Hi Sklywag, Thanks for the feedback. I have posted a couple more pictures. The first one is a before shot and it shows my water was a bit cloudy. The second picture is from this past week and you can see that the water is alot clearer now. The tank stays consistenly clearer now with the Santa Monica. I have two girls, ages 6 and 15. They, and all their friends around the nieghborhood, love to get in on the action and they feed the fish daily too. These fish never go hungry and without the Santa Monica, I would be in big trouble!
BTW, I have always run a filter sock to remove the big particles from the water quickly. Even now with the Santa Monica, a filter sock filters all the water as it drains out of the unit below.
I used to have to clean my glass of algae growth every couple of days before the Santa Monica and now I only have to clean it about a third as often. I don't have any pictures with the glass full of algae (I never wanted to save a picture of that!). My 4 tangs are always picking away at algae on the rock too so the rock looks about the same as before. My main problem was that I just had borderline water quality. I was the cause of my water quality issues because I always liked (and still like) to keep my tank well stocked, well fed, and I don't like having a display tank chock full of rocks either. I used to have to keep a bottle of aquasafe water conditioner nearby so I could put in a cap full of the stuff once a week or so just to make sure that the Ammonia, Nitrites and Nitrates were'nt harming the fish. Now that I have a Santa Monica, I can still keep my tank well stocked and fish well fed and my Ammonia, Nitrites and Nitrates are amazingly zero all the time. I don't need the aquasafe anymore!
Good luck finishing up your own ATS. I am looking forward to your own posts about it.
-C