Tank birthday, 47+ years

gettaReef · Jun 25, 2015

Agreed! Looks like we're on the same boat (look at life similarly). As they say, happy wife, happy life

Paul B · Jun 26, 2015

My montipora's are growing back nicely along with everything else.

A good friend of mine is getting married so he took his tank down and gave me 4 wrasses including these beauties.

Paul B · Jun 29, 2015

I added this marine Betta today. I took his picture while I was acclimating him because now that he is in my tank, I doubt I will ever see the entire fish again as they are hiders.

Paul B · Jun 30, 2015

I just came back from collecting 30 gallons of NSW and I would swear this stuff gets heavier every time I collect it. Normally I don't do much to it except heat it and add a little ASW because the salinity here in New York is low for some reason but it is very turbid with all sorts of black particles in it so I had to diatom filter it. I only had a very little bit of diatom powder on hand so I didn't do as good a job as I would have liked but now it is crystal clear and I am just waiting for it to heat up before I dump it in. I even checked the nitrates and they are zero, calcium is 440.
I took it from the Coast Guard Station near Jones Beach. Near here.

Harold Green · Jul 7, 2015

Hi Paul I'm trying to remember when I had my first marine tank. I do remember filling a ten gallon with sea water and bringing home some small gaftop catfish to populate it. That was about 45 years ago. Probably about the time you started yours I had a 55g with undergravel filter before reverse flow became popular. Had dead corals and some plastic lace plants that reached the waters surface. Two peppermint shrimp lived in the tank along with assorted fish. The shrimp would climb the plants to the surface, turn upside down and capture tetra ruby flake food I put in for the fish. Those shrimp turned bright dark red and were the best looking shrimp I've ever seen. At 65 I replaced my 75g tank last year with a 210g that I hope to enjoy for many years to come. I've been retired for five years now, put in my forty as a commercial electrician. I think I still have that 55g tank from forty years ago but it hasn't been used in several years. The 210 I set up with a 75g sump, skimmer, fuge, ato, filter socks. Leds on the tank for lighting. Over the years the hobby has changed plenty, I've gone through five homes and two wives but marine tanks have always been my constant.

Paul B · Jul 7, 2015

Harold, I also put in 40 as a commercial electrician and started then. I al also only a year older than you but still on the same wife and home.

Harold Green · Jul 7, 2015

I'm pretty sure I got the wife part right this time. As for the reef tank I'm still trying to get sps to grow at a faster rate. I believe the main issue is getting the right intensity and spectrum from the leds. My 75 had vho's and I couldn't find an empty space in the tank but it was mostly soft corals. Unfortunately the vho's produced a lot of heat and replacing ballasts was as pricey as replacing all the lamps. Also I wanted to get away from the plenum systems I've been running for the last twenty years. Now most of the dirt goes down to the sump where the filter socks catch it for easy removal.

iratherBfishing · Jul 7, 2015

I noticed that with a good flow in the water my soft corals spread with the flow. Try putting them in some good flow of water

Paul B · Jul 7, 2015

Harold, don't go nuts. SPS and LPS don't always cooperate and usually there is nothing we can do. Corals in an enclosed tank are at the mercy of chemical warfare from all the other corals in the same tank. Most of them exude substances that limit the growth of near by corals and in a tank, they just keep building up. We don't always have the upper hand even if we do everything right.

Paul B · Jul 7, 2015

Beaslbob, I think I have 4 or 5 diatom filters in various stages of rust and disassembly. A few Silent Giants also along with some Dynaflo HOB filters.
I didn't have a tank in Viet Nam. I also didn't have under ware in Viet Nam so that wasn't an issue. Besides I flew a few times a week and they wouldn't let me carry it in the helicopter. I am also sure the constant rain would cause me to keep adding salt and the nearest electricity for the power heads was in a different country so the extension cord would have been uncannily long. I wouldn't have had a problem feeding the tank as we had plenty of 4' lizards, 7" scorpions, besides your normal size tigers, elephants and monkeys. Being I never saw a road, wall or roof in that country keeping the temperature steady would have been a problem as it was a little to hot for a tank. Water changes would have been easy and cheap as it rained for 8 months usually hard enough to float an Oldsmobile in a few minutes. I would imagine I could have kept the tank on those sand bags behind me here but we moved every few days and had to empty the bags, then blow up the place. Leveling the tank would be easy because everything was sand bags so you could make any kind of stand you wanted. As long as it was made out of sand bags. I also would have to keep my friend here away from the fish as he ate rats. He walked up to me one day out of the bush and we became friends. During the dry season our drinking water was dredged up from a muddy river and had iodine pills put into it to kill the worms, leaches and other cool wildlife living there so I wouldn't have had to dose iodine. Corals may have liked that. :eek:

Here is what that place looked like from a helicopter, so you can see setting up a tank there would have been a piece of cake. I just didn't have the skills then :cool:

Harold Green · Jul 7, 2015

There's only a few soft corals in the tank but I have about 1100 gph flowing through the sump and into the tank along with a wavemaker that's supposed to move about 3400 gph creating a nice back and forth wave. Skimmer sized for 400gph and gfo/carbon reactors. The tanks been running for a year now but I recently doubled the amount of lighting and the sps are starting to grow more rapidly. My only real problem has been with green monti caps that lose color in a week or two while orange and purple ones are growing well. My late 75g all overgrown.

Paul B · Jul 8, 2015

That "problem" doesn't seem like much of a problem

Paul B · Jul 8, 2015

I love these guys, bluestripes and shrimpfish

Paul B · Jul 9, 2015

I took a video

Paul B · Jul 10, 2015

Which one? This one

Or one of these?

Paul B · Jul 14, 2015

I replaced the wrasse that jumped out with this candy cane wrasse. I like him and may get another one

My Marine beta is doing great, hard to get a good picture because he stays in the shadows and wants to be an Enigma.

The mandarin just does what mandarin's do and my bluestripe pipefish is pregnant again.

Paul B · Aug 1, 2015

I went to feed the tank and I noticed that the light over the algae trough was out and the skimmer was dry as was the algae trough. OMG. That lightning strike that nuked my AC and the pump for my worms also killed the light over the trough and my rather ancient powerhead. The powerhead has other issues like the stainless steel shaft is badly worn so when the power went out, it just didn't want to start. I will try to make a new shaft and epoxy it in. The light is toast so I will make another one. I can't even guess how old this powerhead is, probably from the 80s. I have one more like it but I need this type for my skimmer because I designed the thing to fit perfectly.