NateDawg

Hey guys, haven't posted a tank thread before but figured I'd put this one up. Anyway, I just moved to a bigger place that would allow me to have a larger tank so I just got everything moved over last week. The tank before this was a standard 29 that I just basically moved everything right over to the new one.

Equipment:

- 20ish gallon DIY acrylic sump

- simplicity dc320 skimmer

- simplicity dc1600 return

- 2x jebao rw-8 wavemakers

- lighting is a DIY led fixture that I middle the new orphec v4 after but added a couple color spectrums too.

- diy ITC-1000 temp. Controller

- diy ATO

-probably missing something...

Livestock:

Zoas: king midas, salted agave, CARs, blueberry fields, utter chaos, radioactive dragon eyes, sakura sunrise, bam bams, rastas, scrambled eggs, BBBs, everlasting gobstoppers, pink diamonds, Darth mauls, hallucinations, rainbow incinerators, space queens, twizzlers, granny apple Smith's, leprechauns, GB yellow hornets, and many more unnamed...

Sps: $500 efflo, green slimer, Oregon tort, BigR WD, ora red planet, Garf bonsai, tricolor undata, orange setosa, ORA Red Planet, many more..

Fish: 2x standard clowns, purple tang, Potters Angelfish, green clown goby

Various cleanup crews

Anyway, lots more, just got tired of listing haha

Here's the link to the video playlist on brstv for how they kept a clown harem tank, seemed to be pretty informative, 

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBaMLrfToJyxQ2ssQRPnmwFOJ2Qp8NBHi

I'm looking for a cube aquarium that's around 60 gallons. I'd be just looking for the tank, not the stand, unless it could fit a 4 foot sump. Let me know what you Got! Thanks for looking!!!

There was a good chunk of palythoa grandis at the premium aquarium if your ever over that way

Hmmm, kinda looks like it's expelling it's zooxanthellae, corals will do this if they bec9me stressed or they're environment changes. I imagine that any symbiotic animal that has zooxanthellae in it will do that. But that just my .02.

For the one fixture that has the entire blue channel out, most likely the driver or the ac/dc power supply is dead for the entire channel and would have to be replaced. As for the other fixture that has select diodes that are out, they should be easy to replace if you have some minimal soldering knowledge as well as can get the correct LED to replace them with. I haven't messed with those specific fixtures myself but have seen one that a biddy of mine has. They look like they use 3 watt led chips. The blue are all the same spectrum, I'm guessing around 440nm or so. If I was to mod the light, I'd get a couple low uv led chips to add to the fixture. The uv radiation is a key factor in color enhancement of sps corals and why people say that t5s are better at coloration for coral than led because alot of fixtures (if not most) back when they first came out, didn't use very low uv LEDs, which ment potentially less color for sps. As for the sbreef color spectrum, it looks pretty good, though, I would probably instead of using all those 450nm wavelengths, I'd do like 60/40 of 440nm and 470nm just to add a little more wide spectrum coverage.

I've always used milk carton plastic for diffusers, never had an issue with it

Does anyone know of any coral safe nudibranchs? Preferably vegetarians or omnivores (not really sure if there is such a creature)

49 minutes ago, SuncrestReef said:

Smaller snails like cerith and stomatellas would probably work great.  The ceriths will burrow into the sand which helps keep it stirred up.  The stomatellas are small eating machines that can get into every nook & cranny and reproduce quickly.  I have a ton of them if you can't find them anywhere.  Maybe also a small hermit crab.

Sweet, thanks! I'll look into that for sure. I've got some stomatellas in my main display that I might fish out.

Okay so the next thing I'm gunna be looking for is a cleanup crew, what do people suggest for such a small container?

The one thing I'd be worried about is condensation on an led retrofit, and you would have to cut the hood so you could add a heat sink that will be able to get rid of heat coming off of high power LEDs as they don't like getting too hot. It's very possible but it would take alot of cutting of the original housing

2 hours ago, householdofpayne said:

Did you make the light?

Yep, the light is completely home built all the way down to the bare components. I was gunna just get a kessil a360x but it didn't have as much low spectrum output as I wanted so I just built one with the same power output with lower spectrum LEDs and saved like $430 dollars.

11 hours ago, xxkenny90xx said:

Nice tank! About how many gallon water changes do will you be doing? 

It'll be trial and error for the first while and the water changes will depend on how heavy the live stock is in there. I'm going to start with 35% every week and see how things look with that.

5 hours ago, SuncrestReef said:

Looks great!

How many tangs are you going to put in? 😂

I'm thinking 2 or 3, probably a hippo tang and a gem tang to start 😂

Another update!

- got everything set up and water tested, had to restart about 3 times since there is a little bit of pressure in this system, almost every spot that could leak leaked... but, finally fixed all those, got the light working and water flowing! 

And I couldn't resist putting in the first frag! Good ol classic utter chaos. It opened up instantly which was a good sign.

45 minutes ago, Optimusprime3605 said:

 

Let me know if you have one to spare, please.

Have cash or coral.

TIA!

 

Sent from Atlantis 🤙

 

 

 

I've got 2 banjo polypropylene bulkheads I'm not using that you can have for a frag, if that's what your looking for.

Updates are in!

New things:

- got all the plumbing figured out and I'm going to have it sit on a small clear shelf taught next to my computer so I can distract myself even more while working haha.

- I ended up wanting the ability to control the little pump I bought, so I designed and printed a flow controller for it that so far, works great!

More to come!

Marinepure bio filtration blocks and spheres use a ceramic that's composed of aluminosilicate (aluminum silicate), which is why it's so porous, there website states that Its inert and won't leach anything. But they don't really specify if that's true for both salt and fresh water tanks. Being that there are so many various compounds and elements in salt water tanks, there's probably a few of them that will react and cause aluminum to leach into the tank (one reason I was hesitant at using the stuff). Each and every tank will be completely different in terms of chemistry so one tank could have all the problems with the stuff, but the next won't show any signs at all.

Got my sample sent out today. The kit seemed daily easy to do, the only thing that I noticed for someone who didn't watch how the kit was supposed to be used was that the paper instructions weren't very clear as to weather or not to keep the small amount of ethyl alcohol and send that or to send the filter disk. Also, towards the end of pushing the tank water through, it got very hard to push water through which I guess means that the filter was just full with hopefully bacteria. The test was done on Saturday (5/4/2019), and kept in a freezer at -26°F for approximately 44 hours then removed and sent via USPS at 1pm today (5/6/2019).

5 minutes ago, SuncrestReef said:

Wow, Lefty wasted no time!  10 minutes after I put the new shells in the tank, he was already moved in to his new home.

@NateDawg Thanks for the shells!!!

No problem! Lefty looks good in his new ride!

13 minutes ago, householdofpayne said:

We started a Pico tank with a empty  volume of 2.5g. I used rock from my sump, and sand from a sealed Caribsea bag. It took about a week to cycle. I think the rock from established tank, as well as the small water volume made it fast. 

 

Yah, I've been following your Pico tank, and that's good to hear about the short cycle.

2 hours ago, TaylorW said:

I love this idea! I'm assuming you have to cycle it right?

 

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I was going too, but I have the rock and sand I'll be using in my main display sump and I'm going to take water directly from my main display and use that in the tank so if all goes well, there shouldn't need to be a real cycle before I can start putting live stock into it. I'm gunna try giving it about 5 days to settle and make sure all the equipment is working properly then start adding some little critters. 😁

3 minutes ago, SuncrestReef said:

Thank you!  See you tomorrow.

Yup Yup! See you then!

2 minutes ago, SuncrestReef said:

Holy cow!!! What, do you just eat escargot every day???

I'm hoping for turbo snail or astraea shells, about 3/4" to 1" across.  Something not too wide or bulky.  Maybe an assortment of 5 shells would be awesome. 

Haha nope. I just can't keep snails alive 😂 

Jk... I beach comb quite a bit and use the not so pretty seashells as reactor media in my calcium reactor cuz it's cheap and free lol. I'll give yah a goodie bag of various ones.

6 hours ago, SuncrestReef said:

My largest hermit crab, Lefty (shown below) is outgrowing his shell and needs a new home.  Does anyone have any empty shells between 3/4" - 1" diameter to spare?  I'll be at CNC tomorrow for the Cinco de Mayo party, and will gladly toss you a free raffle ticket in exchange for some shells.  Who knows...a snail shell could win you a $250 gift card or a Waterbox aquarium!

I got you covered, how many and what kind do you want?

I've got many more if none of these strike your fancy.