Overhaul of my 24g Cardiff nano reef

[powers2001]

What I found works: take a clean empty food container whatever size you need and put rubble or or crushed coral on bottom. Slide a lady's nylon stocking over the top and tie a knot in the opening. Light can still get in and water can move through the stocking but the mushroom frag cannot blow out.

 

[eric.battani]

After being away from my tank on vacation for a week, I was really surprised to see how much some of my corals had grown and how well my tank did while I was away. Seems like no matter what, something always breaks lol. It wasn't major but one of my LEDs over my algae scrubber went out. Other than that, everything else was fine. But I spent the whole day today playing with my tank. I did a very deep clean on everything which was not very much fun. Then after finishing and packing everything up I ran across an old homemade hob overflow box. And it occurred to me that if cut the right way that it would make a very nice frag rack, perfect for a nano aquarium like mine. So I brought out my dremal and went to work. Soon I had a very nice frag rack. No it may not look as pretty as a store bought rack, but it's nice enough to use when acclamating new frags to my lights. And with the mtrc swap quickly approaching, this will be just what I need.

 

[eric.battani]

Finally got a beautiful mandarin goby to eat some of these pods a couple weeks ago! I have so many in my tank that I can't take pictures of the corals without getting little blur spots from pods. Funny thing is, it seems to want to host my wellso! And before any says anything about my tank not being able to support a healthy pod population when it's only 24 gallons, look at my total system first. It's a Cardiff all-in-one with a built-in refugium that I have loaded with live rock rubble, nothing else, no skimmer, no media basket, nothing but rubble; I also have a hob overflow box that feeds straight into a 20g acrylic refugium which is full of more live rock rubble and macro algae. Plenty of breeding ground for a healthy pod population.
And my system is far from being finished. I still have a rock reactor to add onto my system to grow sponges and more pods, but mostly sponges to filter the water more naturally.

 

[Chad82110]

Thanks for post. I just picked up same tank in feb. Really like aquascape. I know how hard it is in this tank.

 

[eric.battani]

Thanks for post. I just picked up same tank in feb. Really like aquascape. I know how hard it is in this tank.

Thanks. It was a little tricky but with patience, a masonry drill bit, zip bands, and rock putty you can come up with some awesome rock scape as well. The tricky part is getting your flow just right without creating a tornado.

 

[eric.battani]

When you have a reef tank with limited space, you tend to get creative. So I glued some live rock together to make a acan "tree" to hold all my acans.

I could have used some rock putty but I didn't want to wait for it to dry so I used super glue gel and rock rubble from my sump. I still have a few more places for another acan frag or two if I want to add sone in the future.

 

[eric.battani]

My view tonight after finally getting all my frag racks out of my tank. It's too small of a tank to begin with, but I needed the racks to hold corals that I took to the mtrc swap. Now that's over, I was able to take the racks. Now my next project will be to clean the sand bed off. Also to add some royal blue leds to make the colors really pop!

Also here is some zoa eye candy

 

[eric.battani]

Loving my new radion upgrade. I still can't believe I made the switch from metal halides

 

[eric.battani]

So a new update on may tank.

Sometime back I switched back to the original stand, and took out the sump.

Also a couple months ago I added an apex to my tank!!!! It has been one of the coolest features I've added to my tank.

I built a stand to go behind my tank to hold the apex and my dosing containers.

Then I taped the eb8 aquabus so that I could paint it gray so it would match the dos dosing pump. Originally i was just going to leave it the same, but it looked so tacky having the equipment different colors.