4th Floor Fish Tank

AlgaeCleaner · Sep 28, 2017

Hello, I am starting this tread to show our Reefer 450 build.

It all started with a used 20G Nano tank that my girlfriend bought after we had discussed how much maintenance i needed to be involved in if she got a saltwater tank. It took maybe 2 days and I was hooked. The possibility to really go deep in a hobby always intrigues me, the higher the complexity the better! Here's what the nano looked like after lite more than a year.

So after a year of sharing this hobby and improving our 20G, we decided that it was time to plan for a bigger tank. First we were looking into order a custom built tank (or maybe 2?), but we also looked at the Red Sea Reefer series. They are very nice tanks and when I found a used 450 for sale to a really good price we decided to go for it.

However... we live in an apartment building, forth floor, three stairs up. With no elevator. So first thing to do was check with the building manager, asking strange questions like "what is the floor construction made of?", "is that wall load bearing?" etc. He looked a little bit confused before i explained that i was worried about my aquarium that was going to be "a couple of hundred liters or so...".

But the floor is solid concrete below the parquet flooring, and we decided to place the Reefer up against a load bearing wall. The next issue was to carry a Reefer 450 up three stairs with 4 people. Really nice with good friends, but when one of them arrived he said "Wait... ?! What have I agreed to?!"

We managed to get it up in one piece, and it was put into place. Our 2 fishes in our 20 G did take a good look at it, but it is still some time until they will swim around in their new home.

So, after that we started making some modifications to the cabinet. Most of these were decided on after reading Broadfields "Show Off and Discuss Your Red Sea Reefer Series" thread, everyone contributing in that thread have made it to a really good source of ideas!

And finally, the aquascape was done and we are now cycling the tank.

I will continue to update with what we are doing! Happy Reefing!

Broadfield · Sep 28, 2017

Looking great so far!

Dsnakes · Sep 28, 2017

This is going to be a cool build. I haven't seen a scape with pillars like that before. What are you plans for corals? Maybe some montis growing off the sides of pillars?

Daniel@R2R · Sep 29, 2017

Dsnakes said:
This is going to be a cool build. I haven't seen a scape with pillars like that before.

I was thinking the same thing! Love this scape!

AlgaeCleaner · Sep 30, 2017

Broadfield said:
Looking great so far!

Dsnakes said:
This is going to be a cool build. I haven't seen a scape with pillars like that before. What are you plans for corals? Maybe some montis growing off the sides of pillars?

mdbannister said:
I was thinking the same thing! Love this scape!

Thanks for your comments! Really appreciate it!

Yes, you read our mind, we are hoping to create shelf's of monti growing between the rocks.

It is actually one stone pillar in the scape. The other two that one can see is standing shelf rock.

Our original idea for the scape was to have standing reef branches in one part of the tank, something similar to a forest, with different corals such as monti, starpolyps and pulsing xenia. Unfortunately, we could not find any branches in the right size for this. We skipped that idea and instead bought shelf rock. Our original thought was to place them in layer on each other to create an interesting rock formation, and we did this to some extent, but we also placed some of them standing.

We also bought some dry live rock that we cemented into a stone pillar. It is about 45 cm high with a small overhang in the bottom.

From the old tank we had live rock, so it is about 60 % dry rock and 40 % live rock used in the scape. Some of this we did not cemented together but just stacked on each other.

The overall thought for the scape was to create a flow that felt natural. We do not want to have a pile of rocks place randomly in the tank. We tried to adhere to the golden rule when placing the rock in the tank. We spent many late nights dry fitting the rocks to see what we could create. A cardboard with the same size as the tank was used. It ended with that we returned a lot of rock to our LFS because it felt to crowded when using all the rock. This also gave us the chance to discard that rock that did not feel good in the scape.

As you can see, there's a lot of algae in the tank, the cleaning crew is working on it!

mr.Green · Oct 13, 2017

Nice! It seems like its cycling beautifully! Time to put the old livestock in soon?

What are your plans for stocking, are you going to go slow, or just fill it up with frags as soon as possible?

psidriven · Oct 13, 2017

really like the scape, very unique. any pix of the sump set up?

AlgaeCleaner · Dec 18, 2017

Hello again.

Much has happened since the last update. The tank is doing fine. The snails are working on the algae issue, we were also chipping in with a toothbrush and added NoPox to limit the algae. And now we have stopped with the NoPox and the algae is under control.

1 month ago we bought our first new fishes for the tank. A Midas Blenny and a Yellow Eye Cold Tang. We put them in QT. The Blenny looked alright, a bit shy but very interested in food. The Tang on the other hand... All seemed alright with it in the beginning, it was around and exploring the tank and picking on the algae that we gave it. One early morning when it still was dark outside we looked at the fish with a flashlight, the tang was full of white spots. So, we thought it was ich. But it quickly went away and when we turned on the light that evening the fish started to twitch and act as if something annoyed them directly.

We immediately started a TTM if it was ich, . We also crated a post asking about this on R2R, and the answer we got was that it probably was velvet... This was something we didn't think on when preparing for QT. We got the suggestion on using CP, which we unfortunately can't get hold on were we live... Yes, copper also be used but we didn't have this available right then. The tang died later that same day.

The Midas Blenny survived in TTM with freshwater dips during 14 days until we got hold of Cupramine and are now in QT with the copper, still eating and looking healthy.

But back to the DT, it's looking good now since we have added all of our corals, inverts and fish from our 20 gallons. So much space! Our current livestock is:
- One male Emblemaria pandionis
- One Gobiodon okinawae (doing laps around the tank, still not believing how much room there is)
- One Pom Pom Crab
- And our corals: 3 Euphyllias (two hammers and one frogspawn), One Seriatopora caliendrum, 4 different Montiporas, 1 Gorgonian, 1 Caulastrea, 1 Toadstool mushroom leather coral and some small SPS frag survivors from the move. And also one big unidentified SPS.

AlgaeCleaner · Dec 18, 2017

psidriven said:
really like the scape, very unique. any pix of the sump set up?

Thanks! We are hoping that the scape will work and not fall over

. The sump is still "under construction", since we have not finished everything we want to do with it. We are using the ATO box as a refugium but still haven't decided on what light to put on it, using a temporary on in the meantime.

AlgaeCleaner · Dec 21, 2017

So, Benny (our Emblemaria, 2 years in our care) decided to try out a new hobby, carpet surfing, yesterday. Lucky for him, K arrived moments after the jump (unsure how long he was inspecting the floor) and found him. Apparently, he enjoyed laying on the floor because he did his best to bite K in the hand when she was trying to put him back in the water.

Long story short, he's back in the reefer and have calmed down. Eating well and seems to have forgot about his fondness of our floor. We also added an extra layer of net to the DIY screen top, so he can't get through in any way.

AlgaeCleaner · Jan 21, 2018

Time for a update!

As you can see, we are still trying to get the right flow without creating huge sandbanks with they Gyres.

Other things that happend, Aptasia was discovered! And now its gone ;Happy thanks to our three new peppermint shrimps that did a good job at exterminating them! Yey!!

We also got som new SPS for the tank, a Green Bali Slimer (A. yongei) and a Tricolor (A. valida). Hopefully they will enjoy their new tank and color up soon. The tank is now on Aquaforest three part dosing program and hopefully the dosing amount will soon be calibrated correctly so that all corals will be happy.

We bought some new fish that is still in the QT, two High Fin Gobys and one Ornate Leopard Wrasse. The wrasse was very thin when we bought her so we did not know if she would make it. But she was eager to eat both frozen food and live brine shrimp and we feed her 4-6 times each day. She has now gained som weight and has a nice fat belly so tomorrow they will move in to the DT!!

Our Midas Blenny has survived velvet and also it's copper treatment. So now it's swimming around and eating very well, awaiting final approval to be put into the DT (still a week or two left until we can be completely sure).

And as a final, a picture of the Toadstool. Happy reefing!