New Guy and his 220Gal Reef

Nicks Extreme Aquarium · Apr 23, 2019

Hey everyone, I'm Nick. I have posted on my local forum for years now and I've been on r2r for a while but I've never really posted in here so i figured that now was as good of a time as any. I live in south Florida. I'm a firefighter and I've been in the hobby for about 16 years or so. These days I am a fan of deep sand beds and SPS corals so you can imagine the struggle that I have to deal with. I am currently running the ZEOvit method as of recently so I haven't experienced the amazing benefits of the system yet. The tank has been set up for almost 2 years but I had a crash so it's only been about 6 months-post-crash. Below are pics of my tank from the building and setting up stages until today.

I bought the dual overflow tank for a steal because it leaked. I had to remove the bottom panel completely and reseal the entire tank.

I sealed the bottom overflow holes and drilled in this H2Overflow. I should have gotten 2 of them but to cut costs I decided to just go with the one. Its been working very well so I'm pleased.

At this point, I only have cheap Chinese LED lights over the tank.

I was going to have a custom aquarium company come in and encase the stand but like any impatient reefer, I decided to just finish it up myself. Since the tank covered up the wall outlet I added an outlet on the end of the stand there that just runs straight to the wall but I have since removed this.

After a short while, I added a Neptunes system apex and 4 Kessil 360s. I made the casing for the lights out of wood.

Months of neglect, no water changes, and an auto feeder led to a few fish dying and a crazy growth of some thick mat like algae that I've never seen before. So it was time for a reboot. I swapped out all of the sand and scrubbed all the nasty sludge off of the rocks one by one

(Pic above) I used Maco reef cement, 2x4s and some string to redo my rockscape for a better appearance and to allow water to flow through everything. I made big arches and cemented everything into place. (Pic below)

After getting everything into place I decided to buy another Neptunes system DOS and set up an automatic water changing system. I went cheap on the bins but eventually ill upgrade this system as well.

while adding the auto-changing system, I also got rid of my refugium, added a ZEOvit reactor and then added two T5 lights and attached them to my existing canopy thing.

This leads me to today. about 2 weeks ago I've started growing phytoplankton and pods for the tank. I'll post later on to this thread on my experience with this system but so far I think its a great addition.