Hey all
Well I finally got a half decent camera in the Canon Power Shot 720. Havent mastered the art of the super macro pics where you can see the pores of a coral, but here we go.
First I would like to thank House of Fish for all the great service they provided on everything from the delivery to the the purchases. Their customers service is second to none. Advice was great, and follow up was much appreciated. That is why I order from them again!
Tank Specs and Lighting
As for my tank specs, the beautiful custom tank and stand was purchased unused from OGREEF in CT. It is 125g with 48in length. Their are 4 starphire panels with 2X250 12k reeflux and 4 t5's blue white combo. I run the halides on a coralvue dimmable ballast which combined with the reeflux's give me a perfect blue hue that I have tried so hard to get. Due to the limited space under the hood, i had to set up my t'5 at and angle. Since my tank is euro braced, i did not know how to do this, but the angle approach worked quite nicely. This time around i really wanted to keep things nice and clean. My last tank was a bit ghetto in that there was wires all over the place. This time i screwed things as much as possible and really tried to make it compact. Although there is no picture of it, both ballast are screwed to the back of the hood.
Flow
For flow, I run two wireless vortechs on alternating 2 second pulses at half strength, with a sequence dart on 2 one inch sea swirls. The one incher works awesome. The flow is allowed to be just wide enough to perfect flow. Because of this I am allowed to keep some corals relatively close. The tank came with two megaflow's and let me tell you, the suckers were loud as heck. After cutting my sump feed tube to be an inch below the water line and bending the other tube upwards a bit so that the water burping would not be a problem, the noise got much less. From there it took me a week of fine tuning the riser tube on the over flow i finally got it to almost silent. Now all i hear is the water dropping into my overflow a few inches. The trick is if you here your overflow sucking too much air, move one or the other up and down very slowly till you get the desired noise level. Make sure you plumbed the thing properly first before you start moving it up and down!
Control and Automation
Because I am a busy person, I wanted everything to be as effortless as possible. The tank is run on a Aquacontroller 2 with a DC8. Holy Cow! I was soo intimdated at first, but with the DC8, things are so easy. The set up once you start scrolling through the menu are quite easy to understand. My t5's turn on at 12PM and off at 10:30PM. From there I give the tank a half hour of complete darkness from which my single centered moonlight turns on at 11PM. I wanted to give some darkness as I read somewhere that complete darkness is when corals have the highest calcifcation rate. Not sure if this was true, but I thought it was cool. As for my calcium and alk supplementation I use a GEO Calcium 618. This thing is awesome. I probably screwed up my first tank more than anyone with swings back when I was dosing two part. Every morning I would just get up an pour a little into the tank without really measuring. Probably explains why my growth sucked. My GF also hated the two part jugs just laying around the living room next to the tank. This time around I focused on stability and ease, so the best choice was to get a calcium reactor.
Filtration
The heart of the tank is a Bubble Master 200. I had experience with the 250 and that thing was a beast. I downgraded a bit so as to not strip my tank bare of nutrients. So far so good. As you can see from the nastiness I pull out this is a pretty good skimmer! I combine this with a Ozone reactor which runs everytime the ORP drops below 400. During the day time, the ORP usually dips to around 390 and at night goes all the way to 430. I think it may have something to do with the temperature of the tank and it's ability to hold more oxygen as the water is colder in the night. In any case this combination has worked great for me. The rest of the sump contains a linked set of phosban reactors. One holds GFO, and the other holds ESV carbon. I also placed a bag full of Chemipure in one of my baffles so it has max water contact. When I first started the tank, I was so impatent I did not cook or cure my Marco base rock and used straight jersey city tap water. It was hair algae galore. Nothing worked. Sea hairs, phosban, etc..Water changes where too much of a hassle. I had to take a drastic approach. I read a great thread on Vodka and Sugar on reef central and decided to give it a try. The premise made alot of sense to me, and I had a skimmer good enough to handle the subsequent bateria growth. After about a month of fighting a hopeless battle, I dosed 3ML of vodka combined with 2 TSP of sugar for 3 days in a row . The results were dramatic. Hair algae and cyano died off and my rocks where actually beginning to show up. As this is a drastic measure I am not advocating this, as this can get pretty screwed up. You need to do alot of research and have a big skimmer to pull it off. There was a point i began to see a bateria bloom (Semi cloudy water) and my corals where stressed so do not think this is a cure all. To this day, I still have have not done a water change and will probabably never get into the habit of doing so. While my corals may grow faster and colors get better, I am satisfied so far.
Cleaning Crew
After learning from my last tank, I decided against all hermit crabs. Often times they ended up killing my snails. Every time one would get killed I would think to myself, oh well there goes another dollar. This time around i stuck to 5 or 6 large turbo snails, and about 8 fighting conches to clean my 4 inch sand bed. They do a great job. There is also one cuke swimming around the sand which I have yet seen.
Fishes
This time around i really wanted to focus on function and social order as opposed to just having nice fish. I really think this is one of the keys to a healthy reef. DO NOT OVESTOCK
1 Tomini Tang
1 Hippo tang
3 Yellow wrasses
1 Four line wrasse
1 Bi color Blenny
Feeding and Dosing
I feed once a day in the evening and twice a day on the weekends. I Alternate between Frozen cylopeeze, mysis, homemade food, fish eggs, Formula one, and frozen oysters mashed through a garlic press. All the food I feed was with the intent of really feeding my corals as opposed to feeding my fish. The food that seems to have the best result as far as polyp extension goes is the cyclopeeze.
As far as dosing goes, I dose 7 drips of Iodine weekly and half a tab of store bought amino acid complex. Can say for certain this helps, but doesnt seem to have hurt.
Corals
Too many to name, but most of the stuff I have is from truely great reefers which I can aspire to get to. Among them are SMCOOLER, PNOYREEFER, JHALE, PAUL and DACEMAN.
I hope you have enjoyed reading my thread. I definitely made almost every mistake in the book so this time around I tried to do the opposite of everything i messed up on. So far so good.The most enjoyable aspect of this hobby is not to have the biggest baddest tank on the board but rather the joy i get from seeing growth and development in a entire world I created.
Well I finally got a half decent camera in the Canon Power Shot 720. Havent mastered the art of the super macro pics where you can see the pores of a coral, but here we go.
First I would like to thank House of Fish for all the great service they provided on everything from the delivery to the the purchases. Their customers service is second to none. Advice was great, and follow up was much appreciated. That is why I order from them again!
Tank Specs and Lighting
As for my tank specs, the beautiful custom tank and stand was purchased unused from OGREEF in CT. It is 125g with 48in length. Their are 4 starphire panels with 2X250 12k reeflux and 4 t5's blue white combo. I run the halides on a coralvue dimmable ballast which combined with the reeflux's give me a perfect blue hue that I have tried so hard to get. Due to the limited space under the hood, i had to set up my t'5 at and angle. Since my tank is euro braced, i did not know how to do this, but the angle approach worked quite nicely. This time around i really wanted to keep things nice and clean. My last tank was a bit ghetto in that there was wires all over the place. This time i screwed things as much as possible and really tried to make it compact. Although there is no picture of it, both ballast are screwed to the back of the hood.
Flow
For flow, I run two wireless vortechs on alternating 2 second pulses at half strength, with a sequence dart on 2 one inch sea swirls. The one incher works awesome. The flow is allowed to be just wide enough to perfect flow. Because of this I am allowed to keep some corals relatively close. The tank came with two megaflow's and let me tell you, the suckers were loud as heck. After cutting my sump feed tube to be an inch below the water line and bending the other tube upwards a bit so that the water burping would not be a problem, the noise got much less. From there it took me a week of fine tuning the riser tube on the over flow i finally got it to almost silent. Now all i hear is the water dropping into my overflow a few inches. The trick is if you here your overflow sucking too much air, move one or the other up and down very slowly till you get the desired noise level. Make sure you plumbed the thing properly first before you start moving it up and down!
Control and Automation
Because I am a busy person, I wanted everything to be as effortless as possible. The tank is run on a Aquacontroller 2 with a DC8. Holy Cow! I was soo intimdated at first, but with the DC8, things are so easy. The set up once you start scrolling through the menu are quite easy to understand. My t5's turn on at 12PM and off at 10:30PM. From there I give the tank a half hour of complete darkness from which my single centered moonlight turns on at 11PM. I wanted to give some darkness as I read somewhere that complete darkness is when corals have the highest calcifcation rate. Not sure if this was true, but I thought it was cool. As for my calcium and alk supplementation I use a GEO Calcium 618. This thing is awesome. I probably screwed up my first tank more than anyone with swings back when I was dosing two part. Every morning I would just get up an pour a little into the tank without really measuring. Probably explains why my growth sucked. My GF also hated the two part jugs just laying around the living room next to the tank. This time around I focused on stability and ease, so the best choice was to get a calcium reactor.
Filtration
The heart of the tank is a Bubble Master 200. I had experience with the 250 and that thing was a beast. I downgraded a bit so as to not strip my tank bare of nutrients. So far so good. As you can see from the nastiness I pull out this is a pretty good skimmer! I combine this with a Ozone reactor which runs everytime the ORP drops below 400. During the day time, the ORP usually dips to around 390 and at night goes all the way to 430. I think it may have something to do with the temperature of the tank and it's ability to hold more oxygen as the water is colder in the night. In any case this combination has worked great for me. The rest of the sump contains a linked set of phosban reactors. One holds GFO, and the other holds ESV carbon. I also placed a bag full of Chemipure in one of my baffles so it has max water contact. When I first started the tank, I was so impatent I did not cook or cure my Marco base rock and used straight jersey city tap water. It was hair algae galore. Nothing worked. Sea hairs, phosban, etc..Water changes where too much of a hassle. I had to take a drastic approach. I read a great thread on Vodka and Sugar on reef central and decided to give it a try. The premise made alot of sense to me, and I had a skimmer good enough to handle the subsequent bateria growth. After about a month of fighting a hopeless battle, I dosed 3ML of vodka combined with 2 TSP of sugar for 3 days in a row . The results were dramatic. Hair algae and cyano died off and my rocks where actually beginning to show up. As this is a drastic measure I am not advocating this, as this can get pretty screwed up. You need to do alot of research and have a big skimmer to pull it off. There was a point i began to see a bateria bloom (Semi cloudy water) and my corals where stressed so do not think this is a cure all. To this day, I still have have not done a water change and will probabably never get into the habit of doing so. While my corals may grow faster and colors get better, I am satisfied so far.
Cleaning Crew
After learning from my last tank, I decided against all hermit crabs. Often times they ended up killing my snails. Every time one would get killed I would think to myself, oh well there goes another dollar. This time around i stuck to 5 or 6 large turbo snails, and about 8 fighting conches to clean my 4 inch sand bed. They do a great job. There is also one cuke swimming around the sand which I have yet seen.
Fishes
This time around i really wanted to focus on function and social order as opposed to just having nice fish. I really think this is one of the keys to a healthy reef. DO NOT OVESTOCK
1 Tomini Tang
1 Hippo tang
3 Yellow wrasses
1 Four line wrasse
1 Bi color Blenny
Feeding and Dosing
I feed once a day in the evening and twice a day on the weekends. I Alternate between Frozen cylopeeze, mysis, homemade food, fish eggs, Formula one, and frozen oysters mashed through a garlic press. All the food I feed was with the intent of really feeding my corals as opposed to feeding my fish. The food that seems to have the best result as far as polyp extension goes is the cyclopeeze.
As far as dosing goes, I dose 7 drips of Iodine weekly and half a tab of store bought amino acid complex. Can say for certain this helps, but doesnt seem to have hurt.
Corals
Too many to name, but most of the stuff I have is from truely great reefers which I can aspire to get to. Among them are SMCOOLER, PNOYREEFER, JHALE, PAUL and DACEMAN.
I hope you have enjoyed reading my thread. I definitely made almost every mistake in the book so this time around I tried to do the opposite of everything i messed up on. So far so good.The most enjoyable aspect of this hobby is not to have the biggest baddest tank on the board but rather the joy i get from seeing growth and development in a entire world I created.
