Anthony's WB 230.6 upgrade - SPS Dominant Mixed Reef

[Gumbies R Us]

Been a rough few days since the transfer… most of my larger SPS colonies started to rtn…

The positive today though is a new copperband that my LFS had been holding for me. You can see here my dead Pink Floyd skeleton above it. The new few months will be focused on getting the nutrients of my tank under control and stable. They got really high over the 4 months in the 100gal tub. My phosphate for example tested beyond the range of a Hanna checker... >0.9. Yikes! Put some gfo in a reactor and have been trying to bring it down slowly over the last few days. It's down to 0.37 right now, but trying to get it back down to at most 0.1 or lower.

Love the copperband!

 

[anthonymckay]

Made a lot of progress this last week! Electrician came out and ran the dedicated 20A circuits for the tank. Spent half a day doing cable management and setting up the controller cabinet. Finished cleaning everything up and clearing out the aquarium room just before everyone showed up at our house for thanksgiving!

Hit the local fish store this afternoon for some Black Friday discounts and picked up a nice little trachy and an SPS frag.

Everything has stabilized nicely and corals have been recovering. Seeing my Alk uptake steadily rise back towards previous levels. Really happy with things for now.

 

[anthonymckay]

Picked up a few new SPS frags from a local reefer this weekend. Have some more coming tomorrow as well that I’ll post after I get them.

An acid trip mille, a classic green Slimer, orange passion, and JF flame.

 

[anthonymckay]

Picked up 8 new stick frags this afternoon that I bought from a local reefer on Monday! Mounted the others that previously occupied this little rack and these will stay here for the next few weeks. One came on a frag plug that had already had the rod broken off the plug, so I just glued that one to a rock. Got some real fire though for a ridiculously good deal!

From left to right in the pic below:
RRC rainbow splice
TKC burning bush
PC rainbow
The Vihn
Jimbert 23k
RR rainbow loom
WWC little red ferrari
Copps 24k Mille (not pictured)

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Picked up 8 new stick frags this afternoon that I bought from a local reefer on Monday! Mounted the others that previously occupied this little rack and these will stay here for the next few weeks. One came on a frag plug that had already had the rod broken off the plug, so I just glued that one to a rock. Got some real fire though for a ridiculously good deal!

From left to right in the pic below:
RRC rainbow splice
TKC burning bush
PC rainbow
The Vihn
Jimbert 23k
RR rainbow loom
WWC little red ferrari
Copps 24k Mille (not pictured)

New frags look great!

 

[anthonymckay]

The tank is 1 month old today! Things are going pretty well (but I don’t wanna jinx it!). I got my nutrients back into desired windows since transferring from the 100gal tub. Corals that didn’t do well in the transfer have been recovering quite well. My red planet colony that turned all green and STN’d about 80%+ of its tissue has began to regrow tissue over the skeleton. I keep debating cutting it all down to the healthy base, or just leaving it to see what happens. For now with this new tissue growth showing up I’m just gonna leave it be and keep monitoring it.

All my new frags are looking great. I never had polyp extension in my old tank like I’m seeing now. I attribute that to much improved flow setup in this tank. Shot some footage of each frag yesterday, and will do the same in 3 months to get a nice visual of growth progress.

To celebrate the 1 month mark, I went down to my LFS and picked up a pair of royal grammas. Never had them before, but really love the look of basslets! They are currently hiding but hopefully will start showing themselves over the coming week.

 

[anthonymckay]

All the most recent stick frags graduated from the acclimation frag rack to being mounted in the rock scape this morning.

Next thing to tackle will be hair algae. It starting to rear its ugly head on all my old transferred rock. My cleanup crew just isn’t fit for the job, so I have a CUC refresh arriving in 2 days. My urchin, tangs, and sea hare, etc all seem to want to eat everything BUT the hair algae.

Mid morning mostly white light shot of all the newly mounted acro frags.

 

[tritonpower]

Made a lot of progress this last week! Electrician came out and ran the dedicated 20A circuits for the tank. Spent half a day doing cable management and setting up the controller cabinet. Finished cleaning everything up and clearing out the aquarium room just before everyone showed up at our house for thanksgiving!

Hit the local fish store this afternoon for some Black Friday discounts and picked up a nice little trachy and an SPS frag.

Everything has stabilized nicely and corals have been recovering. Seeing my Alk uptake steadily rise back towards previous levels. Really happy with things for now.

looks great

 

[code4]

Wow. Did the noise issue get taken care of? Your daughters are adorable by the way. Glad you got the rot issue fixed in the floor. I bought the same tank. Have next to no plumbing experience. So may need to pick your brain. Did you have other tangs with the powder blue you lost?

I have a white tailed bristle tooth and was wondering if I could have a powder blue. Cycling tanks to put current fish into. Will get son in law to beef up my floor. Sorry for all the questions rapid fired at you

Love the copperband. Have one in a 40 breeder coral tank now. Eating well and will go in the new tank

Ok enough for now

Thanks
Shelley

 

[anthonymckay]

Wow. Did the noise issue get taken care of? Your daughters are adorable by the way. Glad you got the rot issue fixed in the floor. I bought the same tank. Have next to no plumbing experience. So may need to pick your brain. Did you have other tangs with the powder blue you lost?

I have a white tailed bristle tooth and was wondering if I could have a powder blue. Cycling tanks to put current fish into. Will get son in law to beef up my floor. Sorry for all the questions rapid fired at you

Love the copperband. Have one in a 40 breeder coral tank now. Eating well and will go in the new tank

Ok enough for now

Thanks
Shelley

I actually was able to reduce the noise quite a bit. I modified the secondary drain pipe by adding some flex tubing on top to extend it a bit further and thus allowing me to bring the water level in the overflow box up higher. Doing this you don't get the loud splashing trickle sound as bad.

Powder blue was with other tangs and did really well with them in my last tank! Just didn't do so well long term in the 100gal plastic tub

 

[code4]

I wonder if it leached things into the water. I always wondered about that

Thanks. Can I bother you for where you got you pipes and sizes?

Shelley

 

[anthonymckay]

I wonder if it leached things into the water. I always wondered about that

Thanks. Can I bother you for where you got you pipes and sizes?

Shelley

I think it was just an issue of that kind of a setup being very difficult to maintain longterm with no mechanical filtration to assist. All the drain pipes on a waterbox need a 40mm -> 1.25" metric to standard conversion fitting, and then it's all just 1.25" pipe after that. You can get all that from bulk reef supply.

 

[ReefLaw]

What is your light settings and the intensity on the kessils?

 

[anthonymckay]

Tank is 2 months this week. Some notable updates:

• The Yellow Corris Wrasse I bought jumped out... This prompted me to put in an order for a custom lid.
• I thought one of the Royal Grammas had died since I only saw one of them for the 3 weeks following adding them. Turns out the one I was seeing was just far more brave than the other one. The 2nd one finally started coming out of hiding this last week!
• I bought a Gem Tang! And 3 Bimac Anthias. Picked up all 4 at a LFS during a holiday sale for a really good price!
• Continuing my battle with this hair algae outbreak. Nothing really wants to eat it. I beefed up my CUC with a ton of hermit crabs, turbo snails, Mexican turbos. In addition to my tuxedo urchin, 2 sea hares, fox face rabbitfish, and various tangs. I've been performing manual removal for about 10-15 minutes each day, scrubbing rocks with a toothbrush, and moved a couple rocks down into the sump to starve them of light.
• Also worth noting that I also attempted using fluconazole as well to kill hair algae. I conservatively underdosed some FluxRX, 6cc's (150gal size treatment). That was 3 weeks ago, and it has had zero affect. Underdosing it wasn't effective unfortunately.

Hair algae aside things are running smoothly, fish are healthy, and the sps frags have all been steadily encrusting.

 

[anthonymckay]

Snapped a few pics with my phone today while doing some maintenance. Been swapping out roller fleece every few weeks. Starting to wonder if I should upgrade from the sk3000 to the Clarisea sk5000. Anyway, some pics showing some encrusting progress, color recovery, and growth

The orange passion has encrusted over the glue and colors are looking great!

Walt Disney that browned out after the tank upgrade has been coloring back up nicely. Can also see the Jell-O shot below it getting some its color back.

Needle in a Haystack seems to be a pretty quick grower!

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Snapped a few pics with my phone today while doing some maintenance. Been swapping out roller fleece every few weeks. Starting to wonder if I should upgrade from the sk3000 to the Clarisea sk5000. Anyway, some pics showing some encrusting progress, color recovery, and growth

The orange passion has encrusted over the glue and colors are looking great!

Walt Disney that browned out after the tank upgrade has been coloring back up nicely. Can also see the Jell-O shot below it getting some its color back.

Needle in a Haystack seems to be a pretty quick grower!

Nice looking acros!

 

[anthonymckay]

Yesterday I took my daughter to the Coral Farmers Market in my area to see what they had. Ended up spending more than I intended when I walked in, but got some great deals on some stuff! Here’s a few of my favorites I picked out:
- 24k gold torch
- Stratosphere Zoa! (With 2 baby polyps under the skirt). This was the cheapest I’ve ever seen these offered! $100 for a single polyp, and I paid a tad more for this one ($200) because it had 2 additional baby polyps poking out.
- A really nice looking blue hornet (always been one of my fave Zoas, I already have some, but loved this frag with extra big polyps so I couldn’t pass it up)
- Also bought a small homewrecker acro frag that I haven’t got a good pic of yet.

 

[ChiefReefin]

Tank is beautiful and and inspiration for me to get my waterbox 220 set up. What powerheads are you using on yours, are those the Nero’s? If so, how do you like them and would you recommend?

 

[anthonymckay]

Tank is beautiful and and inspiration for me to get my waterbox 220 set up. What powerheads are you using on yours, are those the Nero’s? If so, how do you like them and would you recommend?

Thank you! Yes, using the Nero’s 7. So far they have been great!

 

[anthonymckay]

Sent an ICP test off this morning. Something is off in the tank right now... not sure what. My Walt Disney acro's polyps have retracted quite a bit in the last couple week. The red planet colony that had been recovering since the upgrade has been losing color and looking dull. I also found one of the sea hares dead this morning. Possibly related? But really unsure why, there's still plenty of hair algae for him to consume in there so doubt it just starved.

My water parameters are all within my desired window. I'm suspecting that one of my daily trace additives is becoming overdosed and needs to be lowered, but ICP will give me some insight there.

I'm also starting to notice what I suspect are LCA Dino's on the sand. I dealt with those last time I did a tank transfer. The way I got rid of it before was to just ignore it till it eventually went away, haha.