kwirky
Community Member
I have a big cube of glass in my house, full of salty water, which has muck and animals playing in the muck. I spend an exhorbitant amount of money on it, ensuring that the animals living in the muck have enough muck to survive while ensuring the muck doesn't overtake the animals themselvs. If you've ever played the PC game, oxygen not included, it's basically like that: continually ensuring that the little critters don't drown in their own urine. I've kept a few salty muck tubs over the last 15 or so years and didn't see success until I owned my own house (landlords don't like muck tubs) and earned enough to afford all of the gizmos required to help the animals inside thrive in the muck. I felt like sharing my latest go at having a big glass muck tub, a 40g breeder sps tank which was recently upgraded to a reefer xl 525.
Back around 2008 I completely got out of the aquarium hobby because the burping, farting animals were too much to take care of and I decided I was not in a position of my life to keep their little burps and farts from choking them out of their own water. Back then, I didn't realize that these things were a constant battle with muck. A half decade after getting my degree, and when I had some disposible income, I decided to go with a bonafide freshwater muck tank. This time around, I wasn't naieve: I knew it had muck and I'd grow plants in the muck. The plants would thrive and suck all the muck up and the fish would be healthy. I hauld home a 75g in the passenger front seat of my 2 door mercedes, hooked up a 20 pound co2 tank, dropped in the muck (with loads of nitrates in it), threw plants in, and ended up with this:
I've had moderate success with this system over the years and came to learn that I prefer slow growing muck inhabitants. Most of those fast growing grasses are gone, replaced with slow growing stem plants. I wanted to do something saltwater & decided to keep SPS coral in a little tank.
While at the custom tank builder, asking for quotes, they had a little tank on the floor with "clearance" on it. $250 CAD for a 40g breeder with dual overflow and a sump. No stand. I loaded it up in the front seat of my car (big things always fit easier in the front seat by the way) and drove home, unable to make right hand lane changes the whole way.
I slapped together a plywood and 2x4 stand, thinking I'd upgrade it to the 85g 24x24x36 tank I originally went in to get quoted. Threw in a cheap bubble magus skimmer, built my own LED light system capable of over 300 PAR, and voila:
My spouse wasn't happy about the open front but I was happy which made her happy. I thought this was going to work quite well because I had a skimmer which would pull out the muck, a couple rubbermaid bins so I can change out the mucky water, and I even had an auto top off, which I knew I needed from when I kept a saltwater tank a decade previous. The test kits were expired and $1 a piece but that's fine, they'd be fine while cycling and I figured I could depend on them for judging the direction my parameters were heading and would use observation of the animals to judge health, like I did with the planted tank.
The LED lights were so bright that nobody could sit in the living room without their corneas being burned out. The light spilling was pretty bad but I was happy so my wife was happy. We have two living rooms any ways. Now if I only had some rock but it's so expensive. What should I do?
I picked up 80 pounds of the muckiest, most disgusting rock from an estate sale. When I arrived at the sale it was sitting in green, opaque, standing water in an aquarium which looked like it had been turned off for a half a year. The family member was eager to fish out the rocks so I didn't argue against that, loaded them all into a rubbermaid trash bin, and loaded the trash bin into the front passenger seat of my mercedes and drove home, excited about getting 80 pounds of rock for $50 CAD. I bleached it for a month, washed out the bleach for another month, then I had this:
It felt like a start. I added more channels to my light, using el-cheap ebay buck converts precariously rested atop the giant heatsinks I picked up at said custom tank builder for only $15 each. Scrap value as around $200 so even though the lights were ghetto, the heatsinks would make them a great starting point.
Besides, I was a poor boy from a poor family so this was success, not failure! I had over 100W of LED lighting for only $120!
So next came frags. A birdsnest and a piece of monti from a local who was shutting down their SPS tank. They had dual AP700s over a little 18x18 inch frag tank, automatic everything. I was excited to drop them into my little, pristine ghetto tank. They'd be my canaries.
A month or two later, after the nitrate cycle appeared to be complete I dropped in a small mariculted sps colony. I was fascinated by the large-ish polyps and the flourescent green color. Back in 2008, this was what I really wanted:
I'd sit in front of my tank and stare at the polyps for an hour at a time, completely mesmerized.
I added other frags, and have been adding fish. Over the course of a year I added more frags, fought with my skimmer, upgraded to dual kessil 360x's (my spouse was pleased because no more light spill). I started to get healthier coral when I added a hybrid t5ho fixture. Here's where it was at, with one rusty angel, one roland's damsel, and a tail spot blenny:
At this point, I felt like the king of muck. My muck was so unmuck that my nitrates were at zero, a different problem to have. I had a dosing pump system so I threw potassium nitrate on the 4th channel and felt that I was going to win the muck war. Then the a couple lightning storms hit, nuked the dosing pump, and 200mL of aquaforest fluids were dumped into my tank. I had a ph cut off but for some the PH never went over 8.8 but still, the animals didn't like it.
Multiple water changes later, I was in the local LFS with my spouse and she saw triggers and boxfish and puffers. Why can't we keep those? The tank's not big enough was my reply, you need like a 250 or bigger to give them space. Plus they'll eat my shrimp and stuff. How much is that big tank over there? The shop keep gave a price for the reefer 525. She thought it looked slick. We went home, I figured out where to put it, and just over two weeks ago, a buddy and I dragged it home in his SUV.
This was one of the most stressful, tiring weekends of my life. The friend with the truck was available to move it "tomorrow." I'm usually pretty good at logistics and thought "ok, I can do this." Paid for the tank, and rounded up all of the rubbermaid bins and buckets I could because the new tank had to go in the same place as the old tank. Our living room was a disaster for a few days, I lost two frags, and the firefish didn't survive the move. I was pretty depressed at the end of the three days, but everything else was doing ok, if not better than before the move.
Our living room was in disarray for over a week. Everything was hooked up temporarily, so that life support was in place, but I had to spend every evening over the next week re-running it all so it's tidy, not a fire hazard, not a shock hazard. All of the gizmos were dragged home piecemeal over a year and doing it all in 1 week was a LOT of work. My spouse was shocked at how much work was required. Friends who stopped by could look at the progress from a socially acceptable covid distance through the patio window and usually said something along the lines of, "wow, that's complex."
Then success! Everything fit under the stand, the living room was cleared out, and it was a nice clean muck tank. The muck rock was moved into the new one with lots of space all around. I failed at getting it all in the exact same position, much to the dismay of my frags which were almost colonies.
I really wanted to keep a copperband butterfly and knew it had to go in early, so it had no competition. The local LFS had one which was feverishly eating mysis so I put down a deposit & took him home a few days later. His name's Wall-E. He loves mysis, loved interacting with me, and I love him to death. I've been feeding him 3x per day and he still begs for food. He watches where I'm looking, and will look at the places I'm looking at. I just love him.
I tried my hand at cementing dry rock together, to fill in the tank and give more hiding spots for Wall-E as well as larger gaps for him to swim through.
My nitrates are now at zero, thanks to a 100W COB led grow light which can reach 1200 PAR at the refugium surface. I'm running a red sea 600 skimmer and I pull out 1 cubic foot of chaeto every week. I'm feeding to my heart's content (the fish love it). I added a 3rd kessil A360X and I'm still running the 3 foot T5HO for now. I'm getting 360-400 PAR at the upper regions, great for some sun loving sps, and I've put my deep water SPS at the bottom. I'm getting more colour, more growth, and more polyp extension than I did with the 40g and I'm only 3 weeks in. My birdsnets colony at the bottom has grown almost 1/2 an inch on all of the branches which were already facing upwards, which is insane. I over-sized much of the gear on my 40g so I already had 3x tunze 6055s with wavemakers and only had to add a jebao SW-20 to get crashing water movement along the top, which runs when the lights are at their brightest 6 hours out of the day. The tunzes are pulsing 24/7.
So now I'm excited. I have a little school of chromis in a 20g cube quarantine downstairs. I have 7 of them, 1/2 to 1" long. I won't be adding much for fish beyond that (I'm good at exercising control on that front, just not exercising control on gear purchases).
So this is where it's at as I type this: I have some open spots at the top, ready for some primo frags, with good, random turbulent water. I'm holding off until a month after introducing the chromis because I know that feeding them will throw things out of whack a bit. I might get a little coral quarantine on the go but it has to be cheap because the latest upgrade drained our savings a fair bit. I'll probably drag out 1/2 of the custom built LED lighting unit from when the 40g first started and use that for the quarantine's light. I'm still unsure how I'm going to do automatic top off for the coral quarantine for cheap.
So there we have it. I'm throwing in 3 cubes of hikari mysis every day, using a mesh feeder. The fish burp and fart it out, the coral lap up what they can, and the fuge takes out the rest. The cabinet keeps the burping and farting in the sump from overtaking the house so we smell just salty humidity in the room. I'm going to run with the 3 foot T5HO fixture for a while, too. Long term I want to add more LEDs and get them all towards the front, facing inwards almost 45 degrees so the light comes a bit more from the front and not the top. I suspect the acros will like it more.
If you go this far, thanks for reading!
Back around 2008 I completely got out of the aquarium hobby because the burping, farting animals were too much to take care of and I decided I was not in a position of my life to keep their little burps and farts from choking them out of their own water. Back then, I didn't realize that these things were a constant battle with muck. A half decade after getting my degree, and when I had some disposible income, I decided to go with a bonafide freshwater muck tank. This time around, I wasn't naieve: I knew it had muck and I'd grow plants in the muck. The plants would thrive and suck all the muck up and the fish would be healthy. I hauld home a 75g in the passenger front seat of my 2 door mercedes, hooked up a 20 pound co2 tank, dropped in the muck (with loads of nitrates in it), threw plants in, and ended up with this:
I've had moderate success with this system over the years and came to learn that I prefer slow growing muck inhabitants. Most of those fast growing grasses are gone, replaced with slow growing stem plants. I wanted to do something saltwater & decided to keep SPS coral in a little tank.
While at the custom tank builder, asking for quotes, they had a little tank on the floor with "clearance" on it. $250 CAD for a 40g breeder with dual overflow and a sump. No stand. I loaded it up in the front seat of my car (big things always fit easier in the front seat by the way) and drove home, unable to make right hand lane changes the whole way.
I slapped together a plywood and 2x4 stand, thinking I'd upgrade it to the 85g 24x24x36 tank I originally went in to get quoted. Threw in a cheap bubble magus skimmer, built my own LED light system capable of over 300 PAR, and voila:
My spouse wasn't happy about the open front but I was happy which made her happy. I thought this was going to work quite well because I had a skimmer which would pull out the muck, a couple rubbermaid bins so I can change out the mucky water, and I even had an auto top off, which I knew I needed from when I kept a saltwater tank a decade previous. The test kits were expired and $1 a piece but that's fine, they'd be fine while cycling and I figured I could depend on them for judging the direction my parameters were heading and would use observation of the animals to judge health, like I did with the planted tank.
The LED lights were so bright that nobody could sit in the living room without their corneas being burned out. The light spilling was pretty bad but I was happy so my wife was happy. We have two living rooms any ways. Now if I only had some rock but it's so expensive. What should I do?
I picked up 80 pounds of the muckiest, most disgusting rock from an estate sale. When I arrived at the sale it was sitting in green, opaque, standing water in an aquarium which looked like it had been turned off for a half a year. The family member was eager to fish out the rocks so I didn't argue against that, loaded them all into a rubbermaid trash bin, and loaded the trash bin into the front passenger seat of my mercedes and drove home, excited about getting 80 pounds of rock for $50 CAD. I bleached it for a month, washed out the bleach for another month, then I had this:
It felt like a start. I added more channels to my light, using el-cheap ebay buck converts precariously rested atop the giant heatsinks I picked up at said custom tank builder for only $15 each. Scrap value as around $200 so even though the lights were ghetto, the heatsinks would make them a great starting point.
Besides, I was a poor boy from a poor family so this was success, not failure! I had over 100W of LED lighting for only $120!
So next came frags. A birdsnest and a piece of monti from a local who was shutting down their SPS tank. They had dual AP700s over a little 18x18 inch frag tank, automatic everything. I was excited to drop them into my little, pristine ghetto tank. They'd be my canaries.
A month or two later, after the nitrate cycle appeared to be complete I dropped in a small mariculted sps colony. I was fascinated by the large-ish polyps and the flourescent green color. Back in 2008, this was what I really wanted:
I'd sit in front of my tank and stare at the polyps for an hour at a time, completely mesmerized.
I added other frags, and have been adding fish. Over the course of a year I added more frags, fought with my skimmer, upgraded to dual kessil 360x's (my spouse was pleased because no more light spill). I started to get healthier coral when I added a hybrid t5ho fixture. Here's where it was at, with one rusty angel, one roland's damsel, and a tail spot blenny:
At this point, I felt like the king of muck. My muck was so unmuck that my nitrates were at zero, a different problem to have. I had a dosing pump system so I threw potassium nitrate on the 4th channel and felt that I was going to win the muck war. Then the a couple lightning storms hit, nuked the dosing pump, and 200mL of aquaforest fluids were dumped into my tank. I had a ph cut off but for some the PH never went over 8.8 but still, the animals didn't like it.
Multiple water changes later, I was in the local LFS with my spouse and she saw triggers and boxfish and puffers. Why can't we keep those? The tank's not big enough was my reply, you need like a 250 or bigger to give them space. Plus they'll eat my shrimp and stuff. How much is that big tank over there? The shop keep gave a price for the reefer 525. She thought it looked slick. We went home, I figured out where to put it, and just over two weeks ago, a buddy and I dragged it home in his SUV.
This was one of the most stressful, tiring weekends of my life. The friend with the truck was available to move it "tomorrow." I'm usually pretty good at logistics and thought "ok, I can do this." Paid for the tank, and rounded up all of the rubbermaid bins and buckets I could because the new tank had to go in the same place as the old tank. Our living room was a disaster for a few days, I lost two frags, and the firefish didn't survive the move. I was pretty depressed at the end of the three days, but everything else was doing ok, if not better than before the move.
Our living room was in disarray for over a week. Everything was hooked up temporarily, so that life support was in place, but I had to spend every evening over the next week re-running it all so it's tidy, not a fire hazard, not a shock hazard. All of the gizmos were dragged home piecemeal over a year and doing it all in 1 week was a LOT of work. My spouse was shocked at how much work was required. Friends who stopped by could look at the progress from a socially acceptable covid distance through the patio window and usually said something along the lines of, "wow, that's complex."
Then success! Everything fit under the stand, the living room was cleared out, and it was a nice clean muck tank. The muck rock was moved into the new one with lots of space all around. I failed at getting it all in the exact same position, much to the dismay of my frags which were almost colonies.
I really wanted to keep a copperband butterfly and knew it had to go in early, so it had no competition. The local LFS had one which was feverishly eating mysis so I put down a deposit & took him home a few days later. His name's Wall-E. He loves mysis, loved interacting with me, and I love him to death. I've been feeding him 3x per day and he still begs for food. He watches where I'm looking, and will look at the places I'm looking at. I just love him.
I tried my hand at cementing dry rock together, to fill in the tank and give more hiding spots for Wall-E as well as larger gaps for him to swim through.
My nitrates are now at zero, thanks to a 100W COB led grow light which can reach 1200 PAR at the refugium surface. I'm running a red sea 600 skimmer and I pull out 1 cubic foot of chaeto every week. I'm feeding to my heart's content (the fish love it). I added a 3rd kessil A360X and I'm still running the 3 foot T5HO for now. I'm getting 360-400 PAR at the upper regions, great for some sun loving sps, and I've put my deep water SPS at the bottom. I'm getting more colour, more growth, and more polyp extension than I did with the 40g and I'm only 3 weeks in. My birdsnets colony at the bottom has grown almost 1/2 an inch on all of the branches which were already facing upwards, which is insane. I over-sized much of the gear on my 40g so I already had 3x tunze 6055s with wavemakers and only had to add a jebao SW-20 to get crashing water movement along the top, which runs when the lights are at their brightest 6 hours out of the day. The tunzes are pulsing 24/7.
So now I'm excited. I have a little school of chromis in a 20g cube quarantine downstairs. I have 7 of them, 1/2 to 1" long. I won't be adding much for fish beyond that (I'm good at exercising control on that front, just not exercising control on gear purchases).
So this is where it's at as I type this: I have some open spots at the top, ready for some primo frags, with good, random turbulent water. I'm holding off until a month after introducing the chromis because I know that feeding them will throw things out of whack a bit. I might get a little coral quarantine on the go but it has to be cheap because the latest upgrade drained our savings a fair bit. I'll probably drag out 1/2 of the custom built LED lighting unit from when the 40g first started and use that for the quarantine's light. I'm still unsure how I'm going to do automatic top off for the coral quarantine for cheap.
So there we have it. I'm throwing in 3 cubes of hikari mysis every day, using a mesh feeder. The fish burp and fart it out, the coral lap up what they can, and the fuge takes out the rest. The cabinet keeps the burping and farting in the sump from overtaking the house so we smell just salty humidity in the room. I'm going to run with the 3 foot T5HO fixture for a while, too. Long term I want to add more LEDs and get them all towards the front, facing inwards almost 45 degrees so the light comes a bit more from the front and not the top. I suspect the acros will like it more.
If you go this far, thanks for reading!
