Hello ! I started in the hobby with @TooMuchDog just a few months ago. We moved in together in November, and in January we decided to get a tank started! It was my very first time having fish, and going with saltwater seemed scary! We did a few mistakes, but also have had great success on other aspects. This thread will cover our tank build, our mistakes, our lovely fish, the cool corals we got (and those we lost) and more. I will try to add as many pics as possible too!
To get started, we looked online to find a decent deal on a tank. We found a 75 gallons with stand and cover, and some leftover equipment for 400$. Great! The catch was that to get this beast to the 2nd floor of our apartment, it would require some extra muscles ! ! My, that thing was heavy. But we made it! We spent some time washing it thoroughly with vinegar, to try to get some scratches and marks from the glass. It didn't work fully but it helped a lot.
Then it got started! One of our first mistakes was to not rinse the salt before putting it the tank. We ended up staring at a cloud of sand and water for almost a week! I thought it would never settle down! We used a bit of that product that gathers particles in the water, and I think we also did a water change to help it to settle faster. After all, it was not a big deal yet, as we were just getting started on cycling and did not have any fish yet, but at the time it really sucked haha. We worked hard on our aquascaping skills too! We bought some dead rocks and some dyed "live' rock and tried to shape it with glue. The glue really did not hold well at all, so we decided to use acrylic rods instead. It is not easy to put rocks together using that, but at least it is solid and you know that your rocks are not going to fall out once it is all set! I already knew I wanted an engineer goby, so having a solid aquascape was necessary to prevent any accident once the little guy would start digging under these rocks.
Here's how it looked like at first!
I think that cycling the tank took about 3 weeks. We read that it's possible to add fish before that your tank is fully cycled, but I really did not want to make any fish suffer and decided to wait instead.
Then, one day, our parameters were finally good! Our first fish was actually a couple! A pair of black ice clowns. So cute
These clowns are still doing great to this day, and other than the female being dominant over the male, nothing weird to report. They are still shy with our anemone, but that's a story I'll talk later on about!
Then, second fish we got is the adorable yellow-eye kole-tang. I really wanted a fish that would be active and swim around the tank, and this one is perfect for it. Really beautiful pattern on its skin, and it spends its whole day swimming around, nipping at the rocks for algae, and a few times a day it goes for sprints and circles around the tank.
Along with that, we shopped around for LED lights to eventually get coral. We decided on 2 AI Prime 16 HD. Then, my bf @TooMuchDog gave me an anemone for Valentines Day and I was really excited for my clowns!! (I know, I know, anemones do not do well in young tanks, but this one was offered from a friend's one that just split and I really wanted to try it out)
The nem has been doing great too! There was a few weeks where it was walking around a whole lot, and we put it in the acclimation box with the clowns and it seemed to help her get a whole lot better. Of course, once we released the clowns and the nem back in the tank, the clowns COMPLETELY forgot about it. It's sad, they were the cutest little things when they were hosting the nem! But oh well, clowns will do what clowns want. Maybe one day they'll come back and host it.
Let's fast forward a few months! Our tank is now 6 months old, and we own a one-spot fox face (this one is a little cow, it eats any type of algae you drop in the tank in a matter of minutes), an engineer goby, two wrasses (a pintail and an orange back), the two clowns and the tang I mentioned, and a bunch of corals. We're doing great with soft/lps (hammer, torch, elegance, red goniopora, frogspawn, gsp, green brain, a few acans and zoas), but have not tried really any stick/sps yet (well, the only ones we tried died, so I'm not eager to spend money on that).
Here is what it looks now!
I think I will leave it here for now and post regularly about the new adventures and odd things happening with out tank! Thanks for following, commenting, asking questions, don't be shy!
To get started, we looked online to find a decent deal on a tank. We found a 75 gallons with stand and cover, and some leftover equipment for 400$. Great! The catch was that to get this beast to the 2nd floor of our apartment, it would require some extra muscles ! ! My, that thing was heavy. But we made it! We spent some time washing it thoroughly with vinegar, to try to get some scratches and marks from the glass. It didn't work fully but it helped a lot.
Then it got started! One of our first mistakes was to not rinse the salt before putting it the tank. We ended up staring at a cloud of sand and water for almost a week! I thought it would never settle down! We used a bit of that product that gathers particles in the water, and I think we also did a water change to help it to settle faster. After all, it was not a big deal yet, as we were just getting started on cycling and did not have any fish yet, but at the time it really sucked haha. We worked hard on our aquascaping skills too! We bought some dead rocks and some dyed "live' rock and tried to shape it with glue. The glue really did not hold well at all, so we decided to use acrylic rods instead. It is not easy to put rocks together using that, but at least it is solid and you know that your rocks are not going to fall out once it is all set! I already knew I wanted an engineer goby, so having a solid aquascape was necessary to prevent any accident once the little guy would start digging under these rocks.
Here's how it looked like at first!
I think that cycling the tank took about 3 weeks. We read that it's possible to add fish before that your tank is fully cycled, but I really did not want to make any fish suffer and decided to wait instead.
Then, one day, our parameters were finally good! Our first fish was actually a couple! A pair of black ice clowns. So cute
These clowns are still doing great to this day, and other than the female being dominant over the male, nothing weird to report. They are still shy with our anemone, but that's a story I'll talk later on about!
Then, second fish we got is the adorable yellow-eye kole-tang. I really wanted a fish that would be active and swim around the tank, and this one is perfect for it. Really beautiful pattern on its skin, and it spends its whole day swimming around, nipping at the rocks for algae, and a few times a day it goes for sprints and circles around the tank.
Along with that, we shopped around for LED lights to eventually get coral. We decided on 2 AI Prime 16 HD. Then, my bf @TooMuchDog gave me an anemone for Valentines Day and I was really excited for my clowns!! (I know, I know, anemones do not do well in young tanks, but this one was offered from a friend's one that just split and I really wanted to try it out)
The nem has been doing great too! There was a few weeks where it was walking around a whole lot, and we put it in the acclimation box with the clowns and it seemed to help her get a whole lot better. Of course, once we released the clowns and the nem back in the tank, the clowns COMPLETELY forgot about it. It's sad, they were the cutest little things when they were hosting the nem! But oh well, clowns will do what clowns want. Maybe one day they'll come back and host it.
Let's fast forward a few months! Our tank is now 6 months old, and we own a one-spot fox face (this one is a little cow, it eats any type of algae you drop in the tank in a matter of minutes), an engineer goby, two wrasses (a pintail and an orange back), the two clowns and the tang I mentioned, and a bunch of corals. We're doing great with soft/lps (hammer, torch, elegance, red goniopora, frogspawn, gsp, green brain, a few acans and zoas), but have not tried really any stick/sps yet (well, the only ones we tried died, so I'm not eager to spend money on that).
Here is what it looks now!
I think I will leave it here for now and post regularly about the new adventures and odd things happening with out tank! Thanks for following, commenting, asking questions, don't be shy!
