New here, a little introduction

Koston · Feb 9, 2012

I'm Lexi and I just registered here. I have had an account over at Nano-Reef for quite some time now as I am strictly a nano-reefer as that is all I have space for in my room. I am by no means new to the hobby having kept several different nano-reefs over the past few years. However circumstances left with me a pretty nice brand new JBJ Nanocube 28g LED edition that was set up last June 1st. A little rundown on that: Ever since I got it, I have been unable to keep corals alive in it, but fish and anenomes and snails and shrimp thrive in my system. I have tested for just about everything with constantly perfect parameters and have come up with no results as to why this is happening. Even the simpliest and hardiest of corals like GSP, Mushrooms, and Zoas will melt or whither away within the first couple weeks of arriving in my tank. I then started neglecting my tank (not extremely, WC's were still being done and they were still being fed, just enormous algae build ups. Corals are my favorite part of the tank and it was upsetting that I could not keep any.) Recently I have a revamped interest in redeveloping my tank and finding out what the problem is. Then I found a controller battery pack from a xbox controller in my chamber... realized that could have been having a horrible effect on corals so pulled that out then I have been doing 30-50% waterchanges every week or every other week. I also had the horrible stock media basket that I had not touched since I got the tank so it was disgusting and virtually doing nothing, so I purchased an InTank media tank basket (which are amazing, btw) some Purigen and Chemipure Elite and installed everything last week. My skimmer (CPR Aeroforce 2 BakPak) also has never pulled any skimmate and is way too big and bulky for my tank and just causing a myriad of problems, so I turned it off the other day and plan on purchasing a new one soon. Also purchased a pretty bulked up CUC from John over at reefcleaners.org because there was NONE in my tank.

After doing all this, I decided to test out a live mushroom-covered rock and seeing how they would do in my tank to see if my steps toward correcting the problem fixed my coral problem. I purchased a piece of rock with about 25 polyps of cute green fuzzy mushrooms on it about a week ago now and have seen no ill effects. They are doing fine and not whithering away! They're doing pretty well and not closing up or anything which I am very happy about... Been taking pics to document it.

Pretty sure I am on my way to start buying cool corals now guys

soccerbag · Feb 9, 2012

Awesome news that things are doing better. How frustrating that must have been! A controller battery huh? Crazy. And I'm sure that was it.

Welcome to R2R - we are very happy to have you here. Once you get things settled, we would love to see some pics of the setup. : )