Nano 10 Gallon

Tray21 · Feb 18, 2022

Hey everyone!

This is my first jump into the saltwater world and I chose to use an old 10 gallon tank that I had laying around collecting dust. After watching hours of videos online, I was most convinced that I could handle it after watching the inappropriate reefer videos and followed his model as far as equipment goes to start.
Equipment:
- Standard 10 gallon rimmed tank
- Aqua Knight Led light
-Aqua clear 70 filter (with intank media basket)
-basic preset 50w heater

I used about 10 ish lbs of dry "live" rock, and added Bahama oolite live sand. I got the tank wet and started to cycle in the beginning of December. I noticed the cycle had finished right around the 2nd week in January and added the first part of the CUC. 3 astria snails, 2 nasarius snails and a peppermint shrimp. About a week later my fiance was going through petco and saw a pair of clown fish she really liked and came home with them while I was convieniently at work. Her and the kids also took the liberty of naming them right off the bat. Obviously one of them was going to be named Nemo (shocker!). The other one got named John Wayne Gacy

. Moving forward to today, all the inhabitants seem to be enjoying their home. Currently my nitrates are high at around 40ppm and I just threw a bag of chemipure elite in the filter to try and lower that number to the single digit range. Once it lowers and stays low consistently I will look to start adding corals. This tank is going to be a marathon and not a sprint as I am in no rush to add things just to watch them die and have to replace them unnecessarily. Thanks to everyone that has welcomed me into the reefing community, I look forward to learning as much as possible from all of you!
Happy Reefing!

Idoc · Feb 19, 2022

Nice setup! Good luck...those smaller tanks can be tricky. Just keep monitoring the water parameters on a regular basis. There are many on R2R with nano tanks...they will definitely have some good advice.

Tray21 · Aug 11, 2022

Just posting an update:

Today my AC 70 stopped working, noticed it around 11 am. Was looking at it and felt the motor and it was HOT!!! Immediately unplugged it and ran to the store to get another to replace the filter all together. Luckily I caught it in time before the motor either melted or caught fire. Anyways since my last post several things have changed. Been battling hair algae and trying to control the phosphate levels which creeped up on me. I had not tested phosphates in a couple weeks and when I did test a couple weeks ago they were at 30 ppm. My eldest has taken an interest in the tank and has been doing the feedings in the evening when I'm at work. Well I figure that she has probably been over feeding which has caused the outbreak. I took the rocks out and scrubbed them really well and got 95% of the algae removed. Did not want to remove all of it so that my CUC would have enough to eat.

I have also added anemones a couple of times now with mixed success so far ( I am 100% at fault for the failures but well get to that in a bit). The first go round I purchased a couple of small RBTA's from @Redfoxtang. They were doing really well for a week or so. When I was cleaning the tank one day, I bumped one of the rocks the nems were attached to. Well the rock fell and smashed the nems against the glass pretty good. As soon as it happened, I fixed the rock and kept a close eye on the nems for the remainder of their life. The next day I noticed they werent looking good at all, two of them would not attach to the rocks and were floating around in the tank and appeared as though they were melting. I had an isolation box handy and placed them in the box for closer monitoring and while I waited for my order of cipro to arrive. The next day the nems were completely dead and appeared to have been for a while.

After this experience I felt defeated. It wasn't an issue about the investment that was gone so quickly, it was the fact that my neglect and mistake had caused them to die prematurely. A couple of months later I purchased more nems from @Redfoxtang hoping to have a better result because now I had learned from my mistakes and re-positioned my rocks to be more stable that they wouldn't just fall over. My nems arrived and looked AMAZING! I took no chances and acclimated them over four hours. OVERKILL I know. Once in the tank I felt proud! That feeling quickly vanished the next morning. I woke up the following morning to find two of the three nems in the same state as the last nems that died. This time even worse. I looked at every thing, analyzing my parameters, flow, lighting and rock work. Everything was perfect. But then I noticed the one thing I overlooked and did not anticipate. My peppermint shrimp was aggressively eating the remnants of the two dead anemones. I immediately removed all of the rocks to catch the shrimp that had caused me so much grief. I removed the shrimp and took him to the store that I bought it from and returned him for store credit. The good news was he had not yet touched my last RBTA. With the predator out of the tank I could breathe easy and not worry about this nem dying.

Note: the picture was taken last week after scrubbing most of the rocks.
A week after this a family friend was breaking down their tank and asked if I wanted to have a green bubble tip for my tank. I said yeah why not and both have been doing well since. I also added a couple of emerald crabs to help control the algae. Next order of business is to buy some corals for the tank. I decided to wait until I had the nems in the tank so that they could find their spots before adding corals and potentially having to move corals around when they moved. The 12 month plan is to upgrade to a larger tank in the area of 75 to 125 gallons with a sump. In the mean time this tank is doing the trick with helping me learn while not breaking the bank equipment wise.