Daelie's Reefer 250

[daelie]

Hey all, new guy here, long time watcher though haha got a killer deal during black friday at a LFS on a reefer, and I would have liked to go larger, but my apartment will really only allow 55g or smaller so the reefer 250 was perfect. Previously I had an IM 30L, which was sold so most of the livestock from that has been split into two 20g long tanks that I'll slowly be transferring over to this as it gets set up.



Tank & Stand: Red Sea Reefer 250, White stand



Skimmer: Undecided



Lighting: Giesemann Matrixx II



ATO: Going to use tunze osmolator to top up the built in ATO



Heater: Eheim Jager 100w x 2



Flow: 2 x Ecotech mp10wQD



Substrate: Caribsea SeaFlor Reef Sand



Rock: Tonga Shelf, Pukani, possible Tonga Branch



Livestock: Empty, for now, but currently have my 2 lightning maroons, 1 royal dottyback and a skunk cleaner shrimp anxiously waiting.



Here's a picture of the tank all set up in its corner, it was a bit off level so I've filled it about halfway to get the carpet under it compressed before I shim it to make sure it's completely level.

 

[143MPCo]

Welcome to Reef2Reef, sounds like a great build!

 

[Saltine]

Awesome! I want to make the jump to a 250, saving now . What was the best price you got from LFS if you don't mind me asking?

 

[daelie]

Awesome! I want to make the jump to a 250, saving now . What was the best price you got from LFS if you don't mind me asking?

Umm, I got the white (obviously) for 900 taxes in. BRS has it at 1399.

 

[Saltine]

Wow! Thanks! Time to start saving and possibly haggling .

 

[daelie]

The shot of me leveling was about a week ago, and I started transferring some of the livestock from my two 20's that I'm putting together into the tank very slowly. I just need to upload the pictures of that, possibly this afternoon if I stop procrastinating it.

 

[daelie]

Wow! Thanks! Time to start saving and possibly haggling .

Ha, yes, reefers are MSRP not MAP which a lot of people don't realize I think. Just gotta befriend a store owner and get it as close to cost as possible.

 

[Bong703]

I ordered mine on Amazon and got it for a Grand, best price I've seen without being social.

 

[daelie]

BIG UPDATE:


The first piece to unbox was the lights, which I originally ordered a 6 bulb setup during a sale, but it was mislabeled, and turned out to be an 8 bulb setup, so the store honored the same price, so I didn't complain in the end. Here's a few shots of the lights.





After getting the tank partially wet, I had all my corals/rock/fish from the previous tank divided between two 20 gallon tanks, so I ended up transferring all water/rock/corals from each tank over the course of a couple days, making sure it was a decently slow transition to not really cause a new cycle. Then began the aquascaping.

I started with a small island on the left that's mostly stayed the same this entire time



And then I decided for some shelves on the right side that are mainly going to be the make-up of a large zoanthid garden when everything grows in (hopefully).



To this :





After getting everything up and running, I was skimmerless for the better part of a month because my old tunze didn't really fit anywhere very well and I was torn between what would actually work well in the sump. In the end, I went with a used vertex that was a pretty good price, and it ended up taking up most of my sump space, but it started pulling out some really dark, awful smelling junk. I also repurposed some kessils I had lying around to supplement the t5 lighting and I mostly use them for some shimmer, and the dawn dusk lights on the tank. This FTS and sump shots were taken just after I got the skimmer.







These pictures were all taken roughly around the same time: Thumbnails are clickable



I began dosing a few of the zeovit additives as well a couple times of week to help nutrient levels and see a little better growth than I had in my 30L in the year and a bit prior. My doses were based on someone else's tank build on the zeovit forums that had a very similarly sized tank. My nutrients dropped fast, slightly bleaching a couple of my favias, but everything else responded really well to it and the favias are recovering at a slow pace.

The latest full tank shot is this one taken about a week ago:

 

[daelie]

And finally, while doing a water change, I took a bunch of top down photos to have a nice little album for such an update to the thread: All Clickable for Larger Versions!!



Hopefully I'll keep this slightly updated!

 

[revhtree]

Tank looks good! Nice light!

 

[daelie]

Tank looks good! Nice light!

Thanks, I really like the way it looks over the tank. I just need to get the hanging kit so it's not mounted directly on the glass and actually hang it up. I like having the kessils there as well for the shimmer.

_________________________________

Update:

Things have been growing quite well over the last little while, and I added a few new frags during a sale. I had a chance to snap a quick few photos the other night during a water change. Thinking of adding a sand sifting goby if I can get my hands on one in the next little while. A small bit of cyano has started appearing on the sand in some spots, so I've ramped up the flow a little bit more, and I vacuumed it out during the WC, hoping it doesn't return, and it's been a few days since I last saw it.

 

[daelie]

The cyano I mentioned in my last post actually got a decent hold shortly after and covered the sandbed. I did a water change and siphoned it all out and it hasn't really come back since. Other than that things are going well. My parameters have been staying quite solid and the favia that bleached during the transfer is finally getting some of its purple color back, very slowly but surely, I have it hiding slightly under a ledge on the left side of the tank. Here's a few pictures, still having trouble really showing how blue a few of the corals are, more practice with the camera and I'll figure it out.

New FTS:



Some half tank shots and a few macros

 

[daelie]

For today I just have a small little photo dump of some frags that I'm gonna try to keep track of the growth of over the coming months and hopefully trade/sell them once they get around to covering their plugs. Some have already taken off a lot more than their friends around them. Pictures were taken with the kessils on 100% intensity and 0% color.

 

[daelie]

Update!

Added a tuxedo urchin and a few chromis to get some more life in the tank, plus added a couple new corals and fiddled around with the camera to take a few new photos. Hopefully I'll be able to update my frag shots from the earlier post in the coming days/week, as I've looked at a few of them and have seen some good growth, just need to get off my butt and actually get some photos. For now, I'll leave with these.

 

[daelie]

A sad update today unfortunately.

2 days ago, I came home to see my female maroon not eating anything. Usually always at the top of the tank waiting for it when I walk in the room, she was just huddled inside the anemone watching the food go by. I was a little worried, so I took a video and some pictures for the disease forum here, since I looked and couldn't really see anything with regards to white dots on her skin or sliminess building up. @Humblefish (incredibly helpful guy, I thank him a lot for helping and giving advice) had a good look and couldn't see anything other than he mouth looked a little bigger than normal and she wasn't closing her mouth either, from this he deduced that she may have bitten some zoas near the anemone in an attempt to move them away, as that's decently common behavior, so I turned the lights out, and she stayed in the anemone as I went to sleep.

I woke up, and she was still in the anemone flapping away, still swimming strongly from all I could see, so I went to work for the day. My girlfriend feeds the fish once she gets home from work earlier than me and called me to tell me she looked worse, no longer in the anemone and just swimming very lethargicly, sometimes with her fins no longer moving and very near the bottom of the tank. I posted some pics in my disease thread again as well as video and he still could see nothing overly alarming, but suggested I get her out into quarantine to start some treatment. Unfortunately, she was gone when I got home. Within 24 hours, she went from a voracious eater to no longer in my tank, and his best guess was that she bit a zoa/paly and ingested a small amount of palytoxin that led to her rapid demise, incredibly unfortunate and gut wrenching. Everyone else in the tank seems perfectly fine so far, with the smaller clown taking over sole possession of the anemone for the time being, until I'm able to find a suitable mate for him, probably soon to be her.

 

[Humblefish]

My advice is to get a juvenile maroon. The male will morph into a female, and the juv will mature in around 6-8 months. That's how I did it with my last maroon pair. Again, sorry for your loss.

 

[daelie]

My advice is to get a juvenile maroon. The male will morph into a female, and the juv will mature in around 6-8 months. That's how I did it with my last maroon pair. Again, sorry for your loss.

Yup, that is definitely the plan after I wait a little while just to be sure there's not something weird going around in the tank. Might be a little bit of time just finding a juvenile. Thanks for your help though, it just happened way too fast to really help her.

 

[daelie]

Been a while since my last update. I've done a little bit of redoing the aquascape to be very minimal on the rock in the actual display and since I have both marinepure spheres and siporax in my sump, I haven't seen any negative effect from this change. There's been some good growth and coloration increase with a lot of corals and I saw a good recovery of a red planet frag that was given to me as a very pale sps frag a little over a month ago. I placed it on my frag rack and watched as it slowly regained color and polyp extension. Those pictures below to show the change.

Another SPS I've seen some good growth was my pink lemonade acro, it turned a little green after I ripped it off it's frag plug and glued it onto a rock, but it didn't take very long before the color properly returned and growth took off. Again a couple comparison pics.

A full tank shot with the pumps off, and I still need to tidy up a lot of frag plugs that are lying around, which I'll take of once I set up a frag tank I've been meaning to get running for a little while now.

Finally, I'll end with just a few other pics that I ended up taking after coming home from vacation. And one of the frag rack that I'm hoping to get out of my display in the coming weeks.

 

[revhtree]

Very nice!