Bought the tank off a neighbor for 200 bucks with a bunch of 10 year old equipment totally was in a hurry excited. Here's first day I had it filled with tap water mixed in salt as I was going! I probably shouldn't be saying that I did this but I did. Lol
Second day. It settled out a bit! I'll get some more pictures of my junk set up to show what I started with and the progress I've made. Going to actually have the money over the next couple months to make what was a mess into a beast of a tank! I want to be honest and show the dumb mistakes I've made and how I've upgraded since! Maybe I can help other people from making my same mistakes.
So I say when I started this I had 500 bucks to use and I wanted to just do a fowlr based on first tank and the amount of money I had. don't think I really contemplated 150 gallon and 500 bucks I shouldn't have even bought the tank lol!
The sweet *** hob skimmers the tank came with! Needless to say I got one running at one point in time it randomly flooded the kitchen 2 times. Uh the wife was not happy.
Here's the light I bought! Hahaha all I could afford. Yup 36 watts of power pretty serious. Btw this is light I'm still running for the moment. My reef radiance pro 240 is being built right now. Super excited for that sucker to show up. Since my tank basically has no light at all.
So the tank came with like 20 lbs of what I would call rubble and 40 lbs of crushed coral ..... I think. Anyways I washed and bleached the heck out of the stuff and bought 40 lbs of "live sand" from the lfs. Think it's Hawaiian black Idk. But I did what I could.
It pretty much ran like this for 3 months than I spent some money here and there on about 70 more pounds of rock. Added maybe 20 blue legs a six line wrasse which jumped out. A fox face, humu humu trigger, and a clown trigger. Since the six line jumped I added a malanarus wrasse but the humu was beating it up so he's gone! Took the trade and grabbed a purple tang cause they had a 20% off live stock sale. Yah alot of $ for me to spend with the tank not ready but the wife liked the fish and I figured what the heck!
Can u see the pictures of that light? I can't on here. Idk what I did. Yah I could hear that light up stairs while watching TV. Scarey how people ran them is crazy.
I added a couple of the 1200 gph koralia to the tank in the first couple months also. @ that point in time I realized the wife was prego ago so tank sat for like 8 months with nothing new. I probably had only done 3 water changes over this time frame. No idea how things stayed alive.
At this point I had flooded the kitchen with the hob skimmer that I was trying to run..... so we were both mad and I went to the lfs bought this bad boy! Yup I put it right in that wet dry bio ball sump! Oh gawd trying to add Rodi twice a day to keep the skimmer running kinda. Was a pain in the butt!