75 gallons of paradise

Clarinuto

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Better late than never.... decided it was time to start a build thread! 75 gallons of newbie reef, up and running for 8 months now. Planning for the reef started officially a year ago now when we still had only a FOWLR and I had never even heard of reef2reef! We had a rough start, trying to use dry rock with misguided advice that resulted in a very stinky first floor of the house. No harm no foul besides a wife that was less than amused. Dry rock ended up cycling in a rubber made and live rock was purchased for the tank. Wife was happy and house no longer smelled like a dead beach. Wins for all.

Due to my phone taking a dive into some water, some of the early footage is no more, but our fowlr would eventually leak and we would be thankful to have a cycled tank in late 2018 where we could move our little inhabitants over. Much biospira was used in the process as I was very worried about increasing the bioload too quickly but everything went well.

I can’t for the life of me get good pictures of my faster fish my with phone so pics of my wrasse and coral beauty are terrible or just may not be included, but maybe someone will give me pointers. [emoji4]

Reef is maintained using small fuge, reef octopus skimmer, occasionally running gfo and carbon, Hydor Koralia 3rd gen pumps, Kessil a360wes, very regular water changes, and consistently adding new clean up crew as Wally the melanarus wrasse loves to keep the crew to a minimum [emoji6]

I’ve been lucky to only lose a couple corals. 2 euphyllia (a hammer and a frogspawn) due to a heater failure early on and one torch that I still do not understand. Torch receded and died. Torch died a few months ago now. Everything else in the tank is still doing well. Wish I understood what happened with the torch. Maybe I overloved it. It was my favorite torch (don’t tell the others) so I was pretty bummed about it.


Pics to follow. (Blue tank background are older pics. Black background was updated late fall 2018)
 
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Big G

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Great post! Consider starting a "Build Thread" in the "Members Tanks" section. It's a nice place to save those photos in case the next phone . . . goes south on you. ;)
 
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Clarinuto

Clarinuto

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Clarinuto

Clarinuto

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Great post! Consider starting a "Build Thread" in the "Members Tanks" section. It's a nice place to save those photos in case the next phone . . . goes south on you. ;)

Uh oh. I thought I posted it in the Members Tanks section haha. I will look into that. Err umm oops. :)
 

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Uh oh. I thought I posted it in the Members Tanks section haha. I will look into that. Err umm oops. :)
Noop. You are good. I didn't glance at the header. Sorry for the confusion.

Beautiful pictures. What did you use to take such nice photos?
 
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Clarinuto

Clarinuto

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Noop. You are good. I didn't glance at the header. Sorry for the confusion.

Beautiful pictures. What did you use to take such nice photos?

Thank you! I use an iPhone 7 with the polyp lab coral view yellow lens under Kessils. I try to take pictures when using the most whites (which I only max at 45%) and doing that with the yellow lens seems to do the trick. I’ve tried the orange lens under blues and never get the gorgeous pics I see others get. Not sure why :)
 

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Thank you! I use an iPhone 7 with the polyp lab coral view yellow lens under Kessils. I try to take pictures when using the most whites (which I only max at 45%) and doing that with the yellow lens seems to do the trick. I’ve tried the orange lens under blues and never get the gorgeous pics I see others get. Not sure why :)
No, thank you. I really like how your photos look. Just put the Polyp Lab Coral View in my shopping cart. Thanks again!
 
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Clarinuto

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Hello friends after a very long break! Shortly after my last post in this thread I had some serious health issues which resulted in a near total tank crash. I basically all of my coral and several of my fish over the course of a couple months. I was ready to give up entirely after that, but my wife convinced me not to give up!

Over the past year and a half I have been slowly turning around a tank I thought would never be okay again.

The only remaining coral I had was a green bubble that despite everything was still alive and happy. This gave me the courage to try adding coral again. I waited until about 6 months ago to add coral and to my surprise they didn’t die.

I now have an aquarium that I am feeling increasingly proud of and I wait like a kid every morning for the lights to turn on again.
 
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Clarinuto

Clarinuto

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What happened to the tank specifically? Efforts to control an algae outbreak turned into dynos. A three day blackout to control the Dino’s stressed out my fish majorly and induced a disease outbreak that killed several of my fish.

I am happy to say that many of them did make it through that trying time: my melanurus wrasse, coral beauty angel, ocellaris clown, and a yellow clown goby.
 
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Clarinuto

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Over the past almost year, I’ve added a flame hawk, tail spot blenny, neon blue goby.

I am that person who thinks of their fish as their pet and names them all affectionately.

Wally the Mel. Wrasse
Cora the coral beauty angel
Petey the ycg
Benny the tailspot blenny
Finn the flame hawkfish
Frankie the oc. Clown

the neon blue goby hasn’t been named yet :)
 
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Clarinuto

Clarinuto

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I’ve invested in the tank wildly which I am not sure my wife is super thrilled about

The apex, my most expensive addition, saved us an even larger disaster though. One week ago I woke up to the apex sending me all sorts of alarms. I went downstairs to find my tank leaking all over the floor and all of my equipment off.

probably 10 or 15 gallons of water was dumped by the time I figured it out

it was bad but it could have been much worse if the apex hadn’t alerted me to what was happening. My fish and corals likely would have died from lack of oxygen

it took 16 hours that day to move everyone to 2 20 gallon longs, drain the main display and move out the tank, go to several local petstores to get a new tank, set it up and move everyone over again.

surprisingly everyone seems to be doing pretty well and only a couple corals are doing a little worse for the wear.

the good news out of all of this was that my previous tank was coated in coralline algae on all sides and I had worked on removing all of it from the front panel but was still slowly chipping away at the remaining three sides.
Then this happened and now I magically have clean glass. Much easier to maintain clean glass than try to remove years of coralline buildup. Whoo hoo!
 
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Clarinuto

Clarinuto

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I will post some pics of the tank later but wanted to catch up my thread with the excitement of the past year and a half first!
 

vetteguy53081

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Very nice pics !!
 
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