My 75 gallon tank was set up back on Aug 16th & 17th and although it has only been slightly over 2 months since then I'm surprised how far my tank has come in such a short period.
Shouldn't I be just a few weeks past cycling? Yes, but it seems I got lucky and took a shortcut...I've been involved in FW tanks for some years now and I'm heavily invloved with the Nassau County Aquarium Society (NCAS). A few of the guys over there also have reef tanks and one in particular kept insisting that I should explore the SW side of the hobby. Once I decided to commit to SW the guys gave me so many suggestions I almost couldn't keep up with them. They sent me links by the dozen..buy one of these, look at this, you can pass this one up...my head was spinning and I hadn't decided yet on what size tank I was going to set up.
I wanted a 90 but the 75 was going to be so much easier for me to reach inside of and so the decision was made and the buying started. This is where the 'I got lucky' part kicks in --(this part goes back to mid July when I had made the decision to do a reef) one of the guys found a reefer on Staten Island who had to give up his mature 90 and was selling off 125 pounds of live rock. I set up an empty 55 as a holding tank and went to SI with a trunk full of styrofoam coolers. Rock never moved so fast! The rock sat in that tank for a couple of weeks waiting for an ammonia spike. It didn't happen. It was suggested I drop a raw shrimp in to see if I had much good bacteria and it took 2 days to register the mildest spike. Out came the shrimp and by the next day the ammonia was gone. I had fully cured L/R with no die off!! Add to that there were some mushrooms & palys already on the rock. I bought another 50 pounds of base rock to round things out & soaked it for a couple of weeks. I was ready to start my reef tank.
For now I'm going to skip over the whole design, plumbing, lighting, fuge (oh that part was fun!), canopy info and will post the details regarding all that with the related pics in the next few days.
I do have to stop here first and say Thank You to my good friend from NCAS (he's a member here too) who has been my strongest supporter and who has answered a bazillion questions for me in addition to doing the actual set up of the tank...Psycho Graphic...I just call him Dave.
BTW- I admit I stink at taking pics but at least with the new 14K Phoenix bulbs everything doesn't only look brown or green anymore! And if it happens to cross your mind that I have an awful lot of frags -- some of them belong to Psycho and I'm just holding them until his new tank is set up and some others are slated to go into the Oceanic cube I bought at the Petco sale (the cube set up will be a future project...).
Shouldn't I be just a few weeks past cycling? Yes, but it seems I got lucky and took a shortcut...I've been involved in FW tanks for some years now and I'm heavily invloved with the Nassau County Aquarium Society (NCAS). A few of the guys over there also have reef tanks and one in particular kept insisting that I should explore the SW side of the hobby. Once I decided to commit to SW the guys gave me so many suggestions I almost couldn't keep up with them. They sent me links by the dozen..buy one of these, look at this, you can pass this one up...my head was spinning and I hadn't decided yet on what size tank I was going to set up.
I wanted a 90 but the 75 was going to be so much easier for me to reach inside of and so the decision was made and the buying started. This is where the 'I got lucky' part kicks in --(this part goes back to mid July when I had made the decision to do a reef) one of the guys found a reefer on Staten Island who had to give up his mature 90 and was selling off 125 pounds of live rock. I set up an empty 55 as a holding tank and went to SI with a trunk full of styrofoam coolers. Rock never moved so fast! The rock sat in that tank for a couple of weeks waiting for an ammonia spike. It didn't happen. It was suggested I drop a raw shrimp in to see if I had much good bacteria and it took 2 days to register the mildest spike. Out came the shrimp and by the next day the ammonia was gone. I had fully cured L/R with no die off!! Add to that there were some mushrooms & palys already on the rock. I bought another 50 pounds of base rock to round things out & soaked it for a couple of weeks. I was ready to start my reef tank.
For now I'm going to skip over the whole design, plumbing, lighting, fuge (oh that part was fun!), canopy info and will post the details regarding all that with the related pics in the next few days.
I do have to stop here first and say Thank You to my good friend from NCAS (he's a member here too) who has been my strongest supporter and who has answered a bazillion questions for me in addition to doing the actual set up of the tank...Psycho Graphic...I just call him Dave.
BTW- I admit I stink at taking pics but at least with the new 14K Phoenix bulbs everything doesn't only look brown or green anymore! And if it happens to cross your mind that I have an awful lot of frags -- some of them belong to Psycho and I'm just holding them until his new tank is set up and some others are slated to go into the Oceanic cube I bought at the Petco sale (the cube set up will be a future project...).
great job...
