I redid my aquascape with Australian live rock from Eric Cohen at tankstop.com. This is the second anniversary of my first tank. After two years I wanted to start over and hopefully make less mistakes this time around. Prior to this update, I hadn’t made any major changes for half a year.
I am transitioning to a SPS dominant tank, which means I left most of my non-SPS coral behind.l
A few things to note:
1. Process took 10 hours over the course of two days. I expoxy’d the large pieces first day, cured overnight, then added the aquascape to my RedSea 525 the next day.
2. Aquascape consists of 5 larger structures built with expory/superglue. Then 3-5 inch pieces are layered throughout without glue. Any portion of the aquascape can be easily rearranged or pulled out for maintenance.
3. Aquascape built from 36 pounds of Australian live rock. Several of the larger pieces are sitting on top of 3/4” pieces of flat Marco rock to give the aquascape more elevation.
4. The rockscape is lower than my prior Marco rock aquascape since (1) I had less rock to work with (budget issue), (2) I wanted to limit time spent aquascaping in the open air, and (3) it was challenging to aquascape underwater in the large plastic bins I used. To compensate for the lower aquascape, I moved my MP40s down a few inches.
5. I used 3.5 sticks of the DD aquarium epoxy. This is absolutely terrible epoxy since it starts dissolving as soon as it hits the water, takes very long to cure, and does not form a strong bond after 18 hours. I had to epoxy some connections 3-4 times since the bodnsnkept falling apart. I ended up having to reinforce most of the joints with superglue. Next time I would buy the Tunze epoxy which even is double the price but sets within minutes, pollutes the water a lot less, and has a solid end bond. The 3.5 sticks of DD epoxy (huge headache) was equivalent to 1 stick of Tunze epoxy (smooth process). The water got very polluted after the initial round of epoxy so I ended up doing a water change. When I cleaned up the black plastic bins later, small specs of expoxy settled all over the bottom (and some wall areas) of the bin. Needless to say I do not recommend the DD epoxy!
6. I also used ten 2 oz tubes of superglue. I would have liked to use more but ran out.
7. I ended up with only 4 pounds 3 ounces of small rubble—far less than what I expected. Most of the breakage experienced during shipping was fixed with epoxy and superglue. . I put the rubble into my sump and will attach a few small pieces to the aquascape once I refresh my superglue supply.
Major advantages of the Australian live rock:
1. Incredibly beautiful rock! My wife and kids love the new look!
2. Super high porosity since it largely consists of dead coral skeleton rather than rock mined from land. Rock is very light so it is much less cumbersome to move in/out of tank and to re-adjust in-tank.
3. Structure of rocks makes it very easy to jigsaw together into stable structures. In the aquascape shown, I only have 6-7 major joints made with expoxy/superglue. Most of the pieces are stacked and/or jigsawed. You cannot jigsaw stable structures with Marco rock which means you have to rely heavily in epoxy/glue/mortar when using dry rock.
4. The coral skeleton structure allows you to add frag plugs to the structure without superglue. Half of the frags in the aquascape were simply jammed into one of the numerous small openings available. This allows for easy movement of frags around the tank. I tried multiple times to drill holes into my old Marco rock and gave up since it took forever and was difficult to do without breaking the rock itself.
Below are pictures of the end result! I could not be happier.
