Elos 70 upgrade

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

Loving that light mount! Awesome job!

 

[WDKegge]

Some major changes coming to this tank over the next few months.

The tank has been up for I think a year now, and while I do love it, I am constantly finding flaws, or things that bother me with the display (who doesn't right?) the tank has swayed back and forward between a mixed reef, sofites, sps, I can't seem to make up my mind. Over the last several months tho I have really been enjoying SPS and constantly trying to get lighting, water, and flow to try and maximize growth and color. This has shown me however how limited I am in terms of placement I can do on my rockwork, I do love the rock that I built, but it just doesn't allow me to do the things I want to do.

After a long night of thinking I came to the conclusion that with the lighting that I have now I want to go ALL acros. To do this I will be selling off the majority of my sofites and LPS, fragging off the sps that I currently have and REMOVING all of my rockwork for something along the lines of THIS:

I came across this tank while browsing one of the SPS facebook groups, the guy had ran into a AEF issue and ditched his rock in place of pvc pipe. I know it might not look the best, and I certainly know that mine won't be for a LONG time, but I can see it a year or two later becoming a beautiful wall of acros.

After doing some research on biological filtration I was about to order several blocks of marinepure for my sump to take the place of the live rock when I was turned on by several people to Siporax, after some reading I decided to go with it. I placed a order for 10L of 25MM siporax that should arrive later this week, I will be building a eggcrate basket to store it in the refugium section of my sump. I plan on waiting a month or so to let bacteria cultivate onto the siporax before removing one Island from my tank at a time.

Any tips anyone can offer while I make this change would be greatly appreciated!

 

[WDKegge]

Little long overdue electrical cleanup for a sunday project, used an old crate to match most of the barnwood and wine barrel furniture in my house.

 

[WDKegge]

Siporax arrived and added to the tank today. Any thoughts on how long it would take for it to build up the bacteria needed? I managed to get just under the 10l that I ordered into the fuge area.

 

[WDKegge]

Decided against the PVC scape, friends (and wife) talked me out of it. I ended up ordering 30 lbs of tonga shelf rock from BRS. Here is where I got before I had to head off to work tonight:

Still touch up work here and there to do, I may also go higher with the scape as it sits very low right now, might try proping them up another 6-8 inches to see how it looks. I am drooling over how much surface area I am going to have for SPS!

 

[WDKegge]

So half of the new scape is in, I didn't think there would be much die off from the rock that I used and that the rest of the filtration would be able to pick up whatever there was. I think I was about half right, about a few days after putting the left side in I had a huge brown diatom outbreak over the tank, nothing seems too upset, in fact since adding the new light and two more vortech mp10's polyp extension on my sps has came roaring back, for a good while I was starting to loose polyp extension on almost all my sps.

The other half of my rockwork is cycling in a brute container, I am going to wait for it to cycle before moving it to the display. I also have about 20lbs of a nice heavy grade sand I plan on adding back into the tank once the other side goes in.

Here is a current full take shot, things are kind of a mess.

Closeup of the left side, lots of room for sps!

Some closeups of a few pieces, polyp extension has been fantastic!

Myagai Tort

"Chewy" from my friends tank, short for chewbaca because it's so furry

Mother of pearl I got from MARS swap.

Thanos from MARS swap

Oregon Tort I won in the raffle at MARS swap

Tyree blue stag from MARS

Chalices have really been loving the lighting change too!

SC Dynamite

DC Sweet dreams

 

[daelie]

That's pretty awesome to see that your SPS are coming back nicely. Do you think that the lights or the increase in flow was the major contributor to seeing your PE come back?

 

[WDKegge]

That's pretty awesome to see that you're SPS are coming back nicely. Do you think that the lights or the increase in flow was the major contributor to seeing your PE come back?

I believe the main factor to be the extra flow, within 6 hours of adding on the extra pumps I began to see PE on stuff I hadn't seen polyps on since the day I got them.

 

[Mirkus]

I see you are selling tank. What happened?

 

[WDKegge]

I see you are selling tank. What happened?

I hit a weird spot with the tank a few weeks ago, I found myself really really unhappy with the new rockwork I had made and just kind of down after spending all that time and money rebuilding what I thought I wanted. In the end after talking to a bunch of local hobbyist friends of mine I decided to stick with it. I had gotten away of what I really pictured my tank would look like, I had pictured flowing coral, lots of movement, a large diversity of sps, softies and lps. What I had infront of me was not that, and I did not see it becoming possible with the core structure I had. I debated selling everything and getting something like a lagoon 50 and just keeping chalices and high end mushrooms, but I realized I would never get what I have invested into this setup, plus the elos is such a nice tank. SOooooooooo...

I ordered 70 lbs worth of marco rock (50 lbs key largo, 20 lbs flat cut one side) and really sat down and thought about what I wanted, I printed up a bunch of pictures of aquascapes and hung them on the wall in front of me and went to work over the course of the weekend. This is the result:

Obviously looking like hell at the moment with everything fragged up off the old rock and dust still coming off the new rock, but I am thrilled with how this came out. I can SEE in my mind what it will look like filled out now and I think I finally have a handle on what I want. I am currently in the process of picking up a much larger variety of corals to place everywhere to really bring out that true "chunk of the ocean" that I am trying to achieve. I will post more updates as the tank fills in more.

 

[WDKegge]

Tank has cleared up enough for some decent pictures, makes me sad that i'm over a year into this setup and it still looks like almost nothing, but that's what I get for constantly changing my mind I suppose, either way I am really happy with how everything looks now, time to start collecting some more high end sps and let everything grow.

Sorry for the window glare!

 

[293482398]

Tank has cleared up enough for some decent pictures, makes me sad that i'm over a year into this setup and it still looks like almost nothing, but that's what I get for constantly changing my mind I suppose, either way I am really happy with how everything looks now, time to start collecting some more high end sps and let everything grow.

Sorry for the window glare!

I really like the new scape, top picture is great.

 

[WDKegge]

New bulb time! The bulbs that came with the guisemann were in need of being replaced when I picked it up, so after selling a few frags I went ahead about ordered new bulbs. I had been missing some of that bright blue pop that I got from LEDS and instead of hanging on a reefbrite or something like that I decided to try one of the new E5 bulbs, I went with the "blue pop" bulb in place of my ATI purple+

T5 only - 3 ATI blue+ one purple+

T5 only 3 ATI blue+ and one E5 Blue pop

T5/E5 and 14k Phionex Halide

Overall I am pretty happy with it, it's giving me some amazing pop (I really like the blue look) without having to hang extra stuff on my fixture.

Polyp extension has been fantastic and everything is settling in great after the rescape. Everything is really happy, fish seem so much more active and out and about with the new scape as well, so I assume they are happy too.

Here are some pictures with all lights on in the afternoon.

ASD rainbow phionex booger that I picked up.

 

[WDKegge]

Still chugging along, I replaced my 2 mp10's and one mp40 with a new 200 series maxspect gyre, I am really enjoying the flow its getting across the whole tank and it's so much quieter in my livingroom, hardwood floors tend to carry noise and I now no longer hear the constant whirl of vortechs, the controller is a little funky, but it's getting the job done.

FTS

Since getting new bulbs sps have been growing way better than that I have ever seen when I had the LEDS, before they seemed to just encrust and never really sprout up, with the metal halide T5 all the growth is vertical:

Mid last month:

This morning:

Also I can't believe how much my bounce has grown from the sad little booger I got it as:

Today:

I plan on taking a few small cuts off the foot of the bounce tonight in hopes of propagating it to trade for other corals.

Also my lone jawbreaker finally decided to move around and actually came completely off the plug it was on, leaving a nice big baby behind, hopefully more to come.

Up close:

 

[Clayton Jessup]

Everything looks good , I love the pop of the E5 bulbs , good to know about the Vortech's and good to know about the gyre as well . Loving the tank more and more !!!

 

[WDKegge]

Got loaded up on sticks yesterday from a friend. Things are finally starting to settle in on the tank I think, I messed with it A LOT in the past 6 months, finally at a point now where I just need to monitor and watch it grow. Thinking about adding a 2nd gyre just to get the flow coming from different sides of the tank

Shrooms happy again after having the jawbreaker detach, The baby if left on the plug has a nice fat red streak in it.

New jersey bounce.

RR Angry bird

RR pretty in pink

RR lime in the sky

A few other RR pieces that I forgot the name

 

[WDKegge]

Made a short video of the goings on with the tank!

 

[Mattres]

I like the video! I think the scape is very well layed out to. 6 months under the metal halide and she'll be growing like a weed!

 

[WDKegge]

Been really diligent on my water changes and dosing lately, tank is flourishing.

Angle shot:

Sideboob, almost makes me wish I had set the tank up peninsula style:

Found this micro jawbreaker while I was cleaning up my shroom box, I thought it was a cool find:

The first jawbreaker split I got has some really nice red coming in on it for being so small.

Some random closeup shots for fun:

 

[WDKegge]

Picked up some reefbrite strips from a friend of mine, removed the E5 bulb as I found it really washed everything out, replaced it with a ATI purple+

Loving the color