8+ Year Old 180

[Som1else]

Ive had this tank set up for roughly 8 years and thought that I'd share a few quick shots here.

The Display is 180 Gallons, with a 60 gallon sump tank thats 1/2 full and has a section for Chaeto and a SWC 200 Skimmer
Calcium and Alk are maintained by a GEO CaRx
Lights are 4x 400W MH with 20K bulbs
Controlled by 1st Gen Neptune Apex

Just about all of my coral with the exception of a few were started from frags.

FTS

Right Side

Center

Left Side (missing top part since my rack is in the way)

Some Top Down shots

Thats All for Now

 

[N-A-S-O]

Beautiful Tank!

 

[Wrasse-cal]

8 years! Impressive!

 

[cracker]

Nice tank ! Congrats on the longevity ! So Do tell us of any ups & downs over all the years. Also like the MH lights !

 

[AtlCPA]

Nice!

 

[sneub]

Take us through your journey with this tank.

 

[Som1else]

I am currently digging through old photos to try and dig out some of the build since everything is better with pictures.

 

[Ranjib]

This is awesome tank. You should submit an fts for tank of the month for thread, like right now

We don’t get to see an 8 year old tank very often. Thank you for sharing

 

[hybridazn]

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing!

 

[Som1else]

This is awesome tank. You should submit an fts for tank of the month for thread, like right now

We don’t get to see an 8 year old tank very often. Thank you for sharing

Thanks!

 

[Som1else]

This is my 4th reef aquarium. Here's a quick rundown of my setup timeline

2006-2007 50 Gallon Corner Acrylic

2007-2008 75 gallon Glass

2008-2010 120 Gallon Acrylic

2010-Present 180 Gallon Glass


From 2006-2007 I was just getting started in the hobby and had mostly Zoa's Palys, Mushrooms and an Anemone. I was soon made to realize that I needed better lighting and that a corner 50 was really going to limit what I could accomplish on that end so an upgrade was made.

Here is that first tank:

2007-2008 started with a 75 gallon tank, that was 4 feet long and allowed me to get my first T5 lights started. At the time people couldn’t believe that keeping SPS was possible with T5 lights but I was able to grow out a handful of my first SPS in this tank in addition to the softies that were transferred from the old 50 gallon.

This tank had a rock wall type aquascape that extended from the back wall down to the front of the aquarium. I really liked the look but there was one problem and that was that the tank was a little too narrow and as the corals grew out there was hardly any room for the fish to swim so again another upgrade was on the way.


The 75 at the end:

2008-2010

I bought a used acrylic 120 gallon tank before filling it up I went through the painstaking process of buffing out all of the scratches. It only took a few days but it was a lot of work. The lights were upgraded to HO T5’s and now there were a total of 8. I used ATI Bulbs in an equal combination of AquaBlue’s and Blue+ bulbs. I had also made a decision to change how I did my aqua scaping, Instead of another back wall I opted to create pillars of live rock. The main structure of the pillars were all drilled through so that they could be stacked over a ½” PVC stand. Then each of the rocks that made the pillar was drilled out all over the place so that smaller rocks and coral colonies could be pinned into place using small acrylic rods. This made it easy to move corals to other locations as they grew out. It also made them easy to pull out and frag and to dip for pests which at this point had never been a problem. In the end the tank still didn’t have the room I wanted and a 180gallon came up for sale that I couldn’t pass up.


The Acrylic 120:

2010-Present

This tank was set up with the same rock pillar and pinning Idea that I used in the 120. Its funny looking back at the pictures of when it was first set up because my colonies were still pretty small and others have been lost since then. But here it is when I first transferred things over.

The Beginning of the 180, I cant find a good center picture.

 

[Ranjib]

Very nice. Thank you for sharing

 

[nvert]

Congrats on a beautiful mature tank! Really nice job! I love the gsp backdrop. I've used gsp as a backdrop before and it looked almost as good as yours Thanks for sharing!

 

[BigJohnny]

Awesome! Do you still have sand in the 180? If so have you ever replaced it? What are your params like? What do you test? Have you ever done a triton test? Have you ever had a "crash" in the 8 years? Fire away my friend.

 

[rob G]

I only see one clownfish in there, I am sure there are a few more but certainly sparsely populated; to you feed your corals?

 

[rob G]

I only see one clownfish in there, I am sure there are a few more but certainly sparsely populated; to you feed your corals?

 

[rob G]

I only see one clownfish, I am sure there are a few more fish in there but certainly sparsely populated; do you feed your corals?

 

[Som1else]

Awesome! Do you still have sand in the 180? If so have you ever replaced it? What are your params like? What do you test? Have you ever done a triton test? Have you ever had a "crash" in the 8 years? Fire away my friend.

I cross my fingers every day but Ive never had a crash in any of my tanks. I test for CA and ALK if anything starts to look off but otherwise i don't really even check those very often. One time that I do make an effort is when I add new media to my Calcium reactor, because that is usually when I will recalibrate my PH probes, I have one in the tank and one in the reactor. I find that when I calibrate them, they tend to have a new reading that is offset from what it was right before i calibrated so it makes me have to adjust all my setting in the Apex to accommodate the shifts, so after doing all of that i will test over a few days to make sure its all working and my levels stay stable

Ive never felt the need for a triton test.

As for the sand, I had sand in this tank up until about 3-4 years ago. About 4 years in ( i dont remember when exactly) I had a huge problem with phosphates and all the GHA that comes with it. I started using high capacity gfo but it would only correct it temporarily, I also did weekly water changes and got rid of fish to reduce feedings but nothing worked. It dawned on me at some point that nutrients and phosphates must be leeching out of the rocks and sandbed. At that point I made the decision to siphon all my sand out over a period of a week or two. Once all the sand was gone I continued using a power head to blow all the detritus off my rocks weekly and then did smaller water changes every few weeks just to suck all the detritus out from under the rocks and corners. Its amazing how much stuff blows off of them. Almost magically my phosphates dropped and the GHA went away. So while I really prefer the look of a sandbed, i dont think that its worth it and will continue to go BB since it really is the only way to get rid of detritus. In my opinion sandbeds are a ticking time bomb and no matter what you do to clean them whether its using snails, crabs cucumbers or sand sifting gobies, they will at some point get saturated enough at some point and start releasing uncontrollable amounts of nutrients back into the system.

 

[Som1else]

I only see one clownfish, I am sure there are a few more fish in there but certainly sparsely populated; do you feed your corals?

I have two clowns, 6 kupang damsels, A sailfin tang, Kole tang, a foxface, a shrimp goby and a court jester gobie.

Aside from feeding these fish a rotation of White Grindal worms, brine shrimp and mysis I will also add maybe a 1/2 tsp of reef roids to the mix from time to time. Most recently ive been adding some nori for the tangs and foxface too.

 

[eric8625]

Wow this is very impressive. Any chance you have pictures of your sump?