My 27 year reef tank journey

[RobertK]

OK so this is not a build thread. This thread is to show what my tank looks like now and to tell how I got here. I've been spending a lot of time here on R2R lately, so I thought I'd post this in case anyone might be interested in my tank. I'll start by showing you what my tank looks like now, then go back in time and tell you how I got here.

Here is what it looks like now:

Tank: 70 gallon (48x15.5x21") glass, custom made by LeeMar Aquariums in 2007
Sump: holds ~10 gallons when running, DIY'd
Refugium: ~10 gallons, remote, DIY'd, lit by Kessil H80 Tuna Flora and growing chaeto on reverse photoperiod
Total water volume: approx. 65 gallons
Skimmer: Mini Bubble King 180
Return pump: Iwaki MD30RT, running almost continuously since 2011
Lights: 3 Kessil A360X Tuna Blue with 55° narrow reflectors, controlled by a Kessil Spectral Controller X
Circulation: 2 Tunze Nanostream 6055s, controlled by a Tunze Multicontroller 7096
Dosing pump: Spectrapure LiterMeter 3
Temperature: 78-82° F, Ranco controller
pH monitor: Eutech Instruments Alpha pH 190
RO/DI: 5-stage Spectrapure 100 GPD Ultra-High Efficiency RO/DI
Quarantine tank: 20 gallon acrylic tank with biowheel filter in garage
Salt: Tropic Marin Pro Reef

Current dosing regimen: BRS Balling Hybrid, i.e.:
- 2-part BRS calcium chloride and soda ash
- Tropic Marin K+ and A- Elements added to 2-part
- Tropic Marin Balling Components Part C added periodically to ATO
- BRS magnesium added periodically to ATO (Randy's magnesium method)

The tank is currently LPS dominated, corals range in age from new frags to 15 year-old colonies. I will be adding a few SPS soon to hopefully get some branchy stuff growing between the larger LPS and into the upper part of the tank.

I currently have 9 fish, all captive bred. I got all the fish from Biota except the clowns, which came from my LFS and were bred by Sea and Reef.
1 yellow tang
1 bicolor angel
1 coral beauty
1 multibar angel
1 pavo damsel
2 royal gramma
2 ocellaris clown - DaVinci and Wyoming White

Current Parameters:
Temp: 78-82
Salinity: 35
pH: 7.9-8.1
Alk: 8
Ca: 450
NO3: 3-5
PO4: 0.3

Next up: the back story - how I got here, tank details

 

[smitten with ocean life]

lovely!

 

[RobertK]

OK, now the back story. I got my first reef tank in 1998. It was a 60 gallon acrylic tank with a wooden stand and hood from the LFS. In retrospect I wish I had gotten a bigger tank, especially because the 15" width really limits aquascaping options. I made my share of newbie mistakes but read lots of books (remember books?) and spent a lot of time on Reef Central (remember Reef Central?). Back then nitrates and phosphates were generally considered evil, and I did everything I could to keep them as low as possible. I was so happy when my NO3 and PO4 test kits both read zero! Deep sandbeds were a popular way to keep nitrates down, and I still have one in my tank today (and one in my refugium too).

Here is a closeup of the DSB:

I bought a small matching cabinet and put it next to my stand and plumbed a homemade refugium into it, fed by a submersible pump in the sump and a return line back to the sump. Here are some pictures of it and its plumbing.

A few years later when we moved to a bigger house I bought a second matching cabinet and put it on the other side of the tank for all my electronics and dosing equipment. I would love to have an equipment room on the other side of the wall from the tank but that is not an option in my house, which does not have a basement either. But it was great to get all that stuff out from under the tank and into a dry space. I had an electrician install 4 GFO outlets on a separate circuit behind the new cabinet.

I decided I needed a bigger sump with 3 compartments, but I could not fit a big enough sump in through the cabinet doors. So I built a new acrylic sump in two pieces and connected them with large bulkheads inside the stand. Here are some pictures of the sump when it was brand new (that's my old EuroReef skimmer).

I'm still using the same sump 18 years later, but I but reconfigured the it when I got the Bubble King in 2011. Here is what the sump looks like now:

The water enters on the right via a reverse Durso type standpipe into the skimmer compartment. The second compartment contains a submersible pump that feeds the refugium. When I was running a GFO reactor the powerhead feeding the reactor was also in the second compartment. The water goes through the bulkheads into the third compartment. I made a basket out of acrylic and eggcrate that sits under the bulkheads, in that basket I put Rox carbon in a filter bag (which also functions as a bubble trap).

In the third sump compartment is the return line from the refugium and my ATO. The GFO reactor also discharged into that compartment when I was running it. The return pump is plumbed externally. The sump is sized and the siphon break in the tank is placed such that it fills to about 1/2" from the top when the pumps are off (whew!).

The ATO is an old siphon-fed box called a Nurce (OK who remembers those?). I had it custom made to fit in my stand by a guy named Alan. It still works great 20 years later. It is raised up on a little acrylic platform that I built to keep it above the water level in the 3rd sump compartment. The PVC pipe leading from the sump to the return pump runs under the platform.

In 2007 I made the switch from acrylic to glass. The stand was still in good shape and I had the other two matching cabinets configured with the refugium and all my equipment, so I kept the stand and cabinets and had a new glass tank built to fit the same stand. I increased the dimensions a little bit to increase it from 60 to 70 gallons.

In retrospect I have a lot of regrets about the tank design, including:
- horrible dimensions (only 15" front to back)
- single corner overflow (more on that later)
- Euro bracing - It does provide a handy shelf but blocks some of the light and makes the top opening even smaller
- for some strange and stupid reason I only had them drill one hole in the Euro brace near the overflow, should have had one on each side
- I wish I'd had them use starphire glass instead of regular green glass

But its still a good tank and I've overcome most of these shortcomings, and it has held up well for 18 years.

The corner overflow is only 5" square with a single hole in the bottom, and when I went to make a Durso standpipe it would not fit! So I had to use some angled pipe fittings to make one that would fit.

I was also unhappy with the surface skimming capacity of the toothed corner overflow, so I expanded the surface skimming area by building a triangular platform with an overflow weir that attached to the corner overflow with aquarium silicone. I had to drill a hole in it for the return line, because as mentioned I stupidly had them drill just one hole in the Eurobrace next to the overflow. But the return line actually helps hold the new overflow in place, and it works great!

Here is the original overflow:

And here is the modified version:

Regarding the return line, below the overflow it is a locline that runs behind the rocks, directing the return flow from right to left. I drilled a few small holes in it just below the overflow as a siphon break. Because the tank is so narrow the rocks are stacked up against the back glass, but I made sure to keep a good sized gap along the entire length of the tank between the rocks and the glass down low, both to allow flow from the return line and to give the fish plenty of hiding places.

Next up: lighting progression

 

[RobertK]

When I first got the original tank I put two standard fluorescent bulbs in the hood, then later increased to 4 standard bulbs, and then to 4 VHO fluorescent bulbs.

Here is a photo of my tank in 2006 with the 4 VHOs (thats my old acrylic tank):

And in 2008 with the same lamps (thats the new glass tank):

Not bad for fluorescent bulbs, eh? Honestly that might be the best my tank has ever looked. I must have had plenty of nutrients in the water back then.

A few months after that last photo I switched to T5 fluorescent bulbs, also retrofitted in my old hood. Life had gotten pretty hectic by then (more on that later) and I didn't take many pictures of my tank. Here is the only full tank shot I have under T5s, taken in 2016:

In 2017 I changed lights again. My tank was running hot with the T5s in an enclosed hood, and I was frequently running fans in the hood and over the sump. I purchased a custom made T5/LED hybrid from Nano Box Reef, made from a black anodized 4-bulb ATI Sunpower 36" T5 fixture with 2 of the T5s removed and replaced with LED beam strips. I took the lid off the hood but left the rest of the hood on the tank for aesthetics. I'm not sure why I bought a 36" fixture for a 48" tank. The picture doesn't show it well but the light spread from it was not wide enough and I didn't use it for long. (I still have it, if anyone wants to buy it PM me.)

In 2018 I made the switch to full LED, first with a Kessil AP700 but with only two lights again there was not enough spread for my 4 foot tank. In 2019 I switched to two Kessil A360X spaced further apart than the lights in the AP700. I added the Kessil narrow reflectors which reduce the beam spread from 130° to 55° because the opening between the eurobraces is only 8" wide front to back, and the reflectors focus more light through this narrow gap. It was still too dark in the corners that way, so I added a 3rd A360X with narrow reflector and that did the trick. Good coverage for a 4 foot tank, and the reflectors increase the PAR at depth as well. Last year one of the A360X's died and I replaced it with the newer A360XE. It looks exactly the same as the A360X but has a new chip that makes the lights 15% brighter. I placed it in the center with the 2 older Kessils on the left and right. I've been pretty happy with the Kessils since adding the 3rd one, but I do kinda miss my old T5s.

next up: tank disasters

 

[RobertK]

I have had my shares of ups and downs in the hobby, and so has my tank. I've lived through a few tank disasters, and I'll describe a few of them for your reading enjoyment. And who knows, maybe someone will learn from my mistakes and avoid similar disasters of their own.

The first disaster occurred the day after I set up my first tank back in 1998. I was a total newbie and had no idea what I was doing. I had seen a girl at the LFS connecting flexible tubing to a water pump by shoving the tubing over the male-threaded pump outlet. No hose barb, no teflon tape, no PVC pipe fittings, no nothing. Having never used a water pump before I thought that was the way you do it! In retrospect that must have been a submersible pump she was using and I guess it worked well enough for her when submersed. But my pump was plumbed externally and I connected it the same way she did! Needless to say I flooded my living room, had to drain the tank, remove the stand, peel back the carpet, run fans for a few days, then start over again. I should put that in the "Whats the stupidest thing you ever did" thread.

Next disaster occurred about a year later. For some reason I took almost everything out of the tank. I think my nitrates were running really high and I wanted to add some more rocks and sand, but took everything out first to clean the tank. I had the fish in a large rubbermaid basin with all the live rocks, a heater and a couple of powerheads. I guess I left them in there too long because almost all the fish died. Another dumb newbie mistake.

Next disaster was in 2004. I was dosing kalk via ATO to replace evaporative losses. The ATO malfunctioned for some reason and dumped 5 gallons of kalk into the tank. I did a few large water changes and lost one fish. I switched to 2-part for Ca/Alk after that, but a few years later added kalk back into the mix, again via ATO. And guess what? The same thing happened AGAIN! This time a snail got into the overflow pipe. I was using a gate valve on the overflow pipe in the stand to control the water level in the overflow, and the valve was partly closed. The snail got caught in the gate valve and blocked the flow of water. The water level in the sump dropped and the ATO did its job, again dumping about 5 gallons of kalk in. I probably had a minor flood too. A bunch of my corals died that time. I gave up on kalk after that and have been running BRS 2-part ever since. That was also when I built a modified Durso standpipe for the overflow.

The next major disaster was a cryptocaryon outbreak around 2018, which I'm pretty sure came in on a frag from a LFS, as I had not gotten any new fish for a long time before that and was not dipping new corals back then. My 20 year-old clownfish Peanut (the first fish I'd ever purchased, who somehow survived all those other mishaps and saw lots of other fish come and go during her life) died during that outbreak. I managed to get most of the fish into quarantine but they all died despite treatment with chloroquine , except for my yellow tang who finally recovered after treatment with hyposalinity. I was totally bummed after that and ever since then have made sure to always dip new corals before putting them in the tank. I follow a double dipping procedure using Coral Rx and Bayer described by Mike Paletta in this article.


Next up: the final disaster and my current situation

 

[Indiana Reefin]

Wow! what an amazing setup and an amazing story. Thanks for your humility on the mistakes you have made m. The fact that you can count all of this mistakes on one hand is a major accomplishment over 18 years! The fact that you have stuck with it this long is amazing! You should be proud of your setup! Congratulations!

 

[RobertK]

The final disaster I'll tell you about is one that occurred over many years, and from which I'm still recovering. I'll call this disaster "Life got in the way". Up until recently, my life has been extremely hectic for the last 15-20 years. Busy career, long commute, raising a family, etc. After a while I stopped spending as much time on my aquarium. I stopped water testing, and water changes became a lot less frequent. In reviewing my old log books for this thread I saw that there were entire years with barely any entries. I stopped visiting RC and R2R. I assumed that everything I had learned about reefkeeping 20-25 years ago was all I needed to know, and I did not keep up with advances in the hobby. But I battled cyano outbreaks and I found that there were a lot of corals that I could not keep alive, including most SPS as well as some LPS such as goniopora, plate corals and torches. I've also not been able to keep acans long term. Rather than try to figure out why I simply stuck to the corals that I could keep alive. My tank became overrun with aiptasia, the peppermint shrimp did not put a dent in them, and I went through many bottles of Aiptasia-X and F-Aiptasia. Eventually there were hundreds of them and I could not keep up. I seriously thought about getting rid of my aquarium.

Then last fall I retired from my job. My kids are all grown up now. Suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands, and I turned my attention back to my reef tank. It was still overrun with aiptasia, and I lost a few more acans I'd recently gotten. I surrendered my battle with aiptasia and replaced all the rocks and the top 1" of my DSB. Moved everything into the QT except the DSB and gave the tank a good cleaning. I used dry manmade rocks this time, which I'd never used before. The tank cycled quickly, presumably because of the DSBs in the tank and refugium.

I've also been catching up on a lot of the changes that have happened in the hobby in the last 10-15 years while I was "away". I've been spending a lot of time here at R2R, and reading other stuff as well. I must admit that I was horrified when I learned that nitrate and phosphate are no longer considered evil substances to be avoided at all costs (you guys have known that for a long time), and realized how out of touch with the hobby I had become. I was still running every type of nutrient export I could think of - DSBs, skimmer, refugium, carbon dosing, GFO reactor, and my NO3 and PO4 were still at zero. I stopped the carbon dosing and GFO, and increased feeding. NO3 and PO4 have both come up a bit since then and seem to have stabilized. My fish are happier too!

Another thing I never did before was trace element dosing. I considered all my options, asked a lot of questions and got some advice from Randy and others. Rather than starting over with a completely new dosing regimen such as AFR, I decided that because my alk was already stable it made the most sense to continue dosing BRS 2-part and to add TM K+ and A- Elements to it, and to also dose Balling Part C. I've been doing that for the last month or so. I hope that the higher levels of N and P along with the trace elements will allow me to keep some of the corals I was not able to keep before. I'm now looking forward to the next phase of my reefkeeping journey!

Lastly, I recently got my old DSLR camera out and started taking pics of my tank again. Its a Nikon D7200 with a few lenses including a 105 mm macro lens, and it has been sitting in the closet for the last decade. I used to be really into photography back in the old days (remember film?), but never really made a full transition to digital. I didn't have the time to process and organize the photos on my computer, and iPhone cameras are so much easier! I'm having fun getting to know the Nikon again, here's a few pics I've taken with it this week.

 

[RobertK]

Someone asked about my pair of royal grammas. Its kind of a funny story. I didn't intend to have two of them. I bought one as a juvenile from Biota but it disappeared from my tank and I assumed it was dead, so I bought another one. About two months later I found the original one alive and well in my overflow! I'm really not sure how it got into the overflow, as I had a black plastic mesh screen blocking the overflow weir and a cover on the overflow. It must have squeezed through the mesh and the teeth since it was just a little juvenile at the time.

So now I have two of them. They get along fine but they are not inseparable like my pair of clowns. The two grammas have their own preferred spots on opposite sides of the tank, but they do hang out together too as seen in the above photo. One has grown considerably larger than the other, not sure if that means the larger one is a male.

 

[RobertK]

Disaster strikes again.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/help-particle-board-in-stand-is-disintegrating.1128267/

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

Disaster strikes again.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/help-particle-board-in-stand-is-disintegrating.1128267/

Oh no! How's this going?

 

[RobertK]

Thanks for asking. Temporary tank and stand are set up in my kitchen while I plan for a new custom tank and stand. I haven't bought a new aquarium for 18 years and it has been a daunting task figuring it out and trying to get everything right, as there are some challenges with the tank location. But I'm getting close to ordering it, hopefully will be able to do so in the next couple of weeks. Will probably start a new build thread for the new tank.

 

[LaloJ]

I probably missed it, but are you still using DSB?

 

[RobertK]

No, I had to tear down my tank and my current temporary tank has no sand bed. I had to throw away all the sand from my DSB.

When I was removing the sand bed I found multiple areas where there were thick black layers in the sand which I presume were hydrogen sulfide. I did not want to take a chance reusing the sand.

 

[LaloJ]

I've always liked deep sand beds, they're an important part of old school reef tanks. A few years ago, I still used one in my tank, but unfortunately, I made the mistake of altering the sand composition and had some losses. Now I use a thin layer of fine CaribSea sand that probably doesn't exceed 1 inch.

 

[RobertK]

Yes me too, old school here. I had a DSB for 20+ years. I probably won't have one in my next tank though, haven't figured out exactly what type of sand to use yet but will likely be 1-2" of a medium grain size, something that won't let in too much detritus but won't blow away too easily with water flow.

 

[LaloJ]

I've always believed that if something worked a long time ago, it can still work now. I definitely wouldn't use a DSB in my main tank again, but I might use one in the sump. However, I love the idea of having a lot of live rock in the main tank and seeing how it could handle the detritus. I would rely on a very good skimmer.

 

[RobertK]

Yeah I actually had a second DSB in my refugium too. In retrospect I had too much nutrient export (DSBs, refugium, skimmer, carbon dosing) and my N and P levels were too low as a result. I was in the process of fixing that when I had to take the tank down in a hurry due last month.

 

[Subsea]

Yes me too, old school here. I had a DSB for 20+ years. I probably won't have one in my next tank though, haven't figured out exactly what type of sand to use yet but will likely be 1-2" of a medium grain size, something that won't let in too much detritus but won't blow away too easily with water flow.

Robert,

You have some gorgeous eye candy and Kudoes to your camera skills. Glad to follow your progress.

We have journey down similar roads with our tanks. I went from Jaubert Plenum with DSB to a reverse flow undergravel filter. And from a mud/macro algae refugium to a cryptic sponge / mud refugium.

 

[RobertK]

Thanks Subsea! I'm looking forward to getting a new tank in the new year! I've ordered one from Glasscages, waiting patiently.

 

[lubeck]

Thanks Subsea! I'm looking forward to getting a new tank in the new year! I've ordered one from Glasscages, waiting patiently.

Excellent choice what size are you going with.