criscorrea
New Member
Hey Reefers!
So, I have been reading reef2reef posts for a long time, I think its time to chip in and share my tank and maybe get some practical advise from the community. Here's my story:
I'm from Santiago, Chile (South America). I'm married and have 3 baby girls, ages 7, 4 and 1. I started reefing about 10 years ago. Put together a 35G with a hang on back skimmer (AquaC Remora Pro), bunch of live rock and some corals. No skimmer, nothing automated but the ATO (JBL). Had it for 2 years and by that time I was pretty proud of what had been accomplished with the tank looking well stocked with nice corals. I had a fairly simple routine and almost did no testing, would mainly look at the tank and act according to how I saw the coral polyp extension on different species. Here's a short video of that tank:
Unfortunately, during a 5 day vacation there was a problem with a automatic feeder and a bunch of food went in at the same time causing a complete tank crash. I got back from vacations to find everything had died during my absence. We were about to move to a bigger apartment and had already bought all the hardware to upgrade to a 150G, needless to say my wife told me to forget about it and I ended up selling all the equipment but the 2 orphek PR156W lights that I had bought. At the time I was fresh out of university and the lights had costed what was a significant amount of money, I kinda couldn't get myself to sell them hoping to one day put them to use again. This was April 2012.
Fast forward to 2020. I now live in a house, and I'm stuck at home because of the pandemic. Usually I travel a lot, spending 2-4 days a week travelling abroad because of my work so I had kind of accepted the fact that building a reef tank again would be something I would do after I retired or something. But now I'm stuck home working from my computer and I realized it was the perfect opportunity to build a new tank! I convinced my wife and I embarked on this adventure again. So happy I did (and she said yes)!
I put together a 80G cube. Build the stand myself. The glass is starfire 12mm, dimensions are 70x70x60cm. This time I have a sump where I have a vertex omega 150 skimmer, a UV sterilizer, filter wool and a X-port block. The overflow is an eshopps M size I think, and the lights are my PR156WB's which have been sitting in my basement for 8 years. Flow is provided by 2 MP10's on the back. The tank was put together on May 27th after 3 weeks of cycling the rock with Microbacter7 in a big trashcan. I have 1 bag of oolite aragonite for a shallow sand bed (also had that bag sitting in the basement for 9 years LOL). All rock was dry rock, all dead coral skeleton which had all been kept dry in my basement (guess what, rocks also in basement for past 9 years, it was all supposed to go into my 150G I never built). I also run some carbon passively in the sump in a mesh bag which I change monthly.
So here it is, tomorrow 9 weeks from day 1.
Livestock:
Fish
- Desjardini sailfin tang
- Hepatus tang
- Grama Loreto
- 2 Ocellaris clown fish
- Engineer Goby
- Banggai Cardinal
Corals (all frags)
- 4 acroporas (dont know exactly what species they are)
- Mystic sunset montipora
- Green polyp encrusting montipora
- branching pink polyp montipora
- red and green plate montipora (actually 2 different shades of red)
- Pocillopora
- 7 different types of zoas
- red actinodiscus
- green rhodactis
- Frogspawn
- 2 hammer corals
- 3 rose bubble tip anemones
- Green star polyps
- cryptonite candy coral
- Turbinaria
- Chalice (not sure which species)
- Xenia
- Kenya tree
As you can see I have been very impatient and have put a bunch of stuff pretty fast. I just couldn't help myself. I know I should have waited more for things to stable out, but here I am, trying to keep everything alive. Although I had some problems, the tank currently seems to be doing good and no corals have been lost. Here's a quick story of what I've been through. My original plan was no water changes. I had read a lot about people keeping nice systems with no water changes so that was the initial plan:
Weeks 1-2: Added the fish and the first corals. Both NO3 and PO4 had been at 0 since day one so I figured hey, I got myself I ULNS, this is awesome. Corals seemed fine to me although I can't see any growth. I'm not testing for anything but NO3 or PO4 because I thought that with so little corals there's no way I'm using any Ca, MG or KH...
Week 3: Corals are clearly not so fine. All sps are loosing color, my pocillopora which was dark is by now almost white, still, extending polyps though. I decide corals need feeding. I buy restor, macrovore and reefblizzard (all brightwell) and start target feeding daily. No signs of things getting better.
Week 4: A transparent slime starts to appear on rockwork, it has bubbles, it forms during daytime. After a bunch of reading I think its dinos. I measure a Ca, Mg and KH and I realize my KH has significantly diminished (8,7, down from 10,5 on day 1)! I begin dosing buffer to bring my kh back up to 10.5 dKH. (This I did very slowly, during the course of 3,5 weeks)
I decide to attack the dinos with a full on attack:
1.- 1 day total blackout
2.- Dosed both NO3 and PO4 to the system (Seachem flourish nitrogen and phosphorus)
3.- Heavy siphoning 3-5 times a day everywhere I would see the slime
4.- Stopped coral feeding
5.- Begun dosing Microbacter CLEAN. Started the blackout day with the "for problem aquariums" recommended dosage, then continued with daily dosing.
So, after 5 days dinos are gone, but some coral has suffered. My encrusting montis both have lost tissue, same as 2 out of 4 acroporas. The rest of the corals seem fine. Now at least I get a reading on NO3 and PO4.
Week 5 (the good week): My corals start getting color again! Polyp extension! No dinos! Hey, I think I got the hang of this thing! I calculate my Ca, Mg and KH consuption and start dosing 3-part and Kalkwasser to maintain stability in everything (I dose half kalk half 3-part as I like the benefits of kalk but also added trace elements of 3-part). Around this time I also begin to get diatoms, pretty heavily in the sand floor.
Week 6: I start to get cyano. Also all rocks habve turned green with hair algae. I keep dosing MB clean, I put my powerheads at the max to up my flow. After one week its kinda the same and I say heck, lets nuke this with chemiclean.
Week 7: I apply chemiclean. Cyano is gone, corals seem fine! I decide this no water changes idea is crap and I begin weekly 10% water changes (did a 25% change after the chemiclean). Also, during water changes I siphon out all the top layer of the sandbed and rinse is in RODI water before putting it back into the aquarium. NO3 and PO4 levels are back to zero again. Diatoms are gone too (for now)
Week 8: I dose some more NO3 and PO4 and go back to daily coral feeding to try to maintain some nutrients. I install a doser pump and automate dosing. This past week my levels have been all stable and where I want them to be, some corals such as my mystic sunset monti are clearly growing fast. The monti has covered like half the "hole" on the lost tissue it had with new growth in the past 3 weeks. Diatoms starting to come back...
So, I'm now doing 10% water changes every week, feeding coral every night, feeding fishes heavily, oh and I've completely opened the skimmer so it basically stops skimming and just helps with gas exchange. Corals look good, although I think one of my acroporas is now again loosing some color. Rocks are covered with GHA, although tangs help keep it short. N03 is low but detectable (probably 0.5 ppm) and PO4 is undetectable if I measure end of day. I'm convinced its the algae, sucking out all phosphate from the system leaving my corals to starve...
So any ideas? Everywhere I read it says to keep PO4 low and algae will go away. My PO4 is undetectable even if I dose it directly and I feel corals will start starving again (so I'm feeding heavily), still there's algae all over the place. I use 0 TDS water I filter with a RODI filter at home. Haven't measured silicates but I understand that 0 TDS means there's no silicates in there... Past 3 days I have begun target "killing" algae with hydrogen peroxide introducing 6ml every day, targeting a different part of the rock each day... this is helping but will take a long time to kill it all. I've also covered the rock that has no frags with small pieces of coral rubble I had in order to "shadow" the lights and kill some more algae (you can see the blue coral rubble in the pictures...)
I think my lights have too much white and that is not helping. I have ordered 2 radion G5s which will be here in 4 weeks (should have sold those Orphek lights back in the day when they were the coolest thing avaible!)
Any ideas? Should I just be patient and the algae will go away as the tank matures? A part of me thinks I should put the skimmer back on and start changing the filter wool weekly as well as feeding even more... right now wool is changed monthly, since I can't get any PO4 I figured leaving it a long time might help with some PO4, but now I'm starting to think maybe there's more to it than just PO4 and maybe cleaner water is better...
Thanks!!
So, I have been reading reef2reef posts for a long time, I think its time to chip in and share my tank and maybe get some practical advise from the community. Here's my story:
I'm from Santiago, Chile (South America). I'm married and have 3 baby girls, ages 7, 4 and 1. I started reefing about 10 years ago. Put together a 35G with a hang on back skimmer (AquaC Remora Pro), bunch of live rock and some corals. No skimmer, nothing automated but the ATO (JBL). Had it for 2 years and by that time I was pretty proud of what had been accomplished with the tank looking well stocked with nice corals. I had a fairly simple routine and almost did no testing, would mainly look at the tank and act according to how I saw the coral polyp extension on different species. Here's a short video of that tank:
Unfortunately, during a 5 day vacation there was a problem with a automatic feeder and a bunch of food went in at the same time causing a complete tank crash. I got back from vacations to find everything had died during my absence. We were about to move to a bigger apartment and had already bought all the hardware to upgrade to a 150G, needless to say my wife told me to forget about it and I ended up selling all the equipment but the 2 orphek PR156W lights that I had bought. At the time I was fresh out of university and the lights had costed what was a significant amount of money, I kinda couldn't get myself to sell them hoping to one day put them to use again. This was April 2012.
Fast forward to 2020. I now live in a house, and I'm stuck at home because of the pandemic. Usually I travel a lot, spending 2-4 days a week travelling abroad because of my work so I had kind of accepted the fact that building a reef tank again would be something I would do after I retired or something. But now I'm stuck home working from my computer and I realized it was the perfect opportunity to build a new tank! I convinced my wife and I embarked on this adventure again. So happy I did (and she said yes)!
I put together a 80G cube. Build the stand myself. The glass is starfire 12mm, dimensions are 70x70x60cm. This time I have a sump where I have a vertex omega 150 skimmer, a UV sterilizer, filter wool and a X-port block. The overflow is an eshopps M size I think, and the lights are my PR156WB's which have been sitting in my basement for 8 years. Flow is provided by 2 MP10's on the back. The tank was put together on May 27th after 3 weeks of cycling the rock with Microbacter7 in a big trashcan. I have 1 bag of oolite aragonite for a shallow sand bed (also had that bag sitting in the basement for 9 years LOL). All rock was dry rock, all dead coral skeleton which had all been kept dry in my basement (guess what, rocks also in basement for past 9 years, it was all supposed to go into my 150G I never built). I also run some carbon passively in the sump in a mesh bag which I change monthly.
So here it is, tomorrow 9 weeks from day 1.
Livestock:
Fish
- Desjardini sailfin tang
- Hepatus tang
- Grama Loreto
- 2 Ocellaris clown fish
- Engineer Goby
- Banggai Cardinal
Corals (all frags)
- 4 acroporas (dont know exactly what species they are)
- Mystic sunset montipora
- Green polyp encrusting montipora
- branching pink polyp montipora
- red and green plate montipora (actually 2 different shades of red)
- Pocillopora
- 7 different types of zoas
- red actinodiscus
- green rhodactis
- Frogspawn
- 2 hammer corals
- 3 rose bubble tip anemones
- Green star polyps
- cryptonite candy coral
- Turbinaria
- Chalice (not sure which species)
- Xenia
- Kenya tree
As you can see I have been very impatient and have put a bunch of stuff pretty fast. I just couldn't help myself. I know I should have waited more for things to stable out, but here I am, trying to keep everything alive. Although I had some problems, the tank currently seems to be doing good and no corals have been lost. Here's a quick story of what I've been through. My original plan was no water changes. I had read a lot about people keeping nice systems with no water changes so that was the initial plan:
Weeks 1-2: Added the fish and the first corals. Both NO3 and PO4 had been at 0 since day one so I figured hey, I got myself I ULNS, this is awesome. Corals seemed fine to me although I can't see any growth. I'm not testing for anything but NO3 or PO4 because I thought that with so little corals there's no way I'm using any Ca, MG or KH...
Week 3: Corals are clearly not so fine. All sps are loosing color, my pocillopora which was dark is by now almost white, still, extending polyps though. I decide corals need feeding. I buy restor, macrovore and reefblizzard (all brightwell) and start target feeding daily. No signs of things getting better.
Week 4: A transparent slime starts to appear on rockwork, it has bubbles, it forms during daytime. After a bunch of reading I think its dinos. I measure a Ca, Mg and KH and I realize my KH has significantly diminished (8,7, down from 10,5 on day 1)! I begin dosing buffer to bring my kh back up to 10.5 dKH. (This I did very slowly, during the course of 3,5 weeks)
I decide to attack the dinos with a full on attack:
1.- 1 day total blackout
2.- Dosed both NO3 and PO4 to the system (Seachem flourish nitrogen and phosphorus)
3.- Heavy siphoning 3-5 times a day everywhere I would see the slime
4.- Stopped coral feeding
5.- Begun dosing Microbacter CLEAN. Started the blackout day with the "for problem aquariums" recommended dosage, then continued with daily dosing.
So, after 5 days dinos are gone, but some coral has suffered. My encrusting montis both have lost tissue, same as 2 out of 4 acroporas. The rest of the corals seem fine. Now at least I get a reading on NO3 and PO4.
Week 5 (the good week): My corals start getting color again! Polyp extension! No dinos! Hey, I think I got the hang of this thing! I calculate my Ca, Mg and KH consuption and start dosing 3-part and Kalkwasser to maintain stability in everything (I dose half kalk half 3-part as I like the benefits of kalk but also added trace elements of 3-part). Around this time I also begin to get diatoms, pretty heavily in the sand floor.
Week 6: I start to get cyano. Also all rocks habve turned green with hair algae. I keep dosing MB clean, I put my powerheads at the max to up my flow. After one week its kinda the same and I say heck, lets nuke this with chemiclean.
Week 7: I apply chemiclean. Cyano is gone, corals seem fine! I decide this no water changes idea is crap and I begin weekly 10% water changes (did a 25% change after the chemiclean). Also, during water changes I siphon out all the top layer of the sandbed and rinse is in RODI water before putting it back into the aquarium. NO3 and PO4 levels are back to zero again. Diatoms are gone too (for now)
Week 8: I dose some more NO3 and PO4 and go back to daily coral feeding to try to maintain some nutrients. I install a doser pump and automate dosing. This past week my levels have been all stable and where I want them to be, some corals such as my mystic sunset monti are clearly growing fast. The monti has covered like half the "hole" on the lost tissue it had with new growth in the past 3 weeks. Diatoms starting to come back...
So, I'm now doing 10% water changes every week, feeding coral every night, feeding fishes heavily, oh and I've completely opened the skimmer so it basically stops skimming and just helps with gas exchange. Corals look good, although I think one of my acroporas is now again loosing some color. Rocks are covered with GHA, although tangs help keep it short. N03 is low but detectable (probably 0.5 ppm) and PO4 is undetectable if I measure end of day. I'm convinced its the algae, sucking out all phosphate from the system leaving my corals to starve...
So any ideas? Everywhere I read it says to keep PO4 low and algae will go away. My PO4 is undetectable even if I dose it directly and I feel corals will start starving again (so I'm feeding heavily), still there's algae all over the place. I use 0 TDS water I filter with a RODI filter at home. Haven't measured silicates but I understand that 0 TDS means there's no silicates in there... Past 3 days I have begun target "killing" algae with hydrogen peroxide introducing 6ml every day, targeting a different part of the rock each day... this is helping but will take a long time to kill it all. I've also covered the rock that has no frags with small pieces of coral rubble I had in order to "shadow" the lights and kill some more algae (you can see the blue coral rubble in the pictures...)
I think my lights have too much white and that is not helping. I have ordered 2 radion G5s which will be here in 4 weeks (should have sold those Orphek lights back in the day when they were the coolest thing avaible!)
Any ideas? Should I just be patient and the algae will go away as the tank matures? A part of me thinks I should put the skimmer back on and start changing the filter wool weekly as well as feeding even more... right now wool is changed monthly, since I can't get any PO4 I figured leaving it a long time might help with some PO4, but now I'm starting to think maybe there's more to it than just PO4 and maybe cleaner water is better...
Thanks!!
