Aussie SR80

[Corndiggly]

Hi all!
Firstly wanted to say thanks to everyone for all the awesome info on this forum, it has been a massive help for setting up my first tank!

My wife and I finally started our first marine tank after 12 years of keeping fresh/planted tanks after spotting an SR80 on sale online, we thought the tank would be the expensive part - haha how wrong we were!

After doing some further research we ended up purchasing the following;
- Light: Illumagic Blaze X90
- Skimmer: Aquamedic turboflotor 500
- Return pump (my tanks pumps were missing for some reason?): Sicce Synchra 3000
- Flow: Maxspect Gyre XF230 twin
- ATO: Smart micro ATO
- Heater: 300w titanium plus a 300w cheapie as backup
- Monitoring: Seneye Reef
- Biomedia: Seachem De-nitrate 2L
- Fuge light: AI Magnafuge light
- Substrate 20kg Seachem Aragonite sand
- Rocks: 20kg real reef rock and AF stonefix
- Reactor: TLF Phosban 150 to run carbon
- Dosing pump: Jecod DP5
- Glass cleaner: Tunze Care magnet strong
- ATO reservoir: custom 75L glass tank to fit on bottom shelf of stand

Plus some misc consumables;
- Test kits: Ammonia, Nitrate, Phosphate, Calcium, Alkalinity, Magnesium
- Red sea coral pro salt
- Activated carbon
- Tunze Coral Gum

We already had a RODI unit from keeping freshwater shrimp but I also got the following for the salt mixing station:
- 200L RODI storage tub
- 120L Saltwater mixing wheelie bin
- Fluval CP3 powerhead
- 300w heater
- Refractometer

So after everything arrived I built the stand and put the tank in place and setup most of the equipment.
Now my wife has always been keen creating the visual concepts and ideas to our tanks and I'm more of the practical person who executes her ideas (as closely as possible... sometimes my creativity takes over haha) and I love learning the theories and science behind keeping the system alive (and hopefully thriving)
My wife had played with some rocks at the LFS to rough out a bit of a scape and settled on a large archway and a smaller island to keep up with the rule of thirds for visual impact and also allow for as much flow as possible.

I mixed up some water in the tank and added a little ammonia to start the cycle and waited, testing every couple of days. I knew it would take some time to cycle as I didn't use any liverock or sand but after 3 weeks I still hadn't seen any movement on my test kits so I added some nitrifying bacteria, still nothing for a week, tried some different bacteria, still nothing after another week!!
I was patient up until this point but was getting pretty frustrated, did some searching on here and other sites and everyone said to add a piece of shrimp to kick start the bacteria. I did that and all it did was raise the ammonia even higher so I thought stuff it I'll take the risk and add a small piece of live rock.
I changed 60% of the water first to bring down the ammonia levels and went and bought a fist sized piece of LR and added it to the tank. I checked the next day and I finally saw some nitrates registering! Yay!!
After a couple more weeks and some good signs on the test kits I added 3 mollies from my quarantine tank to the DT and bought 2 x Occelaris clowns and a scissortail dartfish to put in QT.

Then we got our first coral... a cheap $20 Duncan to see if I could keep a coral alive for longer than a few days.
I dipped it with Seachem Reef Dip and didn't see anything in the way of pests come off so put it into a seperate QT tank to observe.

After a week it seemed to be fine and no visible pests so added it to the DT.
We told ourselves at the start that we would take things slow, do it properly, make no mistakes.
Then we caught it... yep we got smacked with the coral bug so hard! Watching this thing take pallets and react to touch, flow and light was amazing - so much more exciting than watching some green underwater grass grow in our other tanks haha

We went a little crazy over the next few weeks and ended up with a hammer/frogspawn/goni garden on the island and a duncan and trachy garden on the arch.

We also got 6 Nassarius and 3 Trochus snails to munch on a bit of the algae and clean up leftover food. The nassarius snails might be my spirit animal... sleep all day under the sand then the slightest sniff of food the beasts emerge to devour everything in their path. Love them.
The trochus are doing an amazing job at keeping the algae at bay - you could literally see the path they had mowed into the piece of live rock and now it is completely spotless apart from from a few odd strands of suspected Acetabularia algae which they don't seem too fond of.

We ended up going to a couple of LFS again last weekend and got a couple more corals and a Blue Maxima clam (fathers day prezzie yippee!) we also dropped past one store doing renovations who were getting rid of some $5 brownout SPS and mushies, got 4 SPS, 2 red morph polyps and what I assume is a ricccordia (blue/green with yellow mouth) all for $25. Once in the tank the SPS really perked up and look much better than they did in the frag tanks.

More updates to come...

 

[Crabs McJones]

Welcome to R2R!!

#WelcometoR2R

Setup looks amazing!

 

[SPR1968]

That’s a great write up and thanks for sharing the pictures with us the system looks very nice

And welcome to R2R!

 

[cancun]

Tanks looks great! Here is a pic of my Innovative Marine SR 80....and just wait until you get the Aussie Acan bug.... LOL!

 

[Corndiggly]

Tanks looks great! Here is a pic of my Innovative Marine SR 80....and just wait until you get the Aussie Acan bug.... LOL!

Nice tank!
I have been eyeing off some acans at the LFS, it seems like you can put the whole rainbow of colours in you tank from one species which is pretty cool!
Got my first micro lord in the tank recently and it brings some much needed orange to the tank, although he did have a short battle with one of my favias (and won) so I moved him a little bit. Will micro lords and acan lords fight or they related closely enough that it isn't an issue?

 

[Corndiggly]

Some more updates:

After hearing lots of clicking at night and reading on here that it would most likely be either a mantis shrimp or a pistol shrimp I debated whether adding the live rock was a good decision and whether or not I should take it out to avoid issues in future if it was a mantis? I left it in there for a few weeks as I didn't want to disturb the bio filtration this early on but then I noticed some bubble algae starting to grow on that piece and then also noticed a small crab come out of the rock as well one night (third crab on this fist size piece of rock mind you) and I thought that was enough of a reason to nuke it so I took it out and gave it a long soak in RO water to try to get the crustaceans out but none of them came out of their holes, tried looking with a torch and found one of the crabs but he was small and stubborn and when I tried to get the little guy with tweezers he just went in deeper!

I thought bugger it I'll just bleach it, so I soaked it overnight in a mild bleach solution, in the morning I checked and found this little guy but no signs of the crabs. I left that piece of live rock out and put into one of my QT tanks to see if the crabs would come out but so far no signs of them, assuming they are dead in the rock somewhere.

It didn't seem to affect the bio filtration thankfully as ammonia and nitrates were not affected so hopefully enough beneficial bacteria is throughout the rest of the system.

We seeded the tank and refugium with a bottle of pods which seem to be pretty hard to find in Aus for some reason (business idea??)

We got some more coral including;
10 frags of zoas and a nice little island for them to hopefully populate (pink zippers, rastas, sunny D, wammin watermelons, eye of rah, hawaiian ding dangs, alpha and omega, bronze gods, Brazillians, rainbow infusions)

Filled up Hammerspawn Island

Some more SPS frags, (brownouts colouring up nicely also!)

Then we went on holidays for 2 weeks to Bali and left the tank on autopilot (just being fed by our dogsitter), we came home and the only casualty was a gold torch which wasn't looking too healthy when we left (too much flow I think) so that was a good test of the system and we were both pretty relieved and happy to know we didn't need to babysit the system every day and could leave it alone for that long (reckon 3 weeks max as that is when the ATO reservoir and 2 part containers will run dry)
Parameters were pretty good when we came back, calcium was a bit high but everything else was in line.

It seemed like the copepod population had exploded while we were away (as well as hundreds of amphipods) as we could see hundreds if not thousands on the back wall jumping around.
This was great news as we both wanted to get a mandarin (my wife's only "must have" fish) and ended up getting this psychadelic dude to join our reef;
We will see how he goes and if the pod population is still strong in 6 months we might add a blue mandarin if possible.

 

[KRAUSE1]

This is such a nice setup! How do you like the Illumagic light after using it for a while now? I'm thinking of getting the X-90 for my tank with the same dimensions as yours, but had concerns about light spread/penetration for growing sps.

 

[Corndiggly]

This is such a nice setup! How do you like the Illumagic light after using it for a while now? I'm thinking of getting the X-90 for my tank with the same dimensions as yours, but had concerns about light spread/penetration for growing sps.

Thank you!
I really like the Illumagic, depending on how you set your tank up the X90 should have plenty of spread left to right on a 4ft tank.
If your tank is 2 ft front to back you may want to supplement with T5 or use 2 x90's so you get no shadowing when the sps colonies grow out, but as the back quarter of this tank is the sump and it is shallow I find it's plenty of light for my mixed reef. You could probably start with 1 light then buy a 2nd once the colonies grow out if this is the case.

Penetration is good, I have mine set to 47% white, 60% blue and 58% UV and get 50-100 par on the sandbed and 150-200 at the top of my rockwork.
At 100% on all channels it is around 400 par at the top of the rockwork.

The phone app is probably not as polished as some of the big brands but it is all you need, it has 3 adjustable channels (white, blue, UV) and you can preset 6 different intensity settings and then there are 6 adjustable time settings so preset 1 turns on at x time, preset 2 turns on at y time etc. then you can choose whether the presets fade into each other or they are instant.
I use the blue channel at 1% for moon lighting then at 9am instantly change to 25% blue and 25% UV then ramp up gradually to the above settings which is quite white looking but really pops the colours then it fades down to just blues late afternoon then back to moonlight at night.

Some of my SPS have thrived and some have perished but I don't think this has anything to do with the lights, more likely due to the alk/cal swings as I'm learning how to best keep the tank stable lol

 

[huangeffendi]

Hi, your tank looks familiar, I think local LFS use your tank as reference.. lol.. any update on how the illumagic doing? Do you add the vitamini strip as well? Thx

 

[Corndiggly]

Hi, your tank looks familiar, I think local LFS use your tank as reference.. lol.. any update on how the illumagic doing? Do you add the vitamini strip as well? Thx

Illumagic is working great, thinking of getting one vitamini strip for the front facing in but haven’t pulled the trigger yet.
Some of the corals are starting to shadow others so this might help get them some extra light. In 2 minds though as I may end up changing tank to something with a sump and get a second blaze or 2 vitaminis.