Kingtriton92 Posted August 31, 2019 Share Posted August 31, 2019 After a fairly long hiatus from the hobby I decided to dive back in after jealously gazing upon my brother's beautiful Redsea reefer 250. I ended up getting a Redsea Max Nano as it was the perfect size for my office nook. I picked up about 20 lbs of dry rock and 20 lbs of carib sea live sand, added water and cycled for several weeks. In the area below the protein skimmer I added miracle mud, seachem matrix and a golf ball size chunk of cheato. I cut away the vinyl behind this chamber and mounted a modified fluval plant light and my refugium was off and running (opposite my normal light cycle). I added a cobalt heater and DIY back mounted PC fan and an inkbird temperature controller to control the heat and cooling. I went with the Hydor Ti ATO system with a 2.5 gallon reservoir, a Tom's aqualifer pump and mounted the sensors in the return pump section to avoid water height fluctuations due to my wave maker. For said wavemaker I decided on the Jabao RW4 which at half speed gives me plenty of water movement. Its Chinese but for me its getting the job done. For filtration I'm running 200 micron filter socks, chemipure blue, purigen, carbon and some polyfibre. After the cycle finished I started doing five gallon water changes once a week and set my skimmer up for a fairly dry skim. I'm using a single AI Prime HD light with a slightly modified version of one of their "featured " programs. For livestock I started with a large amount of multiple species of pods from reef nutrition and algae barn. I started them in my fuge and waited until I was seeing them on the glass and sand to add fish and coral. For inverts I added an emerald crab, four blue leg hermits, three trochus snails a sea lettuce nudibranch and a narcissus snail. For fish I have a starry blenny, a green clown goby, a mandarin and an ocilarous clown. Ultimately I'd like to transition to much smaller fish to create a sense of scale but that is proving difficult. For corals I am focusing primarily on soft and LPS. Currently I have a beautiful island of metallic green star polyp, a neon green paliathoa colony, a torch, some green finger leathers, a pulsing xenia, four different ricordia and a bunch of zoa's. Currently my zoas are utter chaos, rastas, sunny D's and a handful of genaric reds, greens and orange combo rocks. My next step will be to introduce some rock flower anemones to my sand bed. I've also added a few bottles of purple and pink helix and am finally seeing growth on the back wall. Not much left but to sit back and watch it grow in. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burningbaal Posted August 31, 2019 Share Posted August 31, 2019 great stuff! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
don_chuwish Posted October 20, 2019 Share Posted October 20, 2019 How's it been going? Love the aquascape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewisriverfisherman Posted October 20, 2019 Share Posted October 20, 2019 Nice write up on your tank, thanks for sharing. Somehow I think I missed this post the 1st time around. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
techymechy Posted August 22, 2020 Share Posted August 22, 2020 Very nice. This is very close to what I want to do. Can you take pics of your plumbing, sump, etc? Also how do you do your make up water? Do you use tap water and premix or do you have an RO/DI? I am trying to figure out what I have to have to support a tank of this size. How big of water changes do you do and how often? Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scubaethan Posted August 22, 2020 Share Posted August 22, 2020 I like your aquascape too! It's like pillars - very dynamic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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