles and I'm like, hang on, I need a couple more. And then the lady looks at me and I'm like, my wife is a teacher. And she goes, that poor deer. And she gave me a discount and said, we sell it by the case.

That's going to be my new light when I go to the liquor store. I'm a teacher.

Winning, winning. Well, Kyle, hopefully you had a better week than us.

I had a pretty uneventful week, actually. Just a lot of nine to five, going to work and coming home.

Damn. See, it seems so much better than. Breaking tanks. Well, we're here getting bit by turtles.

We did have a tank overflow at the office, though. Oh, boy. We had some valve get away from us and blocking overflow, and everything from the sump ended up on the floor.

It's better than on your computer.

Hey, did you have the heater in the sump?

No heaters in the tank.

Cobalt won't cover that. Cobalt won't cover that.

We've had that since we started this chat. We have a plethora of questions for you. I just want to get these questions out of the way and then we can go to Salt Water Chemicals. Does that sound fair?

Sure, yeah.

Excellent. Ask away.

So to start the party right, I have to scroll up here. There's a couple like meme questions, so give me one moment.

The memes are hilarious. They're on point going in there.

When did cobalt first start selling blue Fruity pebbles?

Blue fruity pebble. It was after the red ones came out.

So for the people that can understand.

What the hell are Fruity pebbles, we.

Had less on before talking about fish food. And cobalt's flake food has a proprietary blue colored flake, and that is the probiotics inside the flakes.

Yeah. So the blue flake actually has a triple dose of vitamins, minerals, and immunostimulants. All the flakes have probiotics. The blue flakes have a triple dose. It's basically like hiding vitamins in with all the tasty stuff, because the blue flakes don't have, like, if it's a brine shrimp flavor or whatever, it doesn't have the brine shrimp in the blue flake. It's just got the vitamin blend in there to kind of hide it in and amongst everything else. So that some of the more affinicky and picky fish. Like, I feed with my tank here, I've got a green mandarin that will actually come up and eat flake food. And he likes to pick the blue flakes out, which is kind of crazy.

So I just got a restocked up on flake, and there's a lot of great options, but mice and shrimp. Am I saying that correctly? Mice, mice, shrimp. That's very hard for to find. I've tried to find it before. And you guys have a special flake. I don't know if it's on clearance right now, but I got another pound of it, and it's been going really good for feeding, for sure. We do.

We have amycis and we have a mysis spirulina. If you have some fish that are a little more on the veggie side of things.

Well, I am looking at a giant ball of shark, and he's looking quite thick right now. So he could go on a diet and have some spirulina.

Nice.

All right, so next question. Why is reef flowers simply better than everything else? So I'm going to save that question for the plant forts. What we're going to do is we're going to do two episodes. So this is episode one to talk to you about the saltwater chemicals. And we're having another separate episode to talk about plant ferts. But why is reflower's marine side better? I think we'll answer that today, won't we?

Absolutely. Okay, there's a couple of different answers, some that stores don't like, or at least one that stores don't like, but we'll get to that.

And who's the hottest female actor, in your opinion? And why does rob's choose betty White? You have to go back to episode two in the podcast for the betty White comment, and we're going to just cease and desist the female actor comment. How dare you?

Rob'S has an unusual fascination with betty White.

I do.

And it's downright creepy and perverse. It's not healthy. No, it's not healthy at all.

I think that's other than where's the idea for aqua sponge mats from Cobalt come from.

So it came from angry wives. My wife will probably kill me for saying this, but she doesn't listen when a podcast when I do water changes, I end up with almost as much water on the floor as I do in the buckets. I have a bad habit of forgetting there's a bucket behind me and stepping backwards and knocking things over and stuff like that. So we started looking around, like, what can we do? Putting a towel down on a hardwood floor, you slip and slide all over the place. And before I came to Cobalt, I did aquarium maintenance for seven and a half years. And everywhere we'd go, we'd put down these huge waterproof tarps. And that's just not feasible to keep a giant waterproof tarp like, sitting in the middle of your living room. So we kind of looked around and we were trying to figure out what can we do? And came across dense weave microfiber. And how do we turn that into something that we can use in aquariums? So we put a non slip rubber backing on the back so that water doesn't seep through, it doesn't slide around on you, and the dense weave microfiber absorbs a ton of water. Our estimates that we put on there, as we say, a gallon of water per 5 sqft. But in all honesty, it does a lot more.

So I see the tag here holds three gallons of water up to yes. That's incredible.

Yes. Our big guy holds three gallons of water, and we size them to fit your standard aquarium footprint. So there's a three foot long one, a four foot, five foot, that sort of thing. And with my tank being 5ft, I've got the five footer right there, and it stays in front of the tank and they're machine washable. So if you spill a bunch on there and it starts smelling, you pop them in the washer. But they're great. I mean, it absorbs a ton of water.

See, Jimmy, I think that you need to do some R and D testing for Cobalt and let them know how it works as puppy pads in the future.

I should I we've got three dogs, and they go outside, and there could be no water anywhere. They all come in and they're tracking mud and and water. Would that work for somebody who has pets that suck in?

Absolutely.

Hey, so we could sell it to other people. We've talked about this before. I can't remember the percentage, but most people that have aquariums have dogs, have cats, have hamsters, gerbils, rats, birds and stuff. So, I mean, what a great cross selling, over period thing that I came.

Up with there not intended for your dogs urine. All right.

Can we throw that in the dryer after you wash it? We recommend just hanging it out to dry if you throw it in the dryer. If you forget and, like, turn it on with a heat cycle, it'll actually start to make the rubber on the back really tacky, and then it, like, sticks to your floor, and it can leave marks and stuff like that. So you don't want to heat the rubber up too much.

What's the cost of those? What do you guys retail those for?

I believe retail, I think the small one starts around 35, $40 retail.

Hot damn.

To the big the xxl. I think retail is right about $100.

We we just got one of our users that message us thing just bought me an aquamat. Nice item. spilt a bunch of water Saturday, cleaning my filters.

$35 is not a bad price, I'll tell you. We went to the Minnesota State Fair. They're selling 1ft by two foot, something real similar to that for dogs and stuff. And we paid $40 for that for 1ft by two foot. And they sell a bigger one, and they want $100 for it. And people were walking out people who have dogs said, you know, they put it especially, like if you have your dog coming in an area where you have linoleum or tile and stuff, and they come in wet with wet feet, it actually, as soon as they step on it, absorbs it and stuff, and it doesn't move. Once you stick them down, it doesn't move because of that rubber sticky back that it has.

Yeah, it's great. They don't slide around or bunch up on you when you're doing maintenance.

Are you able to vacuum those, then, when you're absolutely. So if it's dry, you can vacuum that.

Who knew that aquamat would be so fascinating?

You know what? We probably just sold ten just now.

Right there. Done deal.

I know we will when my wife listens to this podcast.

Well, we have been off track since the beginning here, so let's get on track and let's start the conversation. So this is part interview as well. So, Kyle, what got you into fish keeping and being a marine biologist? Like, what inspired you?

So when I was young, my grandparents used to come down and babysit us, like, on weekends, stuff like that if our parents wanted to get away, that's sort of thing. And when I was five, my grandpa took me to the bookstore and bought me a couple of books, and he would always let me pick one out, and then he'd pick one out because he wanted to read books to the kids and stuff like that. And he picked out the book he picked out was I Want to Be a Fighter Pilot because he was in the Air Force. He was a tailgunner in a B 17 in World War II. And the book I picked out was one called I Want to Be a Marine Biologist. And I got just obsessed with that book as a five year old kid. And like, every night I'd have my mother read it to me, and it got to the point where I had the entire book memorized, and I could pretend to read it by just knowing what the entire book was from start to finish. And she must have read that two or 300 times a year to me. And ever since then, I was obsessed with wanting to be a marine biologist and got my first fish tank at age seven. And my mother is absolutely terrified of fish. Like, she can't even be in the same room as fish. She can't even sit at a table where someone's eating fish. Like, she's terrified of them. So when I got my first fish tank, she was like, hey, this is on you. If the fish need fed, you have to feed them. If the fish need clean, you got to clean it. If the fish need decorations, you got to get it. So at age seven, I started taking care of fish tanks. I've had them ever since.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around that. Normally, if you hear the parents don't want a dog in the house or don't want a cat in the house, they're like, sorry, you're just not getting a cat or dog. But they're like, no, I'm not going to stop your dreams. I may crap my pants every time I see a fish go blub, but I got you, son. You're on your own.

Yeah. As the story goes, for my 7th birthday, we went to the Ohio State Fair, and they had, like, the thing where you throw ping pong balls into the bowls and win goldfish. And I won a pair of them and threw a fit because she wasn't going to let me have them. And finally I yelled and screamed so much that she gave in, and that was the start of everything.

See that, kids? Goldfish in a bowl, marine biologist. See how that works?

We've talked about this a couple of times in the show, and I just want to go down to the final verdict on this. It's a shitty way of giving away fish, for sure. It's done 99% of the time. Extremely inhumane. But Jimmy has a point these fish technically are just common goldfish that they use, which are similar to any other bait fish that people abuse for fishing purposes and kill with the hook. I can see the both sides of the coin. One don't do it. It's inhumane. The other, hey. It brings fish people into the hobby. We would not have Kyle without this, clearly. So it started something, and we've been hearing this more and more as we do the podcast. So I started jaded. Now I see both sides.

I actually had those for nine years.

Yeah. So stick it in your hat and smoke it. Rob. Hey, quick question for you, Kyle. Your mom afraid of fish. Is there a story behind that? My mom's best friend was deathly afraid of birds. And here's the story there. She got a bat stuck in her hair. Not a bird, but a bat. And so she was definitely afraid of birds just even flying in the sky.

To the best of my knowledge, no story. And if there is, she's never actually spoken of it. So maybe there's something so traumatic she just can't even speak about it. But she's just like she doesn't get in the ocean. Like, if you go to the beach, she is terrified. If you go to the lake and you want to jump in and go swimming or something, she won't go close to a shore because she's afraid that the fish hang out by the shore and they'll come get her and all this stuff. I mean, absolutely terrified, even afraid of the fish, of eating a fish. You'd think she'd be like, eat that fish. She just doesn't want to see it, because just seeing it, the fish sitting there, she has to leave the room.

Now, did you use this to your advantage? Like when you stuck your girlfriend over at the house when you're 16 years old and you want to do smoochy smoochie in the bedroom, and you just took that bed out and you put it right in front of your door, and she was like, I'm not coming in here, but I know you got her in there.

That is the most evil thing that you would have think of just out of the blue like that.

Jimmy I would do that.

That's a great idea. In that, unfortunately, I didn't think of.

At the time, well, Jimmy is an evil genius. So that's how that works. That's how you got into this hobby. How did the career go? We get continual questions from marine biologists. Now we have one in front of us. So when you go for it, you go through studies and then you go through some sort of internship, or do you just find a company that needs your expertise?

All of the above. So when I started with my undergrad, I actually went in for aquatic veterinary medicine, and I was convinced I was going to be an aquavet. And the more I you know, kind of investigated it, the more I found that there's only like a handful of aquets in the world and they all have jobs and there's no openings for aquavets anywhere. So you basically have to wait for someone to die or retire to try and get in and take their spot at a public aquarium or zoo or something like that. So as an undergrad, I majored in biology with a concentration in what we call evodivo, which is evolutionary developmental biology, and in particular genetics. And I actually was fortunate enough to go to a school that it didn't have a marine biology program, but our genetics professor, she researched sea urchins and she worked hand in hand with baylor university to do the sea urchin genome project. And so I, in undergrad, started doing sea urchin genetics and I mapped out four different genes in strangely centrotus purpiratis, the California purple urchin. And that got me really hooked on invertebrates and invertebrate ecology and things like that. And I was like, well, I know I want to do something marine related. I really found that I just kind of happened into loving invertebrates. So I went down the path to get a master's in marine biology at the college of charleston in charleston, South Carolina. And while I was there, I just wanted something to do because the way the marine labs worked is you'd have day long labs and then you'd have like off days where you didn't have any classes at all because a lot of your labs took place on beaches or out on boats with noah, things like that. So I was looking around for something and there was a fish store down the road from my apartment that was hiring. And I started there. And I started basically as the tank cleaner guy and eventually went to run. A maintenance department here in Charlotte and Ran. We had five trucks and six technicians and serviced about 400 accounts. And just from there really went well. I like this side of things, but I want to get more into the product side of things. Like, it's nice seeing all these tanks and doing all the maintenance, but I really want something that's going to be more impactful to the hobby as a whole. And that's when I found cobalt and went down and they just happened to have a position available. And I basically sat there at the front door until they'd see me and talk to me and went in and sat down with one of the owners and had a conversation and left with a job offer. It's one of those things where I always tell people, I hear a lot, people always like, man, I wanted to be a marine biologist. And I always tell people what you should be like, just you can go pursue it. There's a thousand different things that fall under the marine biology header. My best friend from college, she works up in Alaska with fish and Wildlife Department, and she also went in for marine biology. And now she works with all the catches that come in. So whenever these boats come in with their catches, she's one of the officers that make sure that they have fish that are the right size or the right gender or whatever that fit those laws. There's all sorts of marine biology avenues out there.

You got hired by Cobalt and number one, I know now how to get hired because I'm just going to go sit in front of the office, get a bottle of wine, rainfall door, get my application read. But you guys got into marine chemicals due to reflowers, correct?

Yeah. And so when I started with Cobalt almost four years ago now, Cobalt was primarily a freshwater company because the owners are all big freshwater guys. You got sickly guys, you got planted guys, they are all big freshwater guys. So I was really the first saltwater guy to come in there. Cobalt in general had been looking to get into the chemical side of things. And rather than try and start something ourselves, because of the crazy amount of red tape that comes with making additives, we started looking for partners. And that's when we came across Reflowers. And they're the number one brand in Europe, but they didn't have any Us. Distribution. So we basically sat down and met with them and went through their products and they gave us a bunch of stuff to try out. We started using it in the tanks around the office and really just fell in love with the products for a couple of different reasons, but really fell in love with the products, partnered up with them, brought them over, and now we partnered with reflowers to be the official Us. Distribution for them. And inadvertently I became the basically head nerd for reflowers in the Us. And whenever anything like that, I'm the guy that anybody who has a question, they come to me.

The beard of knowledge.

There you go.

The beard of knowledge. I like it.

The beard of knowledge. Well, what I want to do is I want to take this from both the advanced perspective, but definitely focus a lot on the beginner perspective because number one, I'm not an expert in marine tanks whatsoever. I've set up handfuls of saltwater tanks in the past and it's been something really basic. I haven't gone into reef tanks. I have a lot of friends that do reef tanks. We even have Sean kramer that we've had on the podcast before. He's a 2000 gallon reef tank that does fragging as a small side business, even though it's not small at all.

Not small at all.

Not small at all. But what I'd like to do is just get through a few beginner questions to start out with. So number one, just walk through the process of setting up any basic saltwater aquarium just to go through how the cycle differentiates in any way.

I think a lot of people kind of get scared by saltwater and they really shouldn't. If you can set up a freshwater tank, you can set up a saltwater tank. The big difference is in saltwater there's a few more pieces of equipment and a few more parameters to pay attention to. But basic set up care maintenance is very similar with a saltwater tank. I always recommend people go as big as their budget will allow. The bigger a tank is in saltwater, the easier it is to take care of. And that's just simply because you don't have to worry about parameter swings nearly as much in a big tank versus a little tank. I know a lot of people like to get like the little five gallon or ten gallon desktop style tanks and try saltwater and that and they get really frustrated with it. And it's because things like salinity are changing it. You look at it wrong and you get a little evaporation. Your salinity swings, I always tell people go as big as they can possibly fit in their space or that their budget can afford. And when you set it up, it's a buy once, cry once kind of thing. With saltwater, a lot of the equipment is very expensive. But buy the expensive stuff first, so you're not wasting your money on the cheap stuff over and over and over until you finally get in and get the expensive stuff. And the initial startup cost can be pretty high compared to freshwater, but it's definitely rewarding.

Let's walk through the equipment. So just to pick on this, we'll start with what Fresh has. Again, Fresh has the mechanical filtration. Whether it be a hang in the back filter, canister filter. However, you can add your own chemical filtration, such as a uv filter, maybe carbon in the filter somehow, and then biological filtration so that's generally like bio balls somewhere in the media or a bio wheel on those hang in the back filters. That's just for filtration purposes. You have a heater, you have aerators, you have the decor, which is generally either sand or gravel or some sort of mix in between. Am I missing a lot besides light? Pretty sure that you can do sponge filters, but what extras does saltwater need?

So with saltwater, I know what we tend to see the most is tanks with sumps. And we use a sump filter on saltwater mainly because it's the easiest way to put all of your different reactors or skimmers or things like that and hide them out of view. You don't have to have a sump to do a saltwater tank, but if you don't have a sump, you're going to have all that stuff basically in your tank and it's just going to be more of an eyesore than it is anything else. But with that you have a protein skimmer, which basically is a little device that makes a bunch of bubbles that helps pull fish waste out of the water, or dissolved proteins, organic, things like that.

And that's just because salt water tanks generally create more film on the top. Correct?

Absolutely. So it's that nasty protein film you'll get on the top without it that helps pull it out. Also, with saltwater, things tend to kind of separate out of it a lot easier. So if you feed like a food that's high in like, fatty acids or omega threes, things like that, you'll get a lot of runoff from the food, which we call dissolved organics, which get pulled out by a protein skimmer. Also, with the saltwater tank uv, a lot of people use it. I personally don't because I run a reef tank. And there's two schools of thought. Some people say run the uv, some people say don't. I'm on the don't side of that. I don't like to zap all of my little copa pods and amphipods and things like that. Some people say run it because having the uv is more beneficial than not having it. You can go either way with the uv. And then you have reactors, things for like Gfo, which is phosphate removing media, or you have carbon reactors. You can do refugiums on saltwater tanks, which have all sorts of macro algae and things like that. And basically, you give an area for algae to grow so it's not growing in your display. And then, of course, you have let's.

Pause there just so we can get some of these reactors. Because again, for beginners, there's a lot of times that they're hearing this so they don't understand what they are or do. So, again, just elaborate on what these reactors if you can.

Yes. So the main reactors we see, Gfo is a big one. granular ferrous oxide is gfo. You'll see it under a bunch of different names, but as long as it's a Gfo, there's regular and synthetic. synthetic is just basically a man made version. It's essentially rust is basically what it boils down to, and it binds to phosphate in the water. And phosphate is one of the biggest elements for algae growth. So by having a Gfo reactor, which is basically just a tube that water flows through, it forces the water through the gfo, and it pulls all the phosphate out so that you're not getting algae growth in your tank. You also have what do they call algae scrubbers as a type of reactor, which is basically another tube with a light bulb in the middle that grows algae, that you have an area where algae can grow, and it likes to grow there before it will grow in your display. That also helps pull nutrients out of the water. You also have carbon reactors, which you have in freshwater, which are just full of carbon, as well as some of the various filter medias that we see in saltwater. Things like exchange resins and ions and stuff like that that help pull, whether it be dissolved organics, whether it be things like nitrates, phosphates, that sort of stuff out of the water.

Now, can any of these be used for freshwater purposes, or is this strictly saltwater and people that just aren't using them because they're too expensive? Maybe that's the case.

They can absolutely be used for freshwater. We tend to not see gfo use that much, because if you have any sort of freshwater plants, gfo will pull out all the nutrients those freshwater plants need to grow as well. So if you use something like a gfo reactor on a planted tank, all your plants are going to suffer and die.

So what about the one that I like the most is like an algae reactor or algae refugium. The idea again, you stated that they'll grow there first before they'll grow in your tank and create a mess. Is that the same case with freshwater? Because I can already hear a lot of people with some good money just willing to drop it so they don't have to deal with some excess algae on their glass.

So I've not seen anyone attempt a freshwater refugium, but it would be something that sounds like a lot of fun, and now it's something I absolutely want to try.

R and D, baby.

R and D. The big thing that we see with saltwater is the spectrum of light that you have to grow coral. And the spectrum of light that you use to grow macroalgae are very different. And the algae will grow underneath your macroalgae lights a lot faster than it will under your blue spectrum aquarium coral style lights.

The more you know. So I know we cut you off. What other equipment are we missing?

Let's see. The only other thing that you're going to see a lot of times in salt water tanks outside of these big, strong lights are wave maker and power heads. And we use all sorts of you can go from just something that just shoots a stream of water out all the way up to ones now that sync to your phone and will simulate, like, tide swells and lagoon style waves or reef crest style waves and really make a lot of current. One thing that we like in saltwater tanks is current. We love current. The more current you have up to a certain point, obviously, you don't want to be blasting everything off the rock, but more current you have, the happier everything seems to stay. Whereas with a lot of freshwater plants and style tanks, you tend to have a lower current. You don't want to uproot all your plants. But if you think about where these corals grow on reefs, a lot of them grow towards the top of the reef, where they have all this wave action day in and day out, and you want to try and simulate that in your aquarium.

Even when we went to Sean. Creamer's place. He had that 2000 gallon reef tank. And his number one problem that they didn't plan for originally in building was trying to get flow, right? And any large reef tank, that's a ridiculous example because it's so huge that's 18 foot long. Any reef tank has problems with flow. So the real reason that you have to think about it is any fish in your tank can move to go get food. If you feed at the top, your corals, which are animals, have to eat. And the only way you can deliver food to them is with the flow. So it's all the micronutrients in the water that they feed off of and if they're not getting adequate flow, they'll starve. That's the simplest answer.

Yes. And also with flow, you don't want anything to settle on those corals too because the corals can't like if something falls on top of them, like sand or algae settles on top of them, something like that, they can't just get up, shake it off and move over to another spot. They're at the mercy of the flow to get stuff like sand grains and stuff blown off of them before it becomes a problem.

The best thing that I have, and I didn't know this on my pump I have a nine tank, all ten gallons in one rack. So it's three levels of three tanks and I have it all plumbed together with pvc piping. And I decided to get this specialty pump cause I was looking for the gallons per hour and something I could control so I can turn up the flow or turn down the flow, depending on what I needed. And I didn't realize it was a special button because this is all Chinese pump that I got and there's a special button on there and like what does this do? And then I crap my pants because it was just spewing water. It was trying to wave generation through my pvc. So imagine you sitting there and it's just like puking water in like a rhythm out my pvc holes just spewing everywhere. It was a lot of education right there that I got the special pump with controls.

Wave mode is always fun.

I'm like, what the hell am I doing wrong? And I'm sure enough I'm seeing the wavelength on the controller flash and like, oh yeah, I can fix this.

That's $12 you ever spent best?

No, that was let's see, I'm trying to remember how many gallons per hour that was. I think it was like 5500 gallons per hour. It was something ridiculous, but I could turn it down to nothing. So I got it for like I think it was $80. They're okay, I wouldn't buy the pump again, but I'm always trying to like.

Save a dollar because no, I'm trying.

To review shitty pumps.

Oh yeah, that's it.

There's this whole episode that we need to plan for Jimmy with review products from Wish I think we should have Kyle back on being R and D.

I would be 100% on board with that.

We will place an order, and we will contact you in two to three years when the stuff shows up, and we will do it.

I have quite the list that I've been planning, but I think that would be a fantastic but you don't have.

The $12 to pay for it because it's only 300 items for $12.

No, I've purchased stuff over the years. I already have a list built and stitches, too. I'm just waiting for the other half to come that I ordered three years ago.

You probably get free covered with it, too.

Yeah, there's some hardcore gimmicks even like that. What was that? The charcoal activated carbon cube. Never change your water again. Some gimmicks.

My wife bought charcoal to put in the dog's water dish, and the dog thinks it's just something to play with, and she paid, like, $12 for these three pieces of looks to be, like, large pieces of charcoal. She throws in a water dish to help purify it. And I know she wants to just save time and energy, but I think it's okay just to change a water dish once in a while, right?

I've got a charcoal grill. I can grab a couple of briquettes and sell them to you for half that.

Oh, really?

And then your dog can chew them up.

Do they smell like steak?

They can if you want. That's an extra $10, though.

All right, so to get back on topic, when you're setting up this tank, is there any special steps? I guess what I'm trying to get at is when I say marine chemical, it makes like I'm sounding like I'm bleaching a tank. But when I'm setting this up, what do I have to put in? Is it just salt, or is there anything else? Just to do a standard marine tank.

Water.

Is important, but it's not just any kind of salt. It's a specific marine salt. And there are all different kinds of salts. I mean, if you just google, like, marine salt, you'll see 40, 50 different brands, and each one mixes up at different parameters. And you want a salt that's going to mix up to the parameters that you're trying to hit for the livestock you plan on keeping. If you're just going to do what we call a fowler tank fish only with live rock, your base salts that don't have elevated calcium, elevated magnesium, that sort of thing are going to be perfectly fine for you. But if you're going to do different kinds of coral, you want some of your trace elements to be elevated. Things like magnesium, alkalinity, calcium, bronze, potassium. There's a lot of different elements. And most salt mixes have between 72 and 78 trace elements. And you want to make sure that you're getting the right amount of trace elements for the livestock that you're going to put in there.

So I see on Reef Flowers website that there's three main salts that you guys offer. There's the sea salt, the coral salt and reef salt. What are the differences between the three? Because I'm assuming those are the three that you guys offer as the array.

Yeah, those, those are kind of the three tiers and the three that we find are most universally used by, by most hobbyists. The sea salt is going to be your basic for your fowler tanks, your fish only with live rock. It has your standard array of 76 trace elements and it doesn't have anything elevated. It's just kind of as close to just plain old ocean water as you can get. Because when you're just keeping fish or you're keeping like, you know, fishing a couple of shrimp or something like that, you don't have to worry about some of these elevated macros and micro trace elements. Then we have the coral salt, which is the one I use on my tank, which is designed with elevated calcium, elevated magnesium, elevated potassium, and a slightly lower alkalinity for tanks that are a mixed reef style tank, which is primarily what most people run. But it's also designed for people that do any sort of dosing, whether it be something like a calcium reactor or cauliflower, which is the really old school way of dosing calcium, or someone that adds, like, additives, like all the different reef flowers products that we have. And then you have the reef salt which has really elevated levels of all the trace elements. And that's for people who don't want to dose. Like if you're just like, hey, I'm adamant, I don't want to dose anything, I just want to get everything from my water changes. The reef salt is the one for you. Or if you have something like a frag tank where you have a whole bunch of little frag corals that you're trying to get to grow out and really establish themselves quickly. Or you have a really heavily SPS style tank with your small polyp stony corals that need elevated levels of a lot of these minerals, that's going to be the right salt for you? Most people do. A mixed reef I've seen usually 90 ish percent of reef tanks we see are mixed in some capacity. So the coral salt is going to be that perfect salt for them.

So again, that's to get everything started with setting up a tank to have the micronutrients and all the other supplements for your style of tank getting going. But then what other chemicals, what other supplements do we need for each type of tank?

Yes, I apologize.

Or is that just ready to go?

So that's ready to go right off the bat. But as you start adding livestock, things like corals are going to slowly deplete those nutrients out of the water. A lot of it is going to be returned by water changes and in saltwater, we recommend usually every other week, water changes to help replenish that trace elements. Once those corals, once you have enough of them in there, or you have larger colonies, things like that, water changes aren't going to keep up with everything the corals are pulling out of the water. That's when you have to start dosing and adding these different additives and chemicals to keep up with what they're pulling out. And so that's when you see the big three that everyone always doses or should always dose alkalinity, calcium and magnesium. So alkalinity basically helps keep your PH stable. And it's just like in freshwater. It's a measure of the calcium carbonate dissolved in the water. Calcium is essential for coral skeletons. They can't grow without calcium. They need it because they form these calcium carbonate skeletal structures, and then magnesium goes hand in hand with that. It helps with coral flesh development. It also helps with coloration in corals and things like that. And not having enough magnesium can severely stunt colors and growth in your corals. So if you look in there and all your corals kind of look bland and bleak, that's often an indication of a magnesium deficiency in your tank.

So I see here that you have products listed as Easy bawling. Explain that. Easy, besides being a baller.

They're called the balling set because the guy who invented them back in the 80s is named hans vanner Balling. And he worked for tropic marin, I believe. Still does, if he's not retired yet. If he's not retired, he still works for tropic marin. But he was kind of the first guy that was like, hey, we now have the technology to measure what's being depleted out of our saltwater tanks. How do we put that back in? And he came up with what he called the balling method, which is a way to add mineral salts to a tank to replenish alkalinity levels, calcium and magnesium. And that became known as the balling method. Now, there's two different ways that we do it at reflowers. We do Easyballing, which is actually what I do on my tank. And easyballing puts everything into two jars so that you have one is all alkaline or alkalinity salts, and then the other one is your calcium. Magnesium strontium all the different trace elements that go with it. The advantage to that is it's everything you need in two bottles. You dose them together, and you're done. The disadvantage to that is that if you need more calcium and you just want to add calcium, you can't add just calcium, because you have to add the magnesium with it, the potassium with it, everything like that. So that's when the full balling set comes in. So if you're getting into, say, you have a bunch of clams or a bunch of SPS that are pulling a lot of calcium but not as much magnesium out, and you need to elevate your calcium, you can use the actual balling set, which is a four part system that has an alkalinity, a calcium and magnesium, and one we call the ionic balancer, which is all your various trace elements. And then you can add just that calcium element versus having to add all of it all at once.

So I've heard rumors on these products in the past, especially with plant forts, that getting these separate individual bottles allows a better concentration and a better overall product, because sometimes mixing these chemicals together over time allows faster oxygenization and the oxygen I got to quit drinking before the podcast.

It is National Beer Day.

Is there any advantage like that just for them sitting in the bottle reacting together, or is that not an issue with this particular product?

Yeah, so you never want to actually mix the chemicals together in the bottling set because the way that they work is there are a series of, I say mineral salts. I probably should explain that the minerals themselves are put into salt forms which are dissolved into our water, and that stays in that solution until it reacts with another mineral. So the way the bowling system works is your part A, unlocks the parts in Part B, your part B, unlocks the parts in Part C, your part C, unlocks the parts in part A, and so on. So by dosing them all together, you unlock each other. So if you dump them all together, you basically end up with a sludge that just kind of forms a hard mass because they all just basically unlock it to a pile of salt. For lack of a better way to describe it. It just kind of looks like a turd monkey. Yeah, just like a big old hunk of gelatinous goop turd. So you add them into your tank, it distributes across the tank. Then you add the next one that distributes out, and it starts unlocking it as they come into contact with each other and react. So then that way you get a nice even elevation and everything instead of it just spiking all at once and stressing everything out.

So then if you can, you always want to add the four part balling set rather than the easy set, unless you really don't want to mess with four bottles.

Kind of the four parts, you can be a lot more specific. You can add more calcium if you need it or more magnesium. The two part is going to be a lot easier. If you have a small tank where, you know, you don't have these giant ratios that you're trying to hit. You're not trying to add, you know, 70 or 80 ppm of calcium to a tank that's 400 gallons. That's going to take a ton of liquid. If you have a small tank when you're dealing with much smaller quantities, the easy bowling is going to be a lot easier. I use it mainly because I'm lazy. So being lazy is a perfectly acceptable reason to use the easyballing. And a lot of that, too, is about a year ago, if you asked me, do I dose anything? I'd be like, no, I don't have time for dosing. And now I actually dose four different things in my tank and couldn't be happier. But a lot of it for me was kind of getting over the I don't want a whole bunch of bottles sitting there, but I've got to dose all these different bottles all the time. And the nice thing with the easyballing is it's two bottles and you don't have to dose it nearly as often as you do the four part, but it's not as specific or in depth as the four part is.

But the bottles are so pretty.

The bottles are very pretty, but if you have a rimless tank like mine, with no canopy, there's nowhere to put the bottles other than cramming them underneath your tank. And then I've got my big sump down there and there's just not a.

Lot of room that's when you walk into your wife's kitchen and go, the.

Hell with these dishes.

We're keeping this stuff in here done.

Just don't put it underneath with your toilet bowl cleaners. You don't want to mix that up.

You're talking about this as I'm listening to you talk about this, I'm thinking this stuff is going to be expensive. I'm looking over rob's shoulder, he's got it pulled up on a computer. It's like nine to $10 a bottle. That is very inexpensive, not very expensive.

And the other thing, too, and I kind of mentioned earlier, one thing that stores don't particularly like is that reflowers is more concentrated than just about everything else on the market, which means you don't need as much, which stores don't like, because then you're not going back to buy as much all the time. Yeah, unfortunately. But the nice thing is they are all very concentrated. You'll see, some that's like a 500 ml bottle treats 6000 gallons worth of water. So, I mean, you can buy a 500 ml bottle for 1015 bucks and be set for months.

And what's the shelf life on that stuff?

Shelf life on everything is three years.

Holy cow. That is fantastic.

That once it's opened. Once it's open, correct.

There you go. Okay, this is for the coral, the reef tanks. You do not have to do this just for the fish and live rock tanks as much. Correct. Or at all.

Correct.

There are a handful of things that you want to maintain in a fish only tank, the biggest one being an element called strontium. Fish do absorb a little bit of strontium through just general respiration and absorbing seawater, and it does help with skeletal growth. But typically speaking, unless you have just a ton of fish in the tank, water changes are going to be enough to replenish that strontium level for you.

Easy enough.

I just want to go back real quick. You covered it, but I don't know if people heard it. They're talking about if you're starting your first salt water tank and you're mixing the salt water, the reef, or what it would be to use Ro water. Can you explain why you use Ro water and not tap water?

Absolutely. So in salt water, the most important thing that we tell people is use Ro, and if you can find it rodi, and if you have the space, set up your own rodi. I actually have out in my garage, my own six stage rodi system that builds up a big trash can that I've got plumbing run underneath the floor to pump into my tank and everything like that. But the reason we use Ro is because your salt mix has, depending on brand, between 70 and 78 different trace elements in it. And if you use something like tap water, there is a chance that what's in your tap water, we call it tds total Dissolved solids. There's a chance that something in that tap water might react with one of those 78 different trace elements. And you'll get stuff like precipitate, where stuff comes out of solution. You'll get a bunch of algae growth because it might turn it into a form that algae is going to be able to absorb a lot more readily than corals can absorb. You can get all sorts of bacteria, spores and stuff like that that come in through tap water. Chlorine, typically for saltwater, is not a big deal because when you add the salt, the salt reacts with chlorine and takes it out of the water naturally. So, unlike freshwater, where you're worried about getting chlorine in your tank, tap water and salt water, you're not really worried about the chlorine, but you are worried about all the other stuff in there that can react with those trace elements in your salt mix and really throw off your parameters.

Well, that and you said to yourself that this is all array of minerals. So I always get nervous when people say I'm going to use Ro. And they're very inexperienced with a chlorine because they don't know that if you just put ro water with freshwater fish without doing anything to the water, and it's 100% pure ro, you will kill your fish and strip the slime coat right off of it, because there is nothing in the water in there, and it will find it. Like if you have aquarium that's covered in calcium buildup, throw Ro in there for a week, watch it disappear. So be very careful with how you use Ro. But again, you're you're adding the salt mix to it. You're remineralizing the water so you're safe using 100% Ro.

Yes. And that way you're only getting the trace elements you want. You're not getting anything else like heavy metals. And you can see like lead, iron, that sort of stuff come through pipes all the time.

The only heavy metal is what Jim listens to in a cruise.

That's right.

So what I'm trying to go through on a reef tank or coral tank, and I'm trying to monitor what's being consumed in the tank. What do you recommend on how to measure the trace elements in the water? Do you have some sort of tool that you use? Electronic monitor, like we do PH strips for fresh?

Yes. Sorry, I just saw that.

For those that don't know what's going on, there's a visual aspect to this.

That would be the perfect picture.

Oh, no, we don't want to show.

Them this, but yeah, when you're talking.

About clams, too, it kind of threw us off.

If you guys ever want to know what we're laughing at, go to aquarium guisepodcast.com. Come watch the live show. You get to send messages. And memes, they just put kyle's poor face in. Was that men in black photo?

Yeah. Baltimore thing.

The Baltimore dude. So my apologies, Kyle. They're feeling quite warm today.

It looks amazing. I like that.

You know what? We can get you an eight by ten for your office.

We'll send it to you. We'll get another copy for less.

You send it out as Christmas cards.

We'll do the whole office. But anyway, back to the question.

Wow, we fell right off the track again.

What do you use to measure trace elements to keep up with how coral is eating away at it?

So test kits are going to be your best friend in salt water. We use liquid test kits, methods called titrations, where you basically, most of your test kits, you add different chemicals to a little sample of water, and then you add other chemicals until they change color. And based on how much the other chemical you add, it tells you different levels. I'm actually colorblind, so I have a really hard time with titrations like that, so I actually use digital meters. Now, the digital ones are a little bit more expensive, and they take a bunch of different reagents that you have to put in there. Then you hit a bunch of buttons, and it gives you read outs. But to me, the digital ones are way better because I just can't see the color changes sometimes. Like this, a blue to purple color change. I'll never notice that. And now I might think I have way too much magnesium in my tank than what I actually have, or something like that. So I use all digital online. The big ones that you're going to measure, you're going to measure alkalinity, you're going to measure phosphate, you're going to measure calcium, you're going to measure magnesium, and you're going to measure salinity. And those are the big ones. The other thing that we like to recommend testing is potassium. The unfortunate part is there's no electronic meter for potassium that's below about $12,000. ouch. Yeah. So unless you're working in a lab, you don't really have access to an electronic version. And the reagents that are required to test for potassium and salt water are very heavily regulated by the FDA. And you can't find potassium test kits in the Us. Very easily. You have to get them imported over from Germany.

Why is that.

Regulation?

FDA regulation is it made to use, like, blue meth on Breaking Bad?

It's used for some kind of drug. I don't know which kind.

Oh, it is.

Just joking. It is. So it's very heavily regulated. So the import of it is very heavily controlled. So when you do find those test kits, they're not cheap.

Got you.

And like I said, you usually have to get them imported over. Salaford in Germany makes my favorite one, and getting that import is often difficult.

So before we go, that explains why.

Sean sends everything to Germany, right?

That explains it right there.

And also, you don't use anything to make math like that.

I don't know.

Jihad friend.

I'm watching Breaking Bad again. I just want to see if there was any potassium testers in there.

Anyway, I can tell you.

You could tell me after the show.

After the show?

After the show. Adam but you're saying you're colorblind, so quick tangent. Right? I have to talk about this, right? I have a friend, we're sitting there, we're playing cards in the basement, right? And that we're playing uno. And he was just not playing cards. Drawing continually had a hand that was an accordion. And we're sitting there like, come on, what's going on? We're on our last card and he just drops his hand. I'm colorblind. So best way to find out your friend's colorblind. And now it's just constant jokes ever since then, you would make fun of them. I feel you're paying.

Kyle on a nationally syndicated podcast.

I'm just saying, people make fun of Helen keller. I can make fun of color blind people.

We're going to be right back at HR tomorrow morning. Do you guys have an HR department?

Kyle we don't, but I'm sure we can find someone that can take offense to it.

Yeah, there's a lot of snowflakes out there.

Check the box. So I have a question about this Apex Dosing system. And this is just one of many different Dosing systems I've seen. So the idea is that instead of you being an avid aquarius, getting those test kits and adding what you need to manually, you get this cool, extremely retardedly, expensive system, and it just tries to measure it on its own and doses automatically. Do you have much experience with those?

Yeah. So Dosing systems, you still have to measure yourself. And then you program the Dosing system to add the chemical based on how much you see your corals taking over the course of a day. So you have to take several measurements and you see, like, day one, my magnesium is, let's say, 1400 ppm. And then by day five, it drops down to 1340 ppm. And then you have to figure out how much of whatever chemical you want to add. You put it in your little reservoir, and the Dosing system automatically doses it. And what it does is it doses it every single day. That way it keeps it much more consistent than relying on you to remember, oh, on Monday as I dose this, on Tuesday as I dose that, you just basically automate that system. Now, they do also have, I think they call it the triton. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.

Yes, that is correct.

That is something that measures your water chemistry, using a very advanced photo spectrometer to basically read various reagents mixed with your water to tell you magnesium levels, calcium levels, that sort of thing. Those are great, and typically speaking, very accurate. You just go through a ton of reagents with them. There's a couple of different companies that make something similar. That one uses a little disc that spins around and gets red. The other one, I think the triton uses a little liquid vials. You go through a ton of reagents, and if you forget to refill those reagents, your numbers are going to be way off. And if you have it automated to where that's trying to help you calculate your ratios for what you're dosing, you forget your reagents, you could be in trouble because it might think that you have way too much or not enough and throw off your dosing altogether.

I think that's exactly what John has been using.

He had about eight or ten Dosing units.

Yeah.

And he took different doses at different, like three times a day from different parts of the tank to make sure he's getting flow. They're getting accurate readings across it as an array, including in his multiple chambers of sums. So it was just the craziest thing I've ever seen. And then you look over and he's got I don't know how to put it, like an apex rack. And each one has, like, looks like milk jugs hooked up to each one of these. How it just pumps in the man scientist. I mean, it was incredible.

Yeah, that's all your additives and the reservoirs there, and it pumps them right up and puts them in the tank. And the ratio is needed.

They were having a while with problems sourcing the chemicals in bulk because they use so much of it, they're pulling out. I think they do, what, two fragging sessions every month, did you say, Jimmy?

They're doing once a week now?

Once a week they frag out. That is insane. So that's at scale. But as far as these Dosing systems, they have everything down to single tank. They're just going extreme with this. But just to give you an idea, that trident system you mentioned, I think just the base model, $600, they're not cheap.

The nice thing is, it's an investment that because of the stability. Factor from it can really pay for itself in just peace of mind and stability over the lifetime of the tank.

Well, and if you're looking if you're running a coral tank and you've got some of these corals that are worth thousands of dollars, which we saw over at sean's place, it is money well spent.

Yeah. Especially some of the little acro frags that are just crazy expensive. I mean, when you're talking a one inch frag that goes for like four or $5,000, you want to make sure that things are stable and happy as possible.

I love the names that they use for them. He's got one that's called home wrecker. That's what it was.

Yeah, home record just crazy self explanatory.

Like, he's got the piece of a tiny speck of a frag that's not supposed to grow, like $1500. Like, people are crazy. But let's get down to the, like, the less intimidating conversation. So if someone is listening to this, they're like, oh, well, the sun is going to be a while before we start a marine tank. Well, if you refer back to our prior podcast, we were talking in one of the episodes about jars. We did freshwater jars and saltwater jars, and they're very minimal to do. However, saltwater jars. Again, there's no forgiveness in a one gallon jar. If something goes away, it's going to crap out. So you need to know what you're doing. However, let's say that they a family is deciding they want to do a 55 gallon saltwater aquarium. The biggest question is, is there any differences in the cycle? Is there biological bacteria in the bottle? Can I use that freshwater stuff to get the cycle running? How long does that cycle process normally take to get just a basic fish? Only with live rock going.

So the nice thing about saltwater is instead of like bioballs or ceramic media or anything like that, we use what's called live rock, which is basically rock that's extremely porous that houses tons of bacteria cultures on them. Now, live rock is rock that comes out of, like, cycled vats and stuff like that. Where you buy it, it's already gone through its cycle. It already has those bacteria populations. You can also buy dry rock or base rock and do it yourself. If you're starting with base rock, it's just like a freshwater tank, three to four weeks typically for that cycle. If you start with live rock, that cycle is significantly sped up. It's not typical, but I mean, I've seen hot water tanks with really good live rock set up that are cycled within a week. Typically with live rock, you're looking at about a two week cycle, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. And there are bacteria supplements that you can add. You don't want to use the freshwater stuff. There's specific saltwater bacteria. Iospira is kind of the big one that people are familiar with. There's microbacter seven, I think it's called. The seven different strains of bacteria. Dr. tim's is one that I highly recommend. I love Dr. tim's. He has one called the One and Only. That's fantastic for setting up a tank, but once you add those, you're looking at about a two week cycle, give or take.

If I'm a new person listening to this, what should be the steps? I first get my tank set up with a live rock, add the water, add the salt, and then add the bacteria. When do I put and again, people normally start with, like, a small damsel fish. Is that still correct? When would I put the first damsel fishing? Because that's always the hardest.

That's the old school way of doing it. As much as technology has advanced now and supplements and testing has advanced, you really don't have to start with a damsel anymore. We do have a wide variety of fish that we consider starter fish because they are less sensitive to big swings in PH or salinity. Things like clown fish are a great starter fish that a lot of people know from finding the email and all that. They love seeing the clownfish, but they're a great starter fish. chromos are another one. There's all different kinds of chromos, and then some of the gobies are really good starter fish, too, because, again, they're less sensitive to changes in parameters. Usually with saltwater tanks, the thing that everyone has to really learn to control right off the bat is your salinity. As water evaporates out of the tank, you got to make sure you're putting fresh water back in. And it sounds counterintuitive, but when the water evaporates, it leaves the salt behind. So your tank gets saltier, and we've seen a lot of people will think, oh, my, five gallons of water. I better put five gallons of salt water back in, and they spike their salinity, and that can cause a lot of problems. You always want to top off with fresh water to compensate for it. And once you get the hang of controlling your salinity, everything else is really kind of falls in line with it, and it's really not as bad as it sounds all at first. I know, at first it's pretty overwhelming, though.

I don't know. It sounds pretty decent to me. But the whole microdosing apex systems, we got intimidating there for a minute, so I had to be a little nicer to the conversation advanced here. We try to accommodate everybody.

We love spending people's money. I just love spending other people's money. So much fun.

Oh, yeah.

Hey, back to the first test kit you talked about. How much is an average test kit that you're buying? That is a digital what are you guys paying for something like that? Retail.

So the digital test kits that I use, they range anywhere from most of them are in the $40 to $50 range. I have a digital celebrity tester, and that one was like, 120 ish, but Most Of Them Are 40, $50.

That's not bad at all.

I think you just got to buy reagents. reagents usually come in, like, a 20 or 50 pack, and they're only, like, $10 for a pack of reagents.

Oh, this isn't a question. But you have to yell out the word kobe every time you talk about the balling method. So now you know. Kyle.

Yes, we do that. It shows. When you come to our booth at the show, if someone's talking about it and they say, bawling, someone else in the booth always goes, kobe.

I thought that was fake for a minute. That's pretty good.

That's the thing.

I can't believe you guys are talking about me.

All right, here's the question. What would you dose in a planted microalgae reef tank? So let's start with what's? A planted microalgae reef tank.

So good question. I actually used to have one. So basically, it's a refugium without a tank attached to it. So you grow all sorts of macro algae in your refugium, and there are some in salt water that are absolutely beautiful. And it's just like having a planted freshwater tank, except you're doing it in salt water. There's stuff like dragon's breath algae that's like bright red. There's Cotton Candy Algae, which looks like tufts of Cotton Candy. There's mermaid fans and bottle brush and all sorts of really cool macro algae is that you can grow. What I would recommend dosing in a tank like that, you're going to want some sort of nutrient load for it. So if you don't have any fish that are producing waste, one of the best things you can do is actually take some flake fish food and crumble it up and put it in there and just kind of let it break down for those plants to actually get a little bit of food. But as far as the additives go, there's one that reflowers makes that I absolutely love. They call it the corlene algae accelerator, but it's not what a lot of people are used to in a coraline algae product where it's basically like a calcium supplement. This is actually proteins, amino acids and a bunch of different nutrients that are for algae's in general. Not just coraline, algae, all sorts of macroalgae. So they will boost growth in refugiums, and they boost things like your calrpa, which isn't really that hard to grow, but they'll boost mermaids fans and they'll boost Dragons breasts and all these various ALGIES that people grow. The downside is if you have, like, a bunch of hair algae or something like that, it will also feed and boost your hair algae. You don't want to do it if you have, like, a huge algae outbreak, but if you're trying to grow a macroalgae tank, the coraline algae accelerator is fantastic for it.

See, I know some people that like to do weird projects. There's a few people in our discord. There's another community called tct or the Community Tank. And there's a bunch of, how do we say, like psychos, psychos experts that have had a lot of fun. They're one of those people that like to do biotopes of garbage. Like, they have beer cans in it and whatnot. They have fun with some of their aquarium set ups. And I'm just an idea popped in my head. If you guys are listening, one of you should take this coral and algae accelerator and just see what cool creations you can do in a fresh water tank. If you just like, super loaded, the swamp monster will come out.

The sea monster will come out and grab you by the throat and eat you.

Absolutely. Just speed it up.

Hey, Kyle, quick question on some of these products. Now, we are getting close to winter up here in Minnesota. Are these products safe? If they freeze when you're shipping them.

We don't recommend freezing them more so for the integrity of the bottles. They are full just about to the very top, and when they freeze and expand, it will crack the bottle and you'll end up with a mess. Because of the way most of these are made, a lot of these nutrients are bound up in what we call mineral salts. So freezing them doesn't denature them. Now, there are some, the ones that have proteins and amino acids, freezing can denature those and cause those to be less effective. But things like the calcium supplement, the magnesium supplement, those are okay. If they end up freezing and shipment, I would just worry about the actual bottle cracking and then when it thaws out, it's all over your floor or something.

And that's why you have one of those mats down to clean all that.

Exactly why you buy that with a cobalt aqua sponge mat.

But, yeah, some of the products, the freshwater products that we get up here in the northland with the live bacteria and stuff, it gets frozen, it's shot, it's no good. So I know this is the time of year that I actually start buying some of that stuff and keeping at my house extra bottles of stuff. So even like on a drive when we come back home from Safe Harbor, North Dakota, if you'd have to throw the stuff in the trunk, it's going to be frozen by the time you get home an hour and ten minutes later. So a lot of these items are shipped across the United States. And as we go into winter here, that concern is always a real one with all of us up here in the northland.

Yeah, the nice thing is there's nothing that has a live bacteria strain that we offer here in the Us. Mainly again, because there are some things coming, but they're tied up in the bureaucratic red tape right now. But the chemicals that we have right now, all the additives, most can withstand freezing again, unless they have those proteins or amino acids in there.

Perfect.

So to go down the other questions on the list, you talked about the LG accelerator. What are the other two special formulas used for that I see in reflowers?

Great question. So let's see what's under the special formula.

It would be B color and F color. With color, I don't want C color or Ecolor Went, but they're in there somewhere.

Those I actually have quite a story with. So B color and F Color are both coral color enhancers, and B color is a bromine based coral color enhancer, and F Color is an iron based coral color enhancer. And a lot of people are probably sitting there going like, why would you want to add iron to your tank? Iron feeds algae because you want to be juicing.

Bro.

The nice part about the iron is the way it's in there. It's a bioavailable form of iron that can be immediately taken in by anything that uses or that has greens, yellows, reds. So pull that iron right out, and it really helps to bring out all of the color and the fluorescence in it. Actually, the B color and F color were the very first things from reflowers that I started dosing in my personal tank. And I started with those because it's a once a week dosing, and that's it. And I was like, all right, this is the easiest one. I'm the laziest one. Let me get the one that I only have to do once a week because I'm way too lazy to do anything else. So I got those, started dosing them, and it was about six weeks or so into dosing it. And me seeing my tank every day and being colorblind, I wasn't really seeing anything. And my wife, who could really care less about the tank, I mean, she'll feed the fish if I ask her, but that's about all she cares about the tank. But she walked by the tank and she was like, hey, did you get a new coral? And I was like, no, I didn't get a new coral. And she's like, well, everything just looks prettier. And I knew then that, hey, it's working, because she doesn't care about the tank, and she noticed that everything was looking better. And it's one of those things that I've been dosing for about a year now, and I absolutely love it. It's really nice because I can go to some of these local fish stores and things like that and buy some of their browned out acros, put them in the tank and under the dosing that I'm doing. Within a month, they'll be covered up and looking beautiful.

Do you even juice? bro so on here we have a gentleman that decided to post a picture and state, this is how I dose iron. So if you look at the picture, it looks like he has a reptile lid on the top of his aquarium. Yes, the grate is rusting on top.

So I think that's how he doses iron.

That's how he doses iron. Not recommended.

Crazy thing is that will absolutely dose iron. It will also dose a lot of other contaminants and impurities that you don't necessarily want. But it will work for iron.

Who knew?

So going back to the last thing you said, if you go in and you buy kind of like a coral or something that doesn't have good color, are they telling you this or are you seeing this? I'm serious. Are you able to distinguish different tones?

Yeah, there are three different kinds of color blindness and I have the one that starts with the tufany or something like that. I don't remember the name of it, but I see things in various shades of like loose and purples. So I can see like loose purples, reds, but things like yellows, greens, all that kind of stuff all lost to me. So honestly, the way I can tell if a coral is, like, browned out or not looking the way it should is I can go in to a store and I'll look in their frag tank and be like, hey, an acro that's four inches long should really be, like, 70 $80. And it's over here in the $10 section. something's up with it. That's why I know like, hey, boom. That's one of the ones that I'm going to try because I can throw it in my tank. I don't mind it looking like crap for a while because I know it's going to bounce back and start looking awesome because of the way I dose my tank.

Nailed it.

So do you have to go with your wife to pick out a dress and stuff? And she comes out, she goes, what do you think, the black dress or the pink dress? And you're going, I don't care. The one of the shows the most cleavage.

I just think it's interesting that your color blindness does just the green and yellows and not the reds. Normally like people I know can't see Christmas at all. Like green and red is gone.

I can't see Christmas.

Like I got a tank. But my beautiful planet 125 I got.

In there.

Oh yeah, way to go char. anyways, so I got my 125 planted. It's just beautiful greens. I got, you know, fire shrimp, rummy nose, tetras and he can't see shit in it. It just all looks just one thing.

I want to sell him some of my washout discus to him, I tell you that much.

The guy to have well, we can.

Use the reflower American trace and get those discus looking a lot less washed out.

You know what, I am going to try that. I am excited to start using some of these products after being educated a little bit more on. I am impressed about the prices. They are not that bad. And I think everybody should give us a try and report back to us and we can have it talk about it in our second episode.

And by the time this releases, there may be even be a promo code at the front of the episode.

There may be a promo code and a contest.

Oh, man.

A contest.

You can win yourself some reflowers. You don't even have to buy it that way.

Hot damn.

I'm just going to feel mine from the top of the sequence that rob's got right here.

Hey, now you can't take my juggies.

I'm not touching your jugs, dude.

So is there anything that we'll go ahead. Cool thing about jugs.

The cool thing about the reflower jugs is all the pictures that you see on all their jars are taken in their own personal aquariums. The four guys who started the company, one of the guys was a photographer by trade. And when they started the company, he went around and photographed all their tanks. So everything you see on those labels has been grown using reflowers.

Hot. There's no stealing content online or buying stock photos from places. It's their own tanks. That's great.

If you look really closely, one of the planted supplements is actually a leafy sea dragon.

Oh, man. Now I'm going to have to really go at it. We got like six bottles up here.

Steven closely to figure out which one.

I'm going to bring shotglasses next time. We're just going to do shots of this stuff and see what happens.

We'll get this done yet. Don't consume any reflower products direct to humans.

The promise is that it makes you look any better.

Right.

So I do have a question. Does this mean somebody has a captive leafy sea dragon? Because that's kind of on my bucket list of things to get SeaWorld. Yes, as a matter of fact, they do. Multiple captive leafy sea dragons as well as a handful of pipe fish in there with them.

SeaWorld has a wonderful display of those if you've ever been to SeaWorld. And sudden one of the inside buildings, and they are huge.

Wait, SeaWorld is still going? I thought they closed it down after we just took the pictures with the statue of shamo.

No.

Shed Aquarium up in Chicago also has an amazing sea dragon exhibit. I knew these were in captive aquariums, but I didn't know if private people had them. Absolutely. And there's actually a breeder in the Us. They're working on breeding leafy sea dragons as well as a few other various species. But they raise the young on one of the foods that I helped make. So I'm very excited with that.

That's a hard flex right there.

Have they had any success then for the breeding of them?

I don't know if I can say one way or the other.

Kyle, is there anything gratuitous that we've forgotten along this trip we've taken?

The only other thing that I would say when you're getting into dosing is to start with dosing once a week. You don't want to dose too much. Some of the chemicals won't hurt. If you overdose, some will, you don't want to dose too much. So I always recommend people start small, dose once a week, and then once you've got that day, see how that impacts your tank. Increase that dosage a little bit more and a little bit more until you find the right levels that work for your tank. And the instructions on all the bottles are really just guidelines for an average tank. Every tank uses the different minerals and things like that in different ratios. So if you have a bunch of sps, you might be pulling out more calcium or strontium. If you have a bunch of softies, or if you have a tank like mine, which has a bunch of non photosynthetics, you're going to be using things like iodine and potassium a lot more than you are. Things like calcium like, I've got a bunch of gorgonians in my tank and they just absolutely love iodine. It does wonders for them. I'm dosing iodine a lot more frequently than most people will. Same with things like potassium. You want to hit that 400 ppm to 420 ppm potassium range, and in a tank with a lot of soft corals or a lot of nonphosynthetics, having that higher potassium is going to be fantastic. But it might not be what you want in a tank with a whole bunch of stony. So a lot of it is just measure it, take it slow. The other nice thing that I always tell people is if you're afraid of dosing, like I was for a very good portion of my aquarium life, find a friend or someone that you know that doses and ask them for guidance, because it can be very overwhelming when you're like, all right, I need how many milliliters per gallon? And all this stuff. It can really get overwhelming and really, like I said, take it slow. Find a friend who may dose. I'm always available via our cobalt aquatics.com. You can always drop me a message on there and ask me, and I'm happy to reply to anyone who needs help. One of the things I do with Cobalt is I travel all across the country to various fish stores and we do talks on fish nutrition and all sorts of different chemicals and additives and what food is right and all this stuff. I always tell people, hey, if you ever have any questions, if any of your customers ever have any questions, whatever, I'm always around. So you can contact us through the Cobalt website. We're always happy to help anyone get started, even if it's just a weird question you have about the aquarium hobby, we're happy to help.

I mean, that's how I handle a lot of things in life. I don't know about it. Find a friend who does. That's why I'm reaching out to lance Armstrong to see how I'm supposed to be able to do steroids one nut Land.

And you wonder why shelle crow left him. Now you know it's all over.

Well, Kyle, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show and letting us know, but I have an action item for you, sir. You need to post some sort of like half way guide. Like if you see that etching glass algae, you add more phosphate for plants. Is there a guide that you can build to give instructions on how to change up your dosing schedule based upon what's in the tank or what you see?

Like dosing for dummies.

Yeah, that's a great idea. I like that a lot actually. it'd be awesome to set up a little like part of on the web page that kind of has a hey, I see this. Here's what I'm probably experiencing and how to fix it.

And you and I can do a video together and we could pretend to be like Arnold schwarzenegger telling people how to use be. Like, this is how you pump and have some fun with it, right? Put a brand behind it. Get marketing.

Nobody'S going to believe that you're Arnold schwarzenegger. Not even me. Really drunk.

Wait, you missed it. What was that accent again? You got to put it in your tank.

Dose it now.

Dose it now.

I'm going to pump you up.

You up.

It can't get better than that, ladies and gentlemen. Well, thanks again, Kyle. I appreciate it. You're welcome certainly for having me listen to the podcast. We record these ahead of time so it'll be at the front of the podcast. If there's any information on the contest and promo code, there'll be some advertisement we'll be doing with free flowers. Certainly give them a try. Reflowers us. Otherwise you can also go to cobalt's website and get those super squishy absorbent pads. That's the new meme now. Well, thanks again, Kyle.

And the Cobalt WAP is the wet f pad.

And with that, we'll leave.

I love it so much. Well guys, I'll see you next week. Again, go to the bottom of the website aquariumgeuppodcast.com. If you like what you hear, you can certainly go on there, give us a few bucks. Go to the merch store, buy a t shirt or hat. It all helps keep the lights on. And above all of them, share this with a friend and join us live. Until next week, guys. Thanks guys for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found. there'd be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.

I never knew that a Minnesota accent would be so sexy until I heard adam's voice. Go frank yourself.

Don't you know that's for my boy? Don't you know.