Hey everyone first i would like to say man i have been on a journey already in this hobby from aptasia to disappearing fish man. But i think I’m starting to get to where i wanna be. But lets start this build thread with some interesting stuff. So i started my 200 build in 2019 perviously i had a 65 but obviously i went bigger within the year.
Let me tell y’all i fell in love with the tank it turned into my baby and once the cycle started i was up and moving!!!
Well fast forward a month later and i have a couple of coral i moved my clownfish and yellow tang into the big boy tank. The yellow loved the extra space!!
As you can see in the photo i was nieve and didn’t know how fast these corals grew. Well add in green star polyps and you have a recipe for disaster. For months i would be battling this Xenia colony as they would split and create new colonies everywhere. Then the catastrophe came. A aptasia. Not bad tbh normally you just stick some glue on and battle then one at a time. But i was getting all my info from one lfs one of the new workers told me it was an anemone which is technically true so i just left it alone. BIG MISTAKE. This little anemone took over the tank. Literally.
Well finally I had to do something about it so i did. I went and bought all new live rock new sand and started the process.
So finally I drained the tank put all my fish in these large storage bins with old sand and live rock and started draining. I filled the tank up with tap water poured about 2 gallons of bleach to kill literally anything in the and ran it for about an hour. Nothing too crazy. Then I drained it refilled it and drained it again. Finally I filled it with ro water use a whole bottle of prime and drained it a third time to make sure there was no bleach residue. Finally for the last time I filled it back up with fresh saltwater and placed my rocks and sand and started the tank up proper with some turbo start.
this is a picture about 3 weeks after setup. All fish were added and everything was all good. Even put a hammer in!! But unfortunately I ran into some large algae issues.
Luckily some manual removal cleanup crew and some water changes fixed it right up. And now we are at present day. Where currently I am battling high nitrate and phosphate readings.
Thank you all for reading this much if you got this far I will be posting regular updates on the tank as it progresses!! This took me a long time to type out and get all the pics holy crap.
Let me tell y’all i fell in love with the tank it turned into my baby and once the cycle started i was up and moving!!!
Well fast forward a month later and i have a couple of coral i moved my clownfish and yellow tang into the big boy tank. The yellow loved the extra space!!
As you can see in the photo i was nieve and didn’t know how fast these corals grew. Well add in green star polyps and you have a recipe for disaster. For months i would be battling this Xenia colony as they would split and create new colonies everywhere. Then the catastrophe came. A aptasia. Not bad tbh normally you just stick some glue on and battle then one at a time. But i was getting all my info from one lfs one of the new workers told me it was an anemone which is technically true so i just left it alone. BIG MISTAKE. This little anemone took over the tank. Literally.
Well finally I had to do something about it so i did. I went and bought all new live rock new sand and started the process.
So finally I drained the tank put all my fish in these large storage bins with old sand and live rock and started draining. I filled the tank up with tap water poured about 2 gallons of bleach to kill literally anything in the and ran it for about an hour. Nothing too crazy. Then I drained it refilled it and drained it again. Finally I filled it with ro water use a whole bottle of prime and drained it a third time to make sure there was no bleach residue. Finally for the last time I filled it back up with fresh saltwater and placed my rocks and sand and started the tank up proper with some turbo start.
this is a picture about 3 weeks after setup. All fish were added and everything was all good. Even put a hammer in!! But unfortunately I ran into some large algae issues.
Luckily some manual removal cleanup crew and some water changes fixed it right up. And now we are at present day. Where currently I am battling high nitrate and phosphate readings.
Thank you all for reading this much if you got this far I will be posting regular updates on the tank as it progresses!! This took me a long time to type out and get all the pics holy crap.
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