My first reef build! 40cm cube

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

Most of the equipment arrived 2 days ago, and I was quite busy setting up the tank to make my build thread, haha.

I'm running on a really tight budget, so a lot of my equipment is mainly nameless or obscure chinese brands.

2 days ago I spent an enormous amount of time adding and mixing my saltwater (Red Sea coral pro salt), as I only had access to a small, 6 litre bucket, so I had to mix and add water multiple times, on top of that my RO filter (I forgot to buy the DI part, which is coming later, but I decided to add water to the tank anyway, since I was impatient. I'm certain I'll regret that later though lol. I think it took nearly eight hours to get it all done and at the right salinity. I also rinsed my sand with RO water twice, which I now regret deeply as the water is still quite cloudy. I also rinsed and added two blocks of porous ceramic (which act as dry rock) and also installed my refugium light, reef light, skimmer, return pump, ATO, and wavemaker (I'm missing the heater as it has yet to arrive).

Yesterday, I went out to buy some live rock and macroalgae (a mixture of sea grape,chaeto,and some other algae, which was apparently free ) to help seed and kickstart my cycle.

My test equipment so far: a brandless refractometer, and some thermometer which shoots out a laser (can someone tell me id they're accurate? Thanks in advance!)

My parameters so far:

Salinity - 1.0255 (trying to get it to 1.026 by using sw in the ATO)

Temperature - 23.2℃
I'll update the parameters once my Salifert test kits arrive.

I'm planning to stock the tank with: 1 Red/blue legged hermit
1 emerald crab
1 Skunk cleaner/fire shrimp
A pair of clowns
1-2 Banggai cardinalfish
1 Tailspot blenny
1 yellow watchman goby/royal gramma
1 frogspawn coral
and one or two soft/LPS (leaving some space in case I'm planning on trying SPS or Tridacna clams)

This is probably too much for my tank to handle, but I'm not sure which fish/invert I should keep or drop. It would be awesome if anyone can suggest alternatives .

I just realised I need to buy a camera filter to take proper pictures haha.

P.S. Thank you for spending time reading this

 

[Super Fly]

welcome. Water will clear in few days.
Don't know about a laser shooting thermometer but I'd recommend getting a digital and old fashioned glass thermometer to ensure accurate reading.
Curious, what's with all the lemons inside stand?
GL

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

welcome. Water will clear in few days.
Don't know about a laser shooting thermometer but I'd recommend getting a digital and old fashioned glass thermometer to ensure accurate reading.
Curious, what's with all the lemons inside stand?
GL

It's to get rid of the persisting paint smell, but now it just smells like smoke and lemons haha.

 

[Super Fly]

here's a thread from HK reefers so you can connect with some locals there.

Amazing happenings in Hong Kong.

Hey everyone, so Hong Kong reef club have been upto something pretty exciting during the C19 restrictions, and we are hoping you will all be able to enjoy it very soon. But before I get into that a little background story time . So around late 2018 I got put in touch with a friends buddy who...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[revhtree]

I moved your thread to the members tank forum for you!

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

I was going to do another post a week ago (when my test kits arrived) but I was a bit lazy so I skipped it, haha. A while ago some of my macroalgae was dying, and I found out it was due to lack of nutrients, it has stopped dying now after the rotting algae turned into nitrates and stuff.

As of yesterday I have started (irresponsibly) stocking the tank. This is the inhabitants so far:
• 2 Banggai cardinalfish
• 1 Scarlet skunk cleaner shrimp
• 1 Blood red fire shrimp
• 2 Astraea snails
• some kind of frogspawn coral
• this small funny looking acropora (I know, bad idea)
I got the acro mainly for a standard/indicator of water quality (and also because it was really cheap). It was doing fine until this morning when it's polyps weren't fully extended, which was when I, to my horror, realised the heater was unplugged, and the water was 20°C! So I hurriedly turned on the heater, and then forgot about the tank, and when I came back the temperature increased way too quickly (now 24°C) and now some of the polyps are fully shrunken into the skeleton (kind of like a realy big pore), I'm not sure if those polyps will recover.

My current parameters are:
•salinity: 1.027 (brandless refractometer)
•PH: 8.29-8.32 (brandless PH probe)
•KH: 6.7* (salifert) 7 (Yier 益尔, chinese brand)
•Ca: 405ppm (Salifert) 410ppm (Yier)
•Mg: 1290ppm (Salifert) 1320ppm (Yier)
•PO4: ≤0.03ppm (Salifert) hard to determine the colour since it's so light
•NH3: ≈0.1ppm (Salifert) hard to determine the colour since it's so light
•NO2: > 0.005ppm (Yier)
•NO3: >7ppm (Yier)

I'm dosing all-for-reef to get the KH above 7, as well as adding seachem stability after stocking the tank.

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

I moved your thread to the members tank forum for you!

Thank you very much!

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

Btw, when should I try feeding the banggai cardinalfish?

 

[Super Fly]

Btw, when should I try feeding the banggai cardinalfish?

anytime, sooner the better. Just an FYI - some banggai are picky eaters and will only eat frozen food

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

I fed the banggais frozen mysis today, and they swarmed it!
As well as that my fire shrimp finally came out and nabbed some mysis as well. Whenever there are air bubbles, the cardinalfish would try and eat it, is this normal?

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

Update: I've added a bunch of stuff the past few weeks, namely a tailspot blenny, small clownfish pair, and a firefish, as well as a Halloween hermit crab which I've yeeted into my sump since it destroyed most of the new growth on my acro.

For a while I thought my nitrates were too low, so being the foolish newbie I am, decided to overfeed a bit in hopes of raising nutrients in the tank. A few days ago my nitrates reached 25ppm, so I've started dosing vinegar and it's dropped 15ppm since two days ago. I also learned that wavemakers should NEVER directly face corals, even acros since that entirely bleached one side of the coral.

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

Update: my tank is nearly devoid of all coral life. About a month ago I upgraded my lights, but I didn't know how to acclimate the corals to it, making all the SPS bleach (they were growing real nice too...). And even more recently, the local temperature around here went up to 86°F in what was a 78°F tank, as well as adding marbled shrimp to my tank (guy at LFS said they were reef safe smh) which ate a lot of the favias, so nearly all the LPS are now bleached and/or eaten.

 

[I Eat Ice Cubes]

It has been many, many months since I've updated the build thread, and more than a lot has changed!

Now the reason I've been away for so long is partly because I forgot my password for my r2r acc, and also that I had to prepare for my impending A-levels.

I realized that the tank crash was caused by many factors.
These were:
• Lack of a chiller (making my water temp rise above 28°C).
•Insufficient amount of water changes (3.5L weekly wasn't enough).
•The death of 2 garden eels.
•Upgrading the light without light acclimating the corals.

After the end of the exam I started fixing my tank. I achieved this by doing 5.5L water changes every three days and manually removing the dinos, as well as buying a chiller. Initially I bought a chiller which wasn't big enough for my 15g, which I soon replaced it with a proper one.

After three weeks of water changes, the dinos were gone from the tank for an entire week, and thus, I determined that it's time to restock my tank with corals. Now I'm not entirely sure why but I decided that after the crash, it was time to start trying my hand in SPS. Therefore the first coral which I've bought after several months is a green Montipora capitata frag.

After a week of this frag looking perfectly healthy, I decided to buy another piece of SPS, this time, wanting to see if I'm able to keep any Acropora spp. I asked the guy running the LFS on which ones are the hardier species of Acros which aren't bali slimers, and eventually I chose this piece of deepwater acro which he claimed was Acropora echinata.

I also picked up a FF digi as well

After another week, where I've noticed all of these frags encrusting/branching, I took it as a sign that I'm able to increase the amount of corals in this tank, adding a new piece roughly every week.

This digi was placed too high up and fortunately, I was quick enough to put it in a lower spot in my tank, it is not recovering rather well, but will be a long time before returning to it's former glory.

This jawbreaker mushroom was unfortunately unrooted by my hermit crab and has, unfortunately, disappeared into the deepest depths of my tank. You can be sure that I'm coping like mad and telling myself that it's still alive haha.

This piece was (wrongly) called a Walt Disney by the LFS manager, but I did notice that different frags of these throughout his shop were different colours, and it was originally a wondeful yellow colour so I bought it. Unfortunately, the way home took too long and so, the coral suffered from heat shock. It's now recovering but as you can see, the PE is still suboptimal and it also turned a very pale green. It has since started turning purple though, so that's a rather pleasant surprise.

This piece was sold to me by a fellow hobbyist as a sunfire montipora. I'm not entirely sure if it is one, but since it was really cheap, I bought it.

My biggest regret would be getting this homewrecker frag. As it was kept in terrible condition, and even worse still, the green parts of the coral turned out to be bleached bone! I also added two pom pom crabs to my tank.

This is the capitata frag after nearly two months.