I've been finding myself participating more again on the forums, so I figure I'd go ahead and document my current reefkeeping state while I'm at it. I've been keeping aquariums since I was in elementary school. The aquarium hobby is one of the few passions that has stuck with me my whole life. My first salt tank was in 1990 when I was in middle school. It wasn't a huge success. The undergravel filter grew a lot of Cyano, and I remember my tomato clown treated the cyano like an anemone. My first reef was in 1995 reusing the same tank. It had Florida live rock, flourescent strip lights, and a Skilter. I actually had good success given the time and equipment. For some reason, I had great luck with sponges in that system. Since then, I've had numerous reef tanks... And it would be boring to recap all the systems. But the highlight reel would show a wide variety of husbandry shifts, changes in types of corals, etc. A lot of that curiosity has been documented on some well known blogs, as well as some small footnotes in books. I've had seagrass tanks, reefs running original Walter Adey dump bucket ATS, carbon dosing, and true Jaubert system, berlin, you name it. Hopefully I can dig up some old pics. Anyway back to the not so distant past.....
Around 2015, I noticed my longstanding 180-gallon tank was looking rough and deemed it ready to be replaced. This was the most recent pic I could find before tearing it down:
In it's place I upgraded to a 225-gallon, which was the largest tank I could fit in the space. The tank did well for the 3 years I had it.
Unfortunately, I didn't anticipate that we would find ourselves wanting to remodel the main floor of the house a few years later. That meant tearing down the tank and moving it. We also liked the idea of converting the free'd up space to a play area for the kids. The good news is that we had just renovated our finished basement, and there was a good spot for a reef tank down there. The only issue was that the wall was shorter and would not accommodate the 225-gallon. So I found myself needing to downsize to a 5-foot tank. Ultimately, I settled on a Red Sea Reefer 625xxl. I really like the design of these tanks.
In the midst of all these decisions, catastrophe struck. One particular morning, I noticed an electrical smell near the existing reef aquarium. I poked my head around and found nothing. My wife called me a few hours later at work and informed me that there was smoke coming out of the aquarium stand! I rushed home on my lunch break, and finally discovered the electrical cord had completely disconnected from the heater! I had a bare copper wire sitting in my sump surging with electricity every time the apex thermostat activated it. The water in the sump had black soot on the surface. The corals were all bleaching in the display. I was devastated.
The only silver lining is that this didn't happen a week later when we were out of town. I made a quick run to my local fish store and stocked up on Purigen, Cuprisorb, Carbon, and Polyfilter. You could say I was throwing the kitchen sink of media at the problem. I also proceeded with 2 large water changes. I think the electrical current was causing electrolysis of the copper wire. And we all know what copper does to inverts. Long story short, I lost a lot of my corals.
So there I was with a plan to downsize and move the reef to the basement, and an existing tank full of dying corals. I sat back in a semi-burned out state and reflected on the opportunity to start somewhat fresh. Of all the types of tanks I've set up, the tanks that I enjoyed most were uncomplicated mixed reefs with lots of diversity. I'll always get a kick out of noticing some small hitchiker or cryptic fish. And the tranquility of moving soft corals in a mixed reef is hard to beat. The heater catastrophe impacted my existing SPS population more than the LPS and softies. In a way that was a mixed blessing, as I wouldn't have had room for all the corals in the downsize and it helped steer my tank more towards that mixed reef idea. I'll dive into the build of the current tank in the next posting, but here's how it looks as of this date:
Around 2015, I noticed my longstanding 180-gallon tank was looking rough and deemed it ready to be replaced. This was the most recent pic I could find before tearing it down:
In it's place I upgraded to a 225-gallon, which was the largest tank I could fit in the space. The tank did well for the 3 years I had it.
Unfortunately, I didn't anticipate that we would find ourselves wanting to remodel the main floor of the house a few years later. That meant tearing down the tank and moving it. We also liked the idea of converting the free'd up space to a play area for the kids. The good news is that we had just renovated our finished basement, and there was a good spot for a reef tank down there. The only issue was that the wall was shorter and would not accommodate the 225-gallon. So I found myself needing to downsize to a 5-foot tank. Ultimately, I settled on a Red Sea Reefer 625xxl. I really like the design of these tanks.
In the midst of all these decisions, catastrophe struck. One particular morning, I noticed an electrical smell near the existing reef aquarium. I poked my head around and found nothing. My wife called me a few hours later at work and informed me that there was smoke coming out of the aquarium stand! I rushed home on my lunch break, and finally discovered the electrical cord had completely disconnected from the heater! I had a bare copper wire sitting in my sump surging with electricity every time the apex thermostat activated it. The water in the sump had black soot on the surface. The corals were all bleaching in the display. I was devastated.
The only silver lining is that this didn't happen a week later when we were out of town. I made a quick run to my local fish store and stocked up on Purigen, Cuprisorb, Carbon, and Polyfilter. You could say I was throwing the kitchen sink of media at the problem. I also proceeded with 2 large water changes. I think the electrical current was causing electrolysis of the copper wire. And we all know what copper does to inverts. Long story short, I lost a lot of my corals.
So there I was with a plan to downsize and move the reef to the basement, and an existing tank full of dying corals. I sat back in a semi-burned out state and reflected on the opportunity to start somewhat fresh. Of all the types of tanks I've set up, the tanks that I enjoyed most were uncomplicated mixed reefs with lots of diversity. I'll always get a kick out of noticing some small hitchiker or cryptic fish. And the tranquility of moving soft corals in a mixed reef is hard to beat. The heater catastrophe impacted my existing SPS population more than the LPS and softies. In a way that was a mixed blessing, as I wouldn't have had room for all the corals in the downsize and it helped steer my tank more towards that mixed reef idea. I'll dive into the build of the current tank in the next posting, but here's how it looks as of this date:
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