Matt's Peninsula 14

[MattL87]

I’ve had the tank setup for about 4 months now and so far so good. Wanted to make this thread to keep track of it and hopefully learn some stuff from everyone here!

Equipment:
IM peninsula 14 tank
Syncra Silent .5 return pump
Neptune Apex with PH, Salinity, Temp, ORA probes
Finex 50w Titanium heater
Kessil A80 Blue
Tunze ATO
InTank media basket with filter floss and chemi pure blue nano
Bag of seachem matrix in chamber 2

Creatures:
Yellow watchman Goby (Named Grumpy)
Cleaner shrimp (Shrimpy)
1 Turbo snail
1 Nasarius snail

Right now I'm thinking the A80 isn't enough light and want to switch it to a Prime HD, any thoughts on that? And also maybe upgrading the sycra silent .5 to the 1.0.

 

[dbl]

First, welcome to R2R and your new reefing family. I'm a sucker for a peninsula so I'm signing up to watch this one mature.

 

[MattL87]

First, welcome to R2R and your new reefing family. I'm a sucker for a peninsula so I'm signing up to watch this one mature.

Thank you! I love your tank setup, hopefully if I can master this little tank I can convince the other half to let me go bigger!

 

[MattL87]

Little update, got a Polyp Lab filter for my phone to get rid of some of the blue in the pictures. Added two new corals and rearranged the scape a bit.

New corals are an octopus coral and not really sure what the other one is, it looks like little flowers. Some time of lps I'm assuming. It's the one above the goby's cave.

Also if you notice on the glass there are thousands of those , even when I clean the glass they are back the next day. Is it bad to have to many? And how do I lessen them so they aren't on the glass. Makes the tank look dirty!

 

[ReeferJen]

Nice Setup! I have the same tank. You definitely have more open space than I do. I struggle with coral placement because I have somewhat larger rocks in my scape.

 

[mike_zackary]

Beautiful tank. How do you get to keep stability in such small water volume?

 

[MattL87]

Nice Setup! I have the same tank. You definitely have more open space than I do. I struggle with coral placement because I have somewhat larger rocks in my scape.

Thank you, I'm actually following your build! I actually started the tank with the least amount of rock possible because I wasn't sure how I was going to stock it, this way I can add as I go. Especially for corals that will need their own little island or space to themselves. Plus I really like the open swimming space in the front. (even though I have no fish that swim ;Woot).

Beautiful tank. How do you get to keep stability in such small water volume?

The tank is a 14 gallon, water wise probably around 11-12 gallons I'd guess so It's not as small as a lot in the nano section. The tank is only coming up on month 5 now as well so maybe I'm just lucky nothing crazy has happened so far? I can break down what I do on a weekly basis though.

For evaporation I have an auto top off so the salinity doesn't change and I don't have to worry about that.

Once a week I do a 5 gallon water change which is about 40% of the tanks volume. I'll shut off all the equipment, use my glass scraper to scrape the glass, then take a little metal rake and stir up all the sand bed to get debris floating around, then I siphon at the 5 gallons of water, refill with 5 gallons fresh saltwater. Turn all the equipment back on which it will normally be a little dirty and cloudy from stirring up the sand bed so I give it about 30 min for it to all run into the filter. At which point I'll then change out the filter floss for some new floss.

Every other water change I change out 1 of the chemi pure nano packets. I run 2 in the tank so every two weeks I change out the oldest one which would be a month old. And at this time I also shake out my seachem matrix that I have in a little mesh bag in the old saltwater to clear it of any debris or **** that has settled in it.

And that's literally all I do, no dosing or anything like that. Maybe it helps I only have a small goby and cleaner shrimp that I spot feed with a pair of tweezers every other day, and feed reef roids on Friday's before my water change on Saturday.

 

[MattL87]

Playing with my new macro clip on lense for my phone.

(Don’t mind the fire digi, it fell in the sand and was basically dead, starting to see some polyps coming back out on the opposite of the picture)

 

[BoBoBREWSKI]

Awesome pics!

 

[ReeferJen]

Playing with my new macro clip on lense for my phone.

(Don’t mind the fire digi, it fell in the sand and was basically dead, starting to see some polyps coming back out on the opposite of the picture)

Love these. I have frogspawn envy.