DesktopReefer’s (formerly bank3r) 2 Gallon Pico Jar

[DesktopReefer]

Latest FTS




The Full Setup


Key Equipment

• “Tank”: 2 gallon Anchor Hocking Glass Jar (thanks Walmart)
• Heater: Lifegard 50w pre-set heater (keeps between 77.9 and 78.4)
• Air Pump for water movement: Tetra Whisper 20g
• Other water movement: Aquaneat 80GPH adjustable pump
• Lighting: ABI Tuna Blue 12W Par 38 Bulb
• Salt: For now, standard Instant Ocean

Current Maintenance

• 7 Hour Light Period (no ramp up or down on this bulb)
• Weekly 90-100% water change
• 1 full rip clean in the books (March 2022) to rinse sand which I didn’t do at first
• Dose 0.3ml Red Sea Energy AB+ 3 times per week
• Feed corals once a week with Reef Roids the day before a water change
• 4/3 - added reef nutrition tigger pods

Living things I’ve added (not hitchhikers)

• 1 blue leg hermit
• 1 astrea snail
• 1 Trochus snail
• 1 yellow clown goby (started nipping SPS so back to the LFS he went)
• No name Green head favia
• No name red and green favia
• Watermelon Zoas
• SBB Green Goblin Acro
• MattV Red Dana Acro
• SBB Jungle Juice Acro
• Super Man Monti
• SBB Sparkler Monti
• SBB Malibu Rising Mushroom
• SBB Eternals Bright Mushroom
• No Name Yuma Mushroom
• SBB White Walker Goni
• SBB Keroppi Goni
• SBB Carnation Goni
• SBB Cousin It Goni
• No Name Goni

About Me and This Project

I’ll at least give you all my first name to make this place a little more personable. Hi, I’m Kevin. I’m in my mid 30s living the typical suburban life with a beautiful wife, rambunctious but adorable little boy, and two cats.

I’ve been keeping small aquariums most of my life. In fact, the last 10 years are the longest I have gone without an aquarium. I’ve kept a mixture of salt and freshwater aquariums, tons of different fish, plants, and corals. That being said, my favorite has always been saltwater corals.

Why a desktop reef?

Like many people, in March of 2020, I packed up my things from my company office and headed home for an indefinite amount of time. My home office was the extra room in the house where we stored things that didn’t fit in the rest of the house, you know… that room. After a few years of that, my wife had a wonderful idea to redo my office and make it my happy place. Since then, we’ve repainted, put in art and furniture, and organized all of the computer cords on my desk.

When thinking through other things that made me happy, I remembered my saltwater corals. I don’t have a ton of space and I don’t want to spend thousands on a large display and all of the equipment that come with a large saltwater tank. Then I stumbled on reefjar.com and was instantly intrigued. As many aquarists know, it would be crazy to keep a reef in a 2 gallon jar. No mechanical filtration? No skimmer? 100% water change 1-2 times weekly?!? What are you crazy? And yet, there were tons of examples of people having great success with setting up a micro eco system in a jar. I just had to try it.

 

[DesktopReefer]

And so it begins. Day 1. Sorry for all the cloudiness in the water. My intent is to post everything I can about setting up a jar pico from scratch. Obligatory - thank you to people like Brandon, Maritza Vase, etc. for the inspiration. In a few days, I’ll gather together links to everything I purchased. Keep in mind, I’ve been out of the hobby for about 10 years so I had to start from scratch. Feel free to comment, follow along, give me tips, whatever. I’ll be learning as I go and try to share as much as I can (the good and the bad).

Wish me luck!

 

[Ben's Pico Reefing]

Going to try and follow along. You wont need the circulation pump and air pump. One or other will work. If your using a lid to control evaporation I recomend the air. It will provide great movement alone in round tanks. Nothing wrong with using an additional pump but might need to dial down flow a bit.

The pump it shows when I click link will be really big for that tank. It shows 2.75inches long just for the propeller cover section. It probably is over 3 inches and will be over halfway to other side of jar I would go with something like this smaller pump. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B077...d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9kZXRhaWwp13NParams doesnt have to be this one but get one where you don't have a channel in the cord. Had one and water would syphon out. Link was only for example. I have a different one of this type now running since I don't have a lid.

Love pico tanks. So definetly wanted to see progression.

 

[DesktopReefer]

Going to try and follow along. You wont need the circulation pump and air pump. One or other will work. If your using a lid to control evaporation I recomend the air. It will provide great movement alone in round tanks. Nothing wrong with using an additional pump but might need to dial down flow a bit.

The pump it shows when I click link will be really big for that tank. It shows 2.75inches long just for the propeller cover section. It probably is over 3 inches and will be over halfway to other side of jar I would go with something like this smaller pump. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B077...d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9kZXRhaWwp13NParams doesnt have to be this one but get one where you don't have a channel in the cord. Had one and water would syphon out. Link was only for example. I have a different one of this type now running since I don't have a lid.

Love pico tanks. So definetly wanted to see progression.

Thanks for following along. I’ve got some fun updates coming tomorrow… 3 new frags.

Yeah, good catch on the pump. That is actually going in the bucket to mix fresh saltwater. I threw it in the tank when I mixed up my initial salt in the bare tank, but I have since taken it out. I also need to update the air pump. I had to get a more powerful one as that one wasn’t creating quite enough flow.

if you’re interested in getting even more details on my build, I’ve made a quick site to track all the details and the backstory behind the jar. desktopreefer.wordpress.com

 

[Ben's Pico Reefing]

Thats awsome. Ill look at the site as seems you have it detailed out.

OK should have known you would get it figured out lol. It has been almost a week already lol.

Also just read through the page. You know what your doing and doing my exact same thoughts that I tell new people. Research. Find the common denominator in every thing and form an opinion with a grain of salt lol. Seems like you did some great research..

 

[DesktopReefer]

I went out to a local fish store (LFS) to pick up a few corals. The cheapest frag tank had quite a few different options. I picked out 2 favias, one red and one with green heads. Then I also grabbed some zoas (one large head and a few small ones). I put them in the tank towards the end of the light cycle. By the time the lights went out, which caused the zoas to close, the zoas were half open. The favias were sending off some mucus looking stuff which I believe is from the transition. I’ll have to grab a shot of the zoas tomorrow when they open back up, but here are the two favias.

 

[DesktopReefer]

The zoas opened quickly after lights on this morning. I always love to see all the patterns and weird names people have given the variations. Based on what I’ve seen, these may be eagle eyes? Sorry for the bad photography, I’m still working on it.



I also saw plenty of amphipods on the rocks last night when the lights were out.

 

[danny_corals]

I want to try one of these so bad. Yours looks great!

 

[DesktopReefer]

I want to try one of these so bad. Yours looks great!

Do it! If you already have a bunch of the equipment it’s dirt cheap. The only reason I’ve spent so much is that I’m literally starting from scratch… thermometer, heater, mixing bucket, salt, etc.

 

[DesktopReefer]

Hard to believe it’s already been a month. I’ve done a real crappy job keeping this thread updated. I tried my hand at making a Wordpress site but it was just too darn complicated. Instead, I’m just going to post for all my reefing family over here at R2R.

So what have we missed here… I added a couple hermits. Just today, I had to euthanize one as he/she cot pretty ripped apart by the other. Note to self, only one hermit in a small space.

I’ve seen the stray red flatworm here or there. As I see them, I pull them out with the turkey baster. It’s the great thing about working over 9 hours a day next to this thing and having it be so small, I can spot everything that’s going on.



I ended up with a bunch of bryopsis but it was only growing on the glass and air tubing thankfully. For some weird reason, it was only growing in the places where I had the highest flow? Not sure what that was about. That being said, @brandon429 came to the rescue and suggested I do a full rip clean and clean the sand THOROUGHLY. So a week or two ago, I mixed up my 2 gallons of clean saltwater and pumped myself for the task at hand. Lucky for me, I only used half the live sand the first time so now I had the other half sitting around. While my salt was mixing, I did a super thorough cleaning of the sand. I washed it under the kitchen sink in a plastic Tupperware for probably an hour or so until the point where the water was crystal clear after just a second or two of the water being off. After the sand was rinsed, it was as simple as draining the water (as I do for my weekly water changes. I put the single chunk of rock and my 3 frags in the tank with the new water, pulled out the heater, air tubing, and thermometer, took out all the old sand, scrubbed the heck out of the equipment and jar, and then did everything in reverse except with the cleaned sand. All in all, it only took about an hour to clean the sand plus another 30 minutes for the disassembly and reassembly. All things considered, it was super easy. My lesson here is to make sure I make it as simple as possible to pull out all living things. As long as that’s true, it will be super easy to reset the tank if anything goes wrong.





In more exciting news, I bought a TON of corals this last weekend at SBB’s live sale. It was seriously a blast and I got some amazing deals from Shane. Here is a pic of the haul that will be coming to me at the beginning of April (3 mushrooms, 5 gonis, 2 encrusting montis, and 2 acros)



My goal with the acros is just to test out if the tank can support them. I’ve always heard “your tank needs to be X months old before you can do SPS”. In the spirit of the experiment that is this tank, let’s see if that works on a small scale too.

I had noticed the largest head on my Zoa was closing and opening throughout the day. It seemed like something was probably irritating it. I picked up some CoralRX and dipped all of my frags. Here is the end result…



After that, everything seems to be happier. My Zoa is popping another head and a 4th looks to be on the way. My favias are both growing a bit. It’s hard to tell, but I looked at my first pics of them and there is definitely an increase in head size and skeletal growth.

That’s it for now, but I’m super pumped to get this thing loaded with corals and see what we can do.

 

[Ben's Pico Reefing]

Briopsis can be a pain. The sand you cleaned in tap, you did add dechlorinator after or before in the sand? I assume you did. As the chlorinated water can get trapped in sand. Eventually it may dissipate with stirring. I have added sps to brand new tanks as well. I have only had success with 1 so far. And that one is hard to kill lol.. glad to see things moving along.

 

[DesktopReefer]

Briopsis can be a pain. The sand you cleaned in tap, you did add dechlorinator after or before in the sand? I assume you did. As the chlorinated water can get trapped in sand. Eventually it may dissipate with stirring. I have added sps to brand new tanks as well. I have only had success with 1 so far. And that one is hard to kill lol.. glad to see things moving along.

Yeah, I left out the part where I rinsed heavily twice with my distilled water before putting back in the jar.

 

[DesktopReefer]

Added a few things over the weekend and a lot of corals are coming tomorrow from SBB (yay).

I added to my cleanup crew with a Trochus and an Astrea snail. I seeded the jar with a jar of reef nutrition tigger pods. And finally, I’ve added a yellow clown goby.



I’m hoping the relatively small bio load of the goby plus the 1-2x weekly 95% water changes will be enough to keep everything in check. So far, after the rip clean, I haven’t seen nearly as much hair algae and the little bit of algae on the rocks is just adding some diversity to the tank. Worst case, I up the water changes.

I got a Phosphate and Nitrate test kit since I was just genuinely curious about the levels. As I suspected, not really any detectable nitrate and less than 0.1 phosphate. I’m interested to test frequently with the increased bio load and see what it all looks like. This should help me dial in the water change schedule. Luckily waterchanges are around $2-3 per (I use store bought distilled and Red Sea blue bucket salt) so I’m not all too concerned if I have to stick with 2 a week. In a tank this size, it takes me 1 minute to throw the salt, water, heater, and pump in a bucket and then another 5 minutes the next day to drain and refill the tank.

I can’t wait to get some more corals in here and see how the thing grows. I’m hoping I can leave it alone for a while and see how everything settles in.

Last update, why I added the pods. As with most things in this tank, it’s somewhat of an experiment. I saw that they were a good cleanup crew, fish generally enjoy eating them live, plus they just add to the bio diversity. I haven’t seen the goby actively hunting for any pods so we’ll see if I ever catch him eating any. The goby is taking pretty well to my frozen food mix in the coral feeder syringe so the pods are just a treat.

 

[DesktopReefer]

Where to begin…

New corals went in on Tuesday from SBB Corals. I got all of them from the live sale a few weekends ago. I can’t say enough awesome things about the corals themselves, communication, shipping quality, etc. The corals looked absolutely amazing the minute they came out of the bags. You can check out my latest FTS and top down shot on the first page. In total, it’s 5 gonis, 3 mushrooms, 2 encrusting montis, and 3 acros.

That brings me to my next update… mr yellow goby is going back to the store this weekend. I knew they had a symbiotic relationship with acros and I had heard they sometimes nipped at them, but I also heard that if the goby was well fed it wouldn’t nip. Well this little one is fat and happy on all the frozen food and still nipping at all the acros. Zero polyp extension since he started nipping. A $15 fish is not worth losing $100 in corals over so back to the store it goes.

The snails and hermit are keeping the rock sparkling clean. The snails have completely stayed on the rockwork which is great since I can clean the glass easily myself. I’ve kept up with water changes (50%-100% once to twice a week). Hopefully the acros come back strong when they’re not being constantly bothered.

 

[DesktopReefer]

Well back to the fish store went the yellow clown goby. He continued nipping at the acros every single day which caused zero polyp extension. The YCG went back on Saturday and Monday morning I'm already seeing slight polyp extension from the mille. I'm hoping over the next week or so they'll be back to full polyp extension.

In doing a bunch of research, I wasn't real happy with the amount of flow I was getting from just the air pump. Again, it's a Tetra Whisper 20 going full steam. Earlier in this thread, someone thought I was using the aquaneat wavemaker for inside the jar. Unknowingly, they actually suggested a different aquaneat pump that would be smaller and could go in the tank. So what did I do this weekend... yep I bought an aquaneat pump rated for 80GPH. Obviously I can't calculate the GPH of the air pump, but this new pump alone gives me 40X turnover on it's own. It's technically visible where I put it, but I'm not all that concerned. I've got it up high where the SPS are and pointed it to flow right through the middle of all of the acros. I can already tell I'm getting way better flow up there from watching the detritus and microbubbles flowing.

I know the creator of reefjar.com said he had problems with heat whenever he put powerheads in the jar. Luckily, I haven't experienced a heat issue thus far. At the highest point in the day, my temp gauge is reading about 79.4F and this morning without lights, it was reading 78.4F which I think is about what my heater heats to nowadays. This is good enough for me.

I did a nice big feeding on Friday before the waterchange on Saturday (to get the YCG out). I love watching the mushrooms suck in all their food. The Yuma slimed a little and folded inward to slurp up the food, the Eternals shroom folded all the way up and ate it with a huge mouth opening, and the Malibu Rising shroom put out a bunch of slime to catch all of the reef roids and slowly pulled the slime in it's mouth. The gonis shrunk up a little but I've heard they don't really have a huge feeding response.

I'm going to start some experimenting now that I don't have any creatures that need daily feeding. I just took my Nitrate and Phosphate readings and I'm seeing undetectable Nitrates and < 0.05 phosphate. Since the phosphate test is so hard to read except at the changeover of 0.1 where it starts getting green, I'm going to start testing plain distilled water in an adjacent spot to my test so I can try to see if there is a difference. Anyhow, I'm going to be testing over the next few weeks around how much just reef roids and reef energy A+B alone will affect my phosphate and nitrate. I've heard reef roids can be a huge phosphate addition, but everyone's system is different and everyone is probably dosing different. I've heard reef energy A+B shouldn't really affect phosphate or nitrate. Since I dosed it this morning and checked levels this afternoon, it's looking like that is true. Here is the experiment:

• I'll probably try 2-3 weeks of doing reef roids the day before the water change. If I test the day after the water change, right before I add the reef roids, and right before the water change, it should help me figure out just a week of Reef Energy A+B and 12-24 hours of one dose of reef roids.
• Assuming the Reef Energy isn't adding anything to nitrates or phosphates and I don't have some sort of algae problem, I'll move on to doing reef roids right after a water change and monitor phosphate and nitrate daily after that. This should help me determine if one addition of reef roids has a growing impact on phosphate and nitrate as it breaks down.
• Similar to the last step, assuming all is well and good, I'll start doing a couple doses of reef roids spread out during the week.
• I'll probably do this to up to 3 times a week feeding of reef roids if it's not causing issues. I know many people with larger reefs with do 3 times a week but smaller than normal doses, but as we've learned, these jars are a lot different from larger reef systems.

Anyhow, I hope you follow along. I'll post about the experiment periodically as we go through. I think my main goal is to not let Nitrates go over 10 in the week and not to let phosphate go over about 0.1 in a week. I believe this should be enough to keep stability for the corals... who knows?

Wish me luck!

Day 1, 0.3ml of reef energy (note API for nitrate and seachem for phosphate)

 

[DesktopReefer]

Video with the new power head. You can see the flow pretty easily with the gonis.

Added new Aquaneat power head

youtube.com

 

[DesktopReefer]

Day 3 (3 doses of AB+ after almost full)
Today I did distilled water in one of the slots for the phosphate test as a 0 control. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really see a difference.

No detectable algae change
0 Phosphate
0 Nitrate

 

[DesktopReefer]

Lots of updates today. I randomly checked my tank salinity today, recalibrated with distilled water (as instructed in the manual), and then reread tank salinity. I definitely thought I was going for 1.026, but it looks like I may be around 1.028.

Zoas haven’t been opening great and I don’t have great polyp extension so I’m hoping slowly bringing this back to 1.026 will help with that. We’ll see!

 

[bnord]

nice reporting - 15 is as small as I have gone, maybe cut it half for the next try , admire your attention to detail

 

[DesktopReefer]

nice reporting - 15 is as small as I have gone, maybe cut it half for the next try , admire your attention to detail

Are you talking about phosphate? Like you’ve only been able to read down to 0.015 ppm?