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I'm a long time lurker on reef2reef! Joined about a month ago but I can finally share my current tank! A little about my reefing history:
I've always been an animal lover growing up! I've had fish since I was about 5 years old, starting with fresh water. During elementary and middle school I was already breeding discus and selling the babies to my LFS in Austria. By high school I started reefing. I had a 220-250 gallon tank as my first tank, this was in 2009 in the middle east, so most products were Chinese or European. But being close to the red sea, the fish and coral were huge! and very very very inexpensive, we're talking huge plate size tangs for about $60, huge colonies of coral about 24 inches for $100. So I really got a good taste for reefing from day one! The tank was put down in 2013 when I went to college (my parents did not want to maintain it lol, can't blame them since I did everything manually - I was dosing products from Kent since that's the only option available at the time). Since then I've had many nano tanks can't even remember what animals and the tank sizes were since I kept moving from country to country and apartments. Fast forward to now: This is the largest system I've had since my 220-ish one.
This is a Reef Octopus Lux90: (Display 48 gallons, sump about 16-ish)
Light: Fluval Marine LED 3.0 (light settings shown below)
Pump: Tunze Nano Stream 6040 (currently being repaired, so I have Hydor Korilia at 530 gph)
Heater: Eheim Jager 150 watts
Return: Reef Octopus AQ 3000
ATS: IceCap PRO Turf Scrubber In sump (Small, AGS 100) - I scrape once a week
So far not dosing any thing just doing a 15gallon water change every 10 days using Tropic Marin Proreef salt. Will eventually use All for reef, on a doser just waiting to get a little more stability in the parameters.
I do however dose PNS Pro-bio and Yellow Snow interchangeably every day - I live by this stuff!
Animals:
Pair of clownfish
(1) Six line wrasse
(1) Saltwater molly
(1) Blue Chromis
(1) Jester Goby
(1) Sleeper Gold head goby
(1) Purple Firefish
(1) Mandarin Goby
(1) peppermint shrimp
(1) Tiger snapping shrimp
(2) Fighting Conchs
(1) Electric hermit crab
(1) Red Sea Star
An array of snails and small hermit crabs
The system has been running for about 6 weeks now. As you can see Im recovering from hair algae, luckily I got large a pin cushion urchin that really took care of the algae. I don't want to put my hand in the tank until I add more fish or coral. I really avoid putting my hand in the tank unless I get new animals or there is an absolute emergency. The coral and fish were all in a 30 gallon All-in-one system I had before this. The other "lighter" colored rock is wild live rock from KP Aquatics. Funny enough the hair algae did not grow on the wild live rock only the the older live rock from my previous system that was running for 2 years. I will add more fish with time, but won't add any corals until the system has reached 6 months old. I'm more of a fish guy so I'll probably add a monti and/or some birds nest and just let them take over the tank. I prefer a small variety of corals but large colonies - not a frag person at all lol. Fish wise, I'll add a couple more smaller nano fish and maybe some medium fish. I tend to lean towards smaller fish since I like the movement between the rock and coral.
The tank is still somewhat in the "ugly" stage but I thought I could share now that its sorta presentable lol. I'll be more proud of it in about 6 months once everything really settles and I add some more fish and coral!
Thank you! Looks like now I have a project for the weekend! I managed to find some pictures of the tank empty and before adding. I guess for now I'll work my way backwards and show the build up till now. Thank you for the advice, I wasn't entirely sure how to make a build thread lolWelcome! Glad you joined
Have you considered starting your build thread? I found its a great place to document my tank's evolution for myself. Like you, I started tank first then joined, so I'm still finding myself going back collecting pictures & updating historically as well as current state. Once you create your first post in your thread and link it to your account, they will give you build badge (look left, under my ID). Essentially you can copy everything that you put into this thread into a thread in Forum Member Tanks (select proper size directory) and then link - voila!
This is a good reference book type online article I still review:
The Supreme Guide To Setting Up A Saltwater Reef Aquarium
This article was sponsored by @MarineDepot at www.marinedepot.com. Introduction The marine environment is one of the most complex systems on the planet. The aquarium you are about to set up is only a tiny sliver of the vast ocean, but it is no...www.reef2reef.com