Rebooted 72x30x24

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

Hello fellow saltwater enthusiast. I am posting this to possibly help others and to share my experiences with this particular tank as I have had many over the years.
I bought this tank about 5 years ago used from a local forum. My plan was to upgrade a previous reef tank. I had great success in the previous tank.
So I set off to set it up much the same as the smaller tank before it. I ran the same equipment only larger.
Lighting- 60" ATI 8 bulb with reef brites -blue
Mp-40's-4 flow
ATB 1050- skimmer
Bubble Magnus dosing pump- BRS two part
Cad lights-pellet reactor
BRS dual reactor- carbon and rarely gfo- could never get it to tumble
Apex controller
Heaters
JbJ auto top off
Home made sump with filter socks
Probably missing some things.
So I set the tank up built the stand filled with RODI water and reef crystals salt and hit the ground running.
I used about 200 plus pounds of BRS reef saver rock- which I cooked for about 2-3 weeks
I also put the rock from the other tank in and when ready added all my corals and fish.
It went well and I was very happy I had a big tank (to me) to fill with coral and fish(love fish)
I was buying coral directly from Jason Fox and hitting all the local fish stores to find any gems. It was very exciting and watching them grow and to just sit and look at the tank and see changes daily was great! Something I had experienced before with all the previous tanks.
This time around I seemed to be having much better success then before

A previous tank

The new tank going up
I never did a build thread which I regret

A gutter I installed to hide wires- thought it was a good idea and it worked well

Water in and rock started to go in

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

I will keep writing this 240 story as it has been and still is a journey

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

Left half

Right half

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

Sorry for bad pics wasn't good at pics 5years ago and still not any good at them today [emoji23]

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

I used an 80 gallon as a sump under the tank and for the first time had so much room I didn't know what to do with. I loved having the 80 under the tank.

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

Building the sump

ethridge78 · Nov 10, 2016

Nice build

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

This is going to be a journal so to speak of this tank over the past 5 years

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

More corals went in.
All params were in check

dh350twin · Nov 10, 2016

Corals were growing good. Had took pellets offline and went to dosing Red Sea NoPox and reef energy A and B

Radman73 · Nov 11, 2016

I might be stealing the gutter idea.

Daniel@R2R · Nov 11, 2016

Radman73 said:
I might be stealing the gutter idea.

+1. The gutter is very cool!

dh350twin · Nov 11, 2016

Was having pretty good results
Calcium was always kept high around 500
Alk was always kept around 9
Mag was not tested much and never tested nitrate or phosphate

dh350twin · Nov 11, 2016

I have tried many things in previous tanks such as refugiums, pellets-when they first came out.
Simple water changes.
Had good results with pellets with sps.
Had great results with a refugium with lps
At this point Red Sea had came out with NoPox and reef energy A+B so I was trying the Red Sea program and by no means by the book. I would dose NoPox by hand and just dump reef energy A+B in as I felt it needed.

dh350twin · Nov 11, 2016

With water changes every other week about 10% and hand dosing Red Sea and I was running reef crystals for salt everything was going very well. As long as I kept an eye on my calcium and alk.