150g Mixed Reef

emilybell1 · Oct 3, 2021

Hi! Better late than never, my tank is a little over a year old and going great so far. Definitely have had some major hurdles but recently has really stabilized and I’m super happy with it. It’s a 150g mixed reef that is pretty heavily stocked. I bought the whole set up used and it came with a wet/dry sump. I removed the bioballs and put in two marine pure blocks, have a refugium with chaeto, oversized reef octopus skimmer, brs dual carbon/gfo reactor, and tunze ato. Hoping to get a doser in the future but manually dosing for now. Started with softies and then went on to lps. Once those were doing well, I got some easy sps and have just moved on to acros! I was super lucky and won a couple of acro frags and when they didn’t immediately die, I picked up a few more to try. So far I’m getting good pe and they are encrusting so I’m really hoping they continue to do well! Looking forward to continuing to learn more about this awesome hobby!

blaxsun · Oct 3, 2021

Looking good!

emilybell1 · Oct 4, 2021

I thought since I’m so late on getting this started, I would backtrack a little and share how this tank got started! We used to keep freshwater tanks when I was a kid and I always loved them so much so have always wanted to get back into them as an adult. I’m in the military now and convinced our CO to let me keep a fish tank in my stateroom while I was on my last sea assignment. I tried to find something with a lid, of course, and ended up ordering a biocube 16 thinking an aio coupled with the hood would prevent too much wayward splashing. I also knew I wanted to get into saltwater once I made it to my land assignment. I kept this tank freshwater to make it simpler. I can’t seem to track down any pictures of when it was freshwater but just picture a biocube on a boat. It was a big hit on the ship and a real morale booster. I had to take the tank down when we went into the shipyard for drydock but put my biocube into storage with my other stuff to resurface when I moved. Once I made it to Florida, I started back up the biocube but saltwater this time! I used liverock from a lfs and had a pair of clowns and fire fish. This is where the story starts to go downhill. We wanted to add a watchman goby and after adding him all of our fish broke out in ich. I didn’t really know about quarantining at the time and had just added all the fish. After tons of research and feeling horrible that our new pets were sick we decided we would have to get a hospital tank, treat our fish, and run our biocube fallow for 76 days. The watchman didn’t make it but the rest of the fish were transferred to a 20g quarantine and treated with copper and prazipro according to humble fish instructions. In this time we decided to go ahead and upgrade! I found our current setup with everything except the plumbing, power heads, and livestock/rock.

emilybell1 · Oct 5, 2021

Our new tank needed a good amount of cleaning. We bought it from an aquarium builder in Miami whose client decided to go with a bigger tank and it had been sitting in his shop for a while. There were vermetid snail remains all over the overflows and the sump, return pump, and skimmer were pretty grimy. We cleaned everything up with vinegar and got to work on plumbing. This was our first time plumbing a tank so I think we watched every YouTube video known to man on it. We settled on flexible tubing and schedule 80 fittings that we ordered from BRS. We stuck with the skimmer even though it was only rated for, I think, 80 gallons and knew we would upgrade when we felt like it wasn’t keeping up anymore. The return pump is a current eflux 6011 that has worked really well for us.

emilybell1 · Oct 5, 2021

blaxsun said:
Looking good!

Thank you!

emilybell1 · Oct 5, 2021

Decided to go with caribsea liferock for this tank to try to get some beneficial bacteria without the hitchhikers. Our biocube had just about every type you could imagine including a rogue pistol shrimp that killed several fish. Also chose caribsea special grade for the sand and added some Dr. Tim’s. We used ammonia to feed our cycle and waited until the end of our 45 day treatment period in our quarantine tank to add our fish!

emilybell1 · Oct 6, 2021

We’re using 4 marsaqua black boxes currently to light the tank, they came with it. Would love to upgrade the lights but that’s not in the plans right now. For our water, we have an aqua fx barracuda 5 stage rodi filter. We usually make about 45 gallons at a time and store the rodi in a brute container. We originally started using hw marine mix reefer but found that magnesium was testing through the roof. After 2 boxes of that we switched over to reef crystals and that’s what we’ve been using now for the last 8 months or so. Our first 3 fish were finally added in September of 2020!

emilybell1 · Oct 6, 2021

Also welcomed a new aquarium assistant to the family around this time!

emilybell1 · Oct 8, 2021

Next we added a few wrasse. A mccosker’s and carpenter’s flasher and solorensis fairy. The carpenter was really going after the mccosker’s even though the mccosker’s (Kevin Costner) was much larger and male. The mirror trick worked great and they haven’t had any problems since. We also added our first coral! A pulsing Xenia. We started a battle with gha around this time as well. I’ve added a photo of our sump at this point as well, we kept this set up for months after getting the tank established.