Pico reef tank without dosing
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Tahoe61
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No mystery. Successful pico reefers either dose or do routine water changes and use an ATO. I changed out a cup a day on my pico 6 gallon. You can put everything in the ATO. In my case I use AFR.
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canadianeh
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What’s AFR?
Tahoe61
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All For Reef. It's a Tropic Marine product. Instead of parts A/B or A/B/C to maintain the big three you use one product AFR.
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canadianeh
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So you put AFR and mix it RODI water in your ATO reservoir?All For Reef. It's a Tropic Marine product. Instead of parts A/B or A/B/C to maintain the big three you use one product AFR.
Tahoe61
10K Club member
Yes. I use a Tunze Nano Automated Top Off, Nano. Mix AFR in 1/4 gal of RO/DI daily. You can do the same with Kalk, but not together with AFR.
hoardingcorals
Active Member
I think the marketing teams at BRS, ESV, Tropic Marin, etc. will be happy to see someone questioning how running a tank without dosing is even possible. Their efforts to convice us that we need to buy loads of products to keep a healthy tank are paying off. Dosing is really only needed on larger tanks where water changes aren't practical.
People have been successfully keeping nano tanks long-term without dosing, skimmers, or controllers for years. If you would like some more inspiration, check out some of the old Tank of the Month posts on nano-reef. There are lots of old tanks that were even more impressive than WWC's. A common setup used to be a 3-5 gallon tank with an Aquaclear 50, 70 or 110 modified into a fuge. Some might have an ATO, others might have a gravity fed top off, some even used water bottles meant for hamster cages.
It looks like WWC's tank doesn't have much for SPS (or stony corals in general), so keeping up on the most commonly dosed elements like calcium or alkalinity isn't as important. Instead, you can manage parameters through water changes: using alk as an example, say you want to keep it at 8 dkh, if it drops to 7 dkh, you can replenish it by doing a 20% water change with a salt that mixes to 12 dkh (I think my math is correct on that). The same would apply to other elements. It may not work out perfectly, but it will typically be good enough. You don't really want fast growth in a tank that small anyway. If you tried to dose for aggressive growth like many people do, then you would end up with lots of coral warfare and stuff growing out of the surface in six months.
The downside is if you go away for extended periods of time you could end up with greater parameter swings, which is something WWC doesn't have to worry about since there is always staff there to take care of it.
People have been successfully keeping nano tanks long-term without dosing, skimmers, or controllers for years. If you would like some more inspiration, check out some of the old Tank of the Month posts on nano-reef. There are lots of old tanks that were even more impressive than WWC's. A common setup used to be a 3-5 gallon tank with an Aquaclear 50, 70 or 110 modified into a fuge. Some might have an ATO, others might have a gravity fed top off, some even used water bottles meant for hamster cages.
It looks like WWC's tank doesn't have much for SPS (or stony corals in general), so keeping up on the most commonly dosed elements like calcium or alkalinity isn't as important. Instead, you can manage parameters through water changes: using alk as an example, say you want to keep it at 8 dkh, if it drops to 7 dkh, you can replenish it by doing a 20% water change with a salt that mixes to 12 dkh (I think my math is correct on that). The same would apply to other elements. It may not work out perfectly, but it will typically be good enough. You don't really want fast growth in a tank that small anyway. If you tried to dose for aggressive growth like many people do, then you would end up with lots of coral warfare and stuff growing out of the surface in six months.
The downside is if you go away for extended periods of time you could end up with greater parameter swings, which is something WWC doesn't have to worry about since there is always staff there to take care of it.
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