100 gal IM Mangrove Bonsai Reef

[Rubymoon286]

Build and Move day! I moved my smaller systems out of the living room to make room for the hundred gallon and am in the process of updating my wfh space. Once things get rocking and rolling, this tank will be my background for any zoom calls that I need to make Pardon the clutter - it's still a work in progress. Tank will go up later this week or early next week when I have extra hands to help me lift it and I'll have my curtains back up soon too so the window won't be as glaring (I took the opportunity of not having my 20 reef and refugium against that window to wash the curtains finally)

 

[V A R I A N T]

Good luck on the build. One thing to watch for; I had a 100g tank behind my wfh setup and found the refresh rate between the camera and LED lights conflicted. You could actually see flickering of the LEDs in my calls. If this happens, try a shade on your lights or try to adjust the fps of your camera (assuming it allows for this).

 

[Rubymoon286]

Good luck on the build. One thing to watch for; I had a 100g tank behind my wfh setup and found the refresh rate between the camera and LED lights conflicted. You could actually see flickering of the LEDs in my calls. If this happens, try a shade on your lights or try to adjust the fps of your camera (assuming it allows for this).

I'll keep an eye on that! My last set up had my planted Betta tank directly behind me with my blues offset from my camera, but didn't run into any issues, this will be my first time with the light directly behind me though, so I'll be sure to test it out before I actually have to take a video call

 

[Koichie]

Excited to see your bonsai reef design!

 

[Rubymoon286]

Excited to see your bonsai reef design!

Thanks! The rock isn't going to be the bonsai in the tank, but rather I plan to grow and shape my mangroves as bonsai, so it will likely be a little while before the ramification of my trees happens, but I'm certainly excited to see how it goes!

 

[Rubymoon286]

Got the tank on the stand finally and started organizing equipment - will do more with it tomorrow, including dust and clean my 5 gallon reservoir. I'll be plumbing and scaping this week as well and hopefully get enough salt water made to get water going. I don't plan to turn on the lights for a bit outside of the mangrove grow light to get the trees going. Lot to do, but glad things are finally moving!

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Tank looks great on the stand!!!

 

[John Bolden]

Following!

 

[Rubymoon286]

Did a little bit more work this week - and just got my plumbing all glued together. I might come back and swap the emergency overflow to a 45* instead of a 90* but hopefully it's one of those rarely used features. This is my first Bean Animal plumbing job, and I decided to do 45s on the return to reduce drag (sadly I made this call last minute and couldn't find any schedule 80 45s locally) But I'm quite happy with how it came out. I also left myself a nice section of pipe to add future manifolds in the return line.

I'm still waiting on about fifty more pounds of rock - but I started working on my initial scape concept. I plan to go higher near the front of the tank to give myself some good space to guide the mangrove roots. I will probably do two or three trees to begin with and see how it goes. I'm still trying to figure out how I'll control the root growth without taking up a ton of room for a seed tray or similar. Perhaps I'll get some shallow glass dishes and just stay vigilant on planting. One option is to commission some custom, unglazed ceramic pots which might be the way to go since it lets me control the type of clay used.

Tomorrow I'm building a board to hang the various electrical controllers to try to keep things neatly organized from the get go.

I would say today has been a productive one

 

[Rubymoon286]

The last two days have been filling the tank with RODI in preparation for salt water. I finally have water in the box and even made my very first arch out of rubble (weird what having a large tank lets you do!)

Will update with pictures of it once the sand is in and the water has had time to clear up - letting the salt water mix in tank overnight, and I also have made up a fresh 50 gallon brute of water. I'm realizing that I need to just build a mixing station, so that's gone on the todo list.

 

[Rubymoon286]

Final scape, waiting on lights to arrive, but my cycle seems to have stabilized I ended up scraping my original light idea, and went with Orphek bars with the new controller they just dropped. I'm excited by the claims they have, and will give me more options with what coral I end up keeping. I went with 2 reef day, 2 blues, and 2 uv, I may add two more bars in the future but for now that's what I am going with.

 

[Rubymoon286]

Poked around a bit more today - did some cable management and built a board for all of my controllers. it's not perfect but definitely better than we were at!

 

[Rubymoon286]

Reworked the scape a bit, and added some softies - got some lovely feather dusters on the midnight daisy rock I got, and quite pleased with things overall - bonus photo bomb from a clown fish. Happy Monday!

 

[Rubymoon286]

And some corals during my ramp down period - very happy with how they are acclimating

 

[Rubymoon286]

I'm in hair algae hell right now - tomorrow is be water change day, and installing my auto water changer. Curtains are also fnially going back up to block the sunlight from the door.

 

[Rubymoon286]

A new update on the other end of an Ostreopsis outbreak. Still got a little in the tank, but we are definitely winning the fight. It's gone from all over all of the rock to concentrated on one rock which is due to be scrubbed today. I used a combo of Dr. Tims, taking my skimmer cup off, Hydrogen peroxide dosing, and a three day blackout (rather than 5, following the Dr. Tim's recommendation. You can see that most of the dinos are concentrated on that front arch from the end of the tank in the middle picture. I will also likely take better photos after we do some more manual removal using my yellow filter.

Sadly my mangroves didn't take, so I'm working to get the chemistry stable again before adding two more, and the plan with the other two is to get at least one older one rather than two props and I'm going to use one of my indoor plant lights to spotlight them since it'll be a while before my tropical bonsai outside have to come in for the winter If that seems to give a better spectrum for the trees, I'll order one for it specifically.

Phosphate is no longer hitting zero overnight, and is on track, nitrates are still very low, but also raising steadily. I'm gonna just keep on trucking through!

 

[OneZenReefer]

Thanks! The rock isn't going to be the bonsai in the tank, but rather I plan to grow and shape my mangroves as bonsai, so it will likely be a little while before the ramification of my trees happens, but I'm certainly excited to see how it goes!

I am super excited to see this. Also, we actually have many bonsai.

 

[rantipole]

So cool! When I eventually set up a big tank in the dining room, I want to have a mangrove. Good luck and I can't wait to see this develop!

Cheers,
rant

 

[Lebowski_]

Looking great. I think I see some Red People Eater Zoas, one of my favourites.

 

[Rubymoon286]

For those interested, here are a few of my trees - there's a lot in common between Bonsai and reefing including patience and slow steps being key.

For my mangroves, I plan on directing the trees towards the back filtration and up so I'm not shading corals too much.