OlPainless
Active Member
One year in for a SW newbie and guess what, still learning! I started with a 36 gallon bowfront tank I got from someone who used it for freshwater. It had a simple on/off led light tube with just white day and blue night. Cleaned it out and painted the back a dark blue, didn't want to go with a black back(didn't look reefy enough for me). I don't have much room so I went with the Tidal 110 hob, used 20 lbs of Carbi sea pink fiji sand and about 20-25lbs of dry rock with 1 small live rock from the LFS. Filled it up with SW and away we go! I did about 3 weeks of dosing Microbacter 7 to help cycle the tank(recommended from the LFS rep). After plenty of fine folks on this site recommended other techniques, I went with BioSpira Instant Ocean and added a peppermint shrimp and clown. It didn't take long for the tank to fully cycle and over the next few months added various clean up crews and fish. I haven't had any "big" problems throughout the past year, just something things that happen that make you scratch your head and wonder what all goes on in this small environment. Had a yellow watchman goby completely disappear after 36 hours, honestly he could still be in there for all I know but I think an emerald crab I had got hungry. Also, the emerald crab fell apart over night last fall. I've had a few fish die off for one reason or another; lawnmower blenny lasted 1 month, green mandarin lasted 4 days, pin cushion urchin died after 3 days, stuff like that. I upgraded my light a few months ago and got introduced to the world of GHA! Also recently dealing with some red cyano algae on the sand bed that is getting better. Current stock of fish and clean up include: original clown, coral beauty, purple firefish and a fire goby(just lost my royal gramma that I've had since last summer), banded sea star, urchin, cleaner shrimp, peppermint shrimp and a handful of blue legged hermits, 1 red hermit and another handful of turbo/astrea/nassarious snails. Also put in a frag of an acan and zoa's from the LFS to see how they would do in this tank, so far so good. As you can see from the pictures, the rock has a good covering of algae and some(what I think) is coraline algae. I do a 20-30% water change every three weeks and replace the filter media, so far things have been smooth. I had some drama with high nitrates for awhile but I think I am hovering around 25-30ppm on nitrates, still a little high but things seems to be fine in the tank. We will see where this goes in the future, so far I am enjoying it! I wish I had known more about some of the fish I bought, the firefish and fire goby just hide all the time so it would be nice to get another fish that stays visible more often.
