525xl Salty Goodness Rebooted

Victay

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I meant to start a build thread when I upgraded to my 525 xl nearly 3 years ago. I've had some ups and downs and at one point considered packing it all in as my interest in the reefing hobby waned. It's already had one reboot and will be coming up for another reboot in a few months time. The impending reboot seems to have rekindled my enthusiasm and this time I am determined to make a proper go of it. No more half arsing this hobby, only whole arsing from now on.

A bit of background catching up to do first though. I'll follow up with a few more posts to cover some of the drama I have had until the latest issue that is prompting the 2nd reboot.

Some Backstory
It all started with looking after the office goldfish which progressed into me getting my own tropical fresh water tank (33 Gallon Liter Juwel Rio) and dreaming of having a beautiful high tech planted tank one day.

Then I got a nano saltwater tank (5 gallon Fluval) which predictably resulted in the fresh water fishies being evicted from their tank soon thereafter and the Juwel being converted to a saltwater tank.

The Nano.JPG

Fluval Spec circa 2014 with Pepper and Tony
I had reasonable success with this tank with just enough effort to make it interesting without being in the too hard basket. No testing, no dosing, just some clowns and some hardy corals and fortnightly water changes.

The tank stagnated a bit while I was working in Fiji for a couple months and then knowing an upgrade to a much bigger tank was on the horizon coupled with an epic overseas motorcycling trip meant I didn't pay too much attention to it and did bare minimum.

Juwel.jpg

Juwel Rio circa 2018 went bare bottom to help with maintenance while away on trips, but never liked the look
Finally, the day came when I upgraded to a reefer 525xl. I had convinced my partner that a bigger tank would be so much easier to maintain and we could add so many more fish. He was easy to convince. The shiny rimless tank just looked so much nicer than my modified Juwel tank and I was looking forward to putting it all together.
That brings us up to early 2019. I'll cover the 525 build and early days in the next post.
525 empty.JPG

Fish looking forward to their larger home- Red Sea Reefer 525 XL circa early 2019
 
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Victay

Victay

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Sometimes I think reading and researching this hobby is almost as rewarding as doing the actual hobby. And the equipment.....oh the equipment. Can't tell you how much I love looking at pictures of people's sumps.

Equipment - Initial Build
Deltec 1000i skimmer
2 x 200W Eheim Jagers heaters
3 x AI Hydra 26 mounted on DD slimline brackets
2 x Maxspect Gyre XF250 wave makers
2x Avast marine spyglass reactor- only one ever used
Neptune Cor20 main return pump
2 x Brightwell Bio blocks in the sump

Of course, the first thing I realised after the tank had been delivered was that the floor and walls of our brand new house were not level or straight. The 525 didn't come with adjustable leveling feet, so it took a while to add feet and get the tank properly leveled.

Not level.JPG
Not good enough
So Many Feet.JPG

So many feet.

The manifold was next. Two offtakes were added to be able to plumb in two separate Avast Marine Spyglass Reactors. I liked the idea of reducing the number of separate pumps and the spyglasses seemed like an easier option to remove for maintenance.

DIY.JPG

Plumbing
In retrospect, I only ever used one reactor for GFO, and I found if I opened the valve to the reactor it messed up the equilibrium with the return pump, and the Red Sea diaphragm valve would need adjusting again. I landed up just keeping the offtake to the reactor open and removing the media when not needed, but then I just had to deal with salt creep. Love the idea of the Spyglass, but the reactor never really sat nice and level. I have mixed feelings about it.

I'm not sure I would go the manifold route again unless I added a solenoid valve and flow sensors on them so I can control the flow better. A better option would be a separate manifold with its own controllable pump and offtakes, recirculating within the central compartment, so no fluctuations to the return pump chamber water level (which affects the ATO)
Clean Sump.JPG

Shiny Sump

I went with a Cor 20 pump as I wanted a Neptune controller eventually. I think I should have set the pump a little further back than what I did. By sticking it right in the middle, there is less space for the Neptune ATK float valve, probes and dosing lines. Maybe some 45 bends instead of the 90s as well. I find for the most part the pump behaves, but you can hear air getting stuck in the high points after starting it back up and it causes a bit of vibration noise.

Look at how clean that sump is. Next sump I do will have space for a refugium. I've seen others add white vinyl beneath and behind the sump, and regret not doing that before installing it.

Fisrst Scape.JPG

First Scape


Equipment that has since been added or swapped out

ATO

I stuck with the stock ATO for ages before finally getting fed up and adding a 60L (~150gallon) external barrel and reusing my Tunze nano from the old tank. It worked much better. I later swapped out the Tunze for the Neptune ATK, just because.

Neptune Apex and DOS added sometime mid 2020
I detest the form factor of the Neptune gear. It looks like a 5 year old has designed it. I actually wanted to go with the much sleeker looking GHL, but at the time, no one was bringing them in to New Zealand whereas Neptune had a local distributor. For such a big-ticket item, I didn't want to risk not having local support. The local importer has since started distributing the GHL as well and as much as I still want the prettier gear, I'm too heavily invested in the Apex stuff and to be honest I don't use all of its functionality anyway.

KLIR Filter
About to be added Nov 2021

Eheim UV
I added a Jebau 36W unit during the the great Dino Apocalypse (more to come about that later). It crapped out after a year of on-off use. Bought an Eheim to replace it, but I have mixed feelings about its usefulness, so it isn't getting much use, Particularly as my skimmer seems to stop skimming when it gets turned on. Something about the way I have routed the UV discharge.

Heaters
2 x 200 W swapped out for a 300W and 200W. 400W struggled a bit during winter.


Filling Up.JPG

Filling Up
I love when a tank is first set up. Everything is so clean and shiny. The sand and the rock so bright and algae free. I was chuffed with the aquascape too. No walls of rock for me. Would love to do a negative space scape next time.
 
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Victay

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New Fish


525.JPG

Full tank shot Feb 2019

I added a beautiful coral beauty that we named SeaBee. It had been years since I had added a new fish and I was lulled into a sense of security as it came from a reputable fish store and would have been in quarantine for a while there. You can guess where this is going...


cb.jpg

Coral beauty

She started acting a bit weird after a few days and had a cloudy eye...and then a bit of an iffy fin. Fortunately I still had the old Juwel tank so was able to turn it into an impromptu hospital tank and quarantine my beautiful girl while we figured out what was wrong. This was my first encounter with a properly diseased fish. The previous Jewel had hosted my two clowns, a dartfish that hid from the beginning and suddenly died a week after adding it and a six line wrasse that died from some sort of tumour/bowel explosion.

The internet told me to do a freshwater dip. This was more unpleasant for me than the fish, but confirmed flukes. It was so bizarre putting a salt water fish into fresh water and seeing these huge parasites just popping off of her. Stupid fish had a fine time in the fresh water and even ate one of the flukes. Totally unfazed and perked right up in the quarantine tank after.



The clowns were super ticked that they had to go through a dip too just in case. They did not react as well as the CB and I thought Pepper was a gonner, but she perked back up. A round of parasite treatment for the main tank and CB was put into her hospital tank for additional treatment and recovery. I was so annoyed by this experience but it taught me not to trust anyone when it comes to livestock and I went out and got some small tanks for quarantining any future additions.

SeaBee had quite a bit of character, she started getting a bit aggressive with the clowns but Pepper held her own and established that this was her tank and always will be.She also decided to try nipping my acans, but after putting the acans under some cages for a week, she got the message and left them alone from then on.

Living in New Zealand the reefing hobby is an expensive one. Many of the fish, corals and equipment that we see the interwebs just aren't available here (small market, costly and restrictive imports). It's gotten considerably better in the last maybe 2 years with more regular fish imports, but of course, Covid is stuffing that all up again. Clean up crews are difficult to come by. A few snails and hermit crabs are about it. Unfortunately, I am the main cleanup crew. I've heard of people collecting snails from the local rock pools and acclimating them, but it sounds like they don't last too long.

I live in the south island. There is one shop that specializes in saltwater in my town and they very very rarely have livestock. A new importer was starting to import fish and corals regularly and they also did same day airfreight from Auckland. Telling my coworkers I had to leave early to pick up my fish from the airport always got me a few odd looks. For a while our dining room was basically one large fish room with tanks, water salt equipment and fish everywhere.


fish delivery.jpg

Fish Delivery

A few more fish were added....after sitting in their own quarantine tanks for a few weeks prior. The dining room became a semi permanent fish room.

Fish
I tend to name all my fish, and sex them randomly

Pepper and Tony (Black and White Ocelaris))
SeaBee (Coral Beauty)
Spock (Blue Tang)
Morse (Diamond Spotted Sleeper Goby)
Princess Buttercup (Royal Gramma)
2x Hermit Crabs
3 x Turbo Snails
2x cleaner shrimp

spock.jpg

Spock

 
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Victay

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Fishpocalypse

Things were going awesome. I had pretty fish, corals, fancy Neptune equipment, it was awesome...until it suddenly wasn't. Remember how I said I was so diligent with my maintenance and water changes. Turns out that is not always a good thing.
From This.JPG

Aaah so pretty

I had a large tank, a few small fish, apparently perfect water parameters with zero nitrates and phosphates. Yeah I had algae on my rocks and a fair amount of algae too, but zero nitrates and phosphates meant everything was good right?

Odd-looking algae on the sand started appearing, I thought it was cyano at first. Then came the deaths of snails and shrimps. The corals were OK, but I had a serious vermited snail problem. The goby refused to sift any of the sand anymore, and my clowns looked a bit unhappy. The tank looked crap and it took ages to figure out it was Dinos.

Looking back now on my testing results. I basically had zero phosphates and nitrates from February 2019 when the tank was cycled till this photo was taken in October 2019.

To this.jpg

So ugly
Ugh.jpg

Ugh2.jpg


I pulled the clowns out to treat for what I thought was some kind of bacterial infection which I now realise was definitely some sort of reaction to the dinos.

Sick Clowns.JPG

Weird white stripes in the clown fish . Skin also had a whitish coating

I didn't have a microscope at the time, but managed to confirm it was dinos based on descriptions of it getting worse after water changes and a few other key indicators. I tried stopping water changes, feeding more, partial blackout. To be honest I was a little overwhelmed and like most people wanted to see some positive results.

After a lot of reading up, I started the elegance corals regime. It did not go according to plan.
Vodka.jpg

I was not diligent in watching my PH levels which dropped very low during the night. It was heart-wrenching pulling these guys out knowing I had effectively murdered them with my ineptitude.

Sad.jpg


I only had my two clowns and the two new fish that were still in quarantine (melanaurus wrasse and kole tang - Ron and Tammy)
Mess.jpg

I tried a few more times to eradicate the dinos over the course of a few months, but nothing really worked effectively and my corals were starting to deteriorate. The huge frogspawn and candy cane colonies in particular. In March 2020 I decided a re-boot was in order.
 
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Victay

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Reboot No. 1

With corals and fish all in quarantine tanks, I nuked the tank with bleach. Then pulled everything out and scrubbed it clean and left it to dry for a few weeks.


cleanup.jpg

House in a complete mess

I ditched the sand, but kept the rock and had it in tubs of bleach for a week or so, before rinsing it out over the course of a few more weeks and letting dry out completely for even more weeks.

rocks.jpg

Cleaning rocks

I re-used the rock and took the opportunity to change up the scape a little. In retrospect, I don't know why I re-used the rock. Laziness, cheapness? It got rinsed very thoroughly, but I can't shake a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I should have started completely fresh.


reboot.jpg

Improved scape


coral qt1.jpg

Coral lifeboat 1

coral qt2.jpg

Coral Lifeboat 2

I didn't do a very good job of maintaining my coral lifeboats. The acan, elegance and bubble coral came out fine. The candy canes and frogspawn just dwindled down to nothing. Their skeletons were absolutely covered in vermited snails and seemed very fragile. The purple candy cane, doughnut and lobo survived, but were just not happy in the new tank. I'm guessing it was just too much stress and they also started to die off.

Added a few more fish, some of which were replacements for the ones that died. Their personalities are so much different from the originals. SeaBee2 is more timid than her original and the electric blue stripes have never really developed. Spock 2 is the opposite. A bit of a teenage jerk now. And Morse doesn't build the sandcastles like the first one.

I bought the tiniest foxface (Foxy loxy) and an even tinier hawkfish(Bob)

camo PJ.JPG

Foxy Loxy showing off her camo PJs. An amazing colour change ability.


Spock and Foxyloxy.JPG


bob.JPG
coral qt1.jpg
 
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Victay

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The Next Big Disaster

So Reboot #1 was back in April 2020. I can't say I've been a terribly good reefer since then. Nitrates climbed pretty high and I was petrified of using carbon or bottoming out phosphates. Bought a few impulse fish, but luckily realised my mistake before putting them in the display.

Best addition by far has been Kevin, the yellow spotted boxfish. Such an awesome fish. I was reluctant about getting one again as the first one I had tried a year ealier didn't make it to the display tank. My other half absolutely loves this fish and he has been a fantastic addition (still doing well over a year later). So much character. Eats like a pig, and none of the other fish seem to bother him, so not stressed at all.


Kevin Feb 2021.jpg

Kevin Feb 2021

Full Tank Shot  March 2021.jpg

Full tank shot March 2021

In October 2021, the next disaster hit. A bubble appeared in the silicone seal near the top of the tank. Fortunately I spotted it before it got too big. Red Sea Support was very quick to respond and within a day they had confimed that they would replace the entire tank under warranty.

Fantastic service! The downside? I live in New Zealand. No 525 reefers in the country, so my options were to either accept a downgrade to a 450 or wait 3+ months for a new shipment of tanks to come in.

I did not want to accept a smaller tank, so I settled in and prepared for a long wait.
Seam Failure October 2021.jpg

The bubble

Ratchet Straps.jpg

Neptune Orange ratchet straps to the top and bottom of the tank.
 

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