Reefcowboy’s 150 gal SPS System

[Reefcowboy]

Incredible growth to an established reef in only 9months.
Really enjoyed your build. Going to be stealing a few ideas ( crushed coral) for my next build and you have convinced me a ATS is the way to go.

Thank you
I think here in the US sand is so popular while in Europe and other countries crushed coral is heavily used successfully.

Crushed aragonite has its benefits and coralline grows like crazy over it, which I really like.

As far as ATS, I can say it is easily the best piece of equipment I have ever decided to use. Ditching GFO and having a natural approach has been giving me colors and coral health I could not get before. It is very simple to maintain and harvest so I dont even think about nutrients anymore, as the ATS keeps my NO3 at 4ppm and PO4 at zero, no matter how much I feed. If I feed more, the harvest is bigger, feed less the algae grows slower.

I added a kalk stirrer since with the cold weather and windows always closed my pH stayed between 7.7-8.1
Im maintaining it between 7.95-8.2 so its been doing its purpose. In a few weeks ill post again reporting any growth improvements.

 

[m0jjen]

Thank you. I really like Marco Rock , I guess many tanks are using it these days being they allow good flow and great aquascapes.

Im not sure if my experience is like most who used this type of rock, but Ive had absolutely no issues at all. I only seeded the tank with Dr Tim’s One and Only and added the two clowns.

Today the tank is 9 months and I have sponges, criters and lots of life everywhere. All rocks are completely covered in coralline and this is the cleanest set up ive ever owned.

I do read once in a while some people reporting dinoflagellates with Marco Rock, but I think it could be due to other factors.

There could be better ways to seed a tank and waiting longer could also be beneficial. I noticed coralline sprouted heavily at around 4 months from set up date, but like I've posted on this thread, I added SPS very early and all sps did very well.

Thanks for the reply! Thats really low amount of cycle and seeding, i guess you got alot of goodies from the frags and what not =) Regarding the dino's im gonna go ahead and assume that people experiancing this dont stock the tank fast enough and the nutrients bottom out really fast once the biological process starts to speed up. Just my take on that problem

I was thinking about seeding my rock while in a bin. Using a **** ton of bacteria, pods and so on aswell as feeding the "bin". I guess we'll see how it turns out haha

Great tank and thanks again for the reply!

 

[Ecvernon]

Hello. How is your tank doing?

 

[Reefcowboy]

Hello. How is your tank doing?

Sorry its been so long since my last update. Gotta say tank was doing excellent with some colonies reaching close to 6” grown from frags since the beginning of this build. Two months ago I went on a business trip, stayed away for 5 weeks. Left the tank maintenance and feeding schedule with my wife at home and brother in law, who lives half a mile from my house...I guess you guys can figure how things went from there. Murphy’s Law paid a visit.

About 2 weeks into my trip my wife told me some corals were “turning white” and that she was doing everything as I asked. My guess is she must have overfed the fish, nitrate climbed and sps were jumping ship. She didint know how to test the water as I was cusrious how high nitrate must had been for corals to be dying. Crazy how we run a tank flawlessly for a year and the time we leave the house burns down.

So I come back from my trip, glance at my tank and my jaw dropped. About 90% of sps were dead. Even lps like chalices and favias were on their way out. Gonis, and a handful of sps made it. I tested for nitrate, 80ppm....!
My algae scrubber algae was dead, looking like a slimmy mess. I felt like leaving the hobby as it was so dissapointing. It is almost like our tanks know when we leave town.

So I spent the last couple of weeks cleaning, organizing things in the tank and bringing my water back to acceptable patterns. Took my ATS offline(have no idea what happened) and have been dosing Nopox to bring No3 down. I will post some pics soon with more updates

 

[najer]

I hope you get it turned around soon.

 

[fishybizzness]

Sorry its been so long since my last update. Gotta say tank was doing excellent with some colonies reaching close to 6” grown from frags since the beginning of this build. Two months ago I went on a business trip, stayed away for 5 weeks. Left the tank maintenance and feeding schedule with my wife at home and brother in law, who lives half a mile from my house...I guess you guys can figure how things went from there. Murphy’s Law paid a visit.

About 2 weeks into my trip my wife told me some corals were “turning white” and that she was doing everything as I asked. My guess is she must have overfed the fish, nitrate climbed and sps were jumping ship. She didint know how to test the water as I was cusrious how high nitrate must had been for corals to be dying. Crazy how we run a tank flawlessly for a year and the time we leave the house burns down.

So I come back from my trip, glance at my tank and my jaw dropped. About 90% of sps were dead. Even lps like chalices and favias were on their way out. Gonis, and a handful of sps made it. I tested for nitrate, 80ppm....!
My algae scrubber algae was dead, looking like a slimmy mess. I felt like leaving the hobby as it was so dissapointing. It is almost like our tanks know when we leave town.

So I spent the last couple of weeks cleaning, organizing things in the tank and bringing my water back to acceptable patterns. Took my ATS offline(have no idea what happened) and have been dosing Nopox to bring No3 down. I will post some pics soon with more updates

Sorry to hear that things went south. So true that it always happens when you're out of town. Shows how fine the line is between success and failure. We don't realize it but we are constantly balancing on that line! Hope your rebound is quick!!

 

[CDavmd]

This makes me so sad. This is one of my favorite builds and tanks....just sucks. Do you think it was overfeeding? Or did something kill off the algae which then led to the elevated nitrates? Were phosphates equally high?

 

[Reefcowboy]

This makes me so sad. This is one of my favorite builds and tanks....just sucks. Do you think it was overfeeding? Or did something kill off the algae which then led to the elevated nitrates? Were phosphates equally high?

Thank you for the kind remarks. Thank you guys for wishing me a quick tank recovery!
Right now I have no idea what lead to the problem. Im kind of thinking as nutrients rose, the ATS creeped up with algae very fast and maybe the algae grew extremely dense, making the inside portions die off due to light starvation.

The sump/ATS was a nasty mush with dead matter. Im sure it contributed to quick deaths of corals. I cleaned the sump and did many water changes.

So I decided to try running a refugium now, and check how the tank would do compared to the results with the ATS, which were very good until the disaster hit.

 

[Water Dog]

Looking forward to following your tank’s journey to recovery.

 

[NY_Caveman]

It is a shame. Glad you are sticking with it. You will find success yet again.

 

[Reefcowboy]

I got a shallow 24x24x12 , 30 gal tank, so removing chaeto would be easy. Harvesting an ATS wasnt an easy chore, probably the only thing I didn’t like about it, so for this fuge I wanted to make things as easy as possible.

In a few hours I planned it and drilled the outlet/inlet to the sump.
I got a 1200 gal/hr Hydor Seltz DC pump to get water to the fuge from the sump. The pump is of excellent quality, super quiet and very small for its capacity. I definitely recommend!!

I tried making holes for the pipes so that it would change as little as possible the sump design. Even though I did this project in a hurry, I think it came out as I wanted, with very little change to the way it looked before.

I luckily found a fuge tank stand to match my tank’s, and installed the same door handle on it so the end result is almost like the fuge tank and main tank stands were made to match.

For lighting I got the AI prime fuge led(amazing light BTW!), with the ceiling hanging kit. I read lots of bad reviews of the prime neck/bracket not properly supporting the fixture, with some cases of the lights dropping into the tank. I also have two little kids at home so the ceiling hanging kit was a must.

I didnt like however how the power cord hung behind the tank with the ceiling kit, so I made a hiding channel out of tv cable tubbing(ones that hide cable on walls)and it came out as planned.


Sump with the outlet..

And return to sump, straight down to the return pump baffle/section(third pipe to the left)

How the pumbing ended up. Sorry wires are messy, havent had a chance to organize them with all that went on. Apex modules also have so many wires! Its crazy to manage all of it.

Almost no change to the sump

 

[Reefcowboy]

Heres a pic of how the tank is today
Amazingly zoas exploded with growth everywhere during the disaster. I guess they liked baithing in 80ppm nitrates

I have a blue acro that made it, and although it has some burnt tips, it colored up to be the most beautiful cobalt blue ive ever had on an sps. I tested nitrates today, reading 4ppm and zero nitrates. Sps colonies are growing over the areas they had lost tissue, and polyps are finally out. My alk is dropping which means they are back calcifying.

Time to get new frags...

 

[Reefcowboy]

A pic sent by my wife back when she said the corals were dying...

 

[najer]

Nice work on the fuge set up.

 

[Ecvernon]

I'm sorry to hear this. I'm glad you are bouncing back like a true reefer!

The reason I was interested in your build is that I admired your work with the Algae scrubber. I was thinking of copying your design.

 

[Reefcowboy]

I'm sorry to hear this. I'm glad you are bouncing back like a true reefer!

The reason I was interested in your build is that I admired your work with the Algae scrubber. I was thinking of copying your design.

The algae scrubber worked like a horse since the beginning. Im positive it wasnt the reason the tank crashed, I harvested that unit like clockwork every week, sometimes pulled close to a pund of algae... was feeding 7-8 frozen cubes daily and nitrates were always at 4ppm with po4 at zero. They rock!

The screen size of 12”x8” lit by both sides can keep up with heavy bioload I found out. Dont be discouraged to do an ATS, Im doing a fuge now hoping to have similar success.

I plan on getting some inverts and mangroves for the fuge, just something new I wanted to try. Im also curious how ph gets affected by a fuge vs ATS.

 

[Reefcowboy]

A pic sent by my wife back when she said the corals were dying...

Cant stop wondering what could my wife have fed the tank that could have spiraled the crash.

Maybe a pound of beef? Mistaken fish food by my bulldog's?

 

[Ecvernon]

You were away for 5 weeks? Was harvesting the algae part of the maintenance while you were gone? One time I let my smaller algae scrubber run too long without a harvest, which resulted in the death of the algae layers closest to the screen.

 

[Reefcowboy]

You were away for 5 weeks? Was harvesting the algae part of the maintenance while you were gone? One time I let my smaller algae scrubber run too long without a harvest, which resulted in the death of the algae layers closest to the screen.

You hit it in the head. I suspected not harvesting for 5 weeks could result in death of the algae. Issue is my wife would never agree to harvest it while I was away so I took the risk and the algae died.

That is what Im suspecting caused the crash also

 

[lcj2046]

Amazing Build Am following