Tft's 180 build thread

[Tft12]

I've been around the hobby for a very long time but this is my first build thread. I've been working on this 180 for a few years. I had mainly been interested in fish in this system but they all long outgrew this 180 and have been living in a 300 gallon pond, so I decided to put some additional focus on my SPS. Everything is still in the pretty early stages despite portions of the system being around for a few years.

Almost every piece of SPS is from @Battlecorals .

Most of the fish are from Liveaquaria with a few from an LFS.

I'll update with equipment, parameters, and stock list. There's also a nano and 300 gallon stock tank plumbed into this system so I'll give information for those attached systems as well.

 

[KJ]

Nice looking tank!

 

[Tft12]

Nice looking tank!

Thanks a lot! I couldn't remember who had those words in their signature. Something brought it to mind a few days ago.

 

[Tft12]

Fish in 180:

Marginalis butterfly
Yellow long nose butterfly
Pair of Potter's angels
Meredithi angel
Lavender tang
White tail bristletooth tang
Lemonpeel mimic tang
Blue hippo tang
Scopas tang
Carberryi anthias (three females, one male...one additional male that was recently deposed as dominant male)
Rainford's goby
Ocellaris clown pair
Green parrotfish
Starry blenny
Sharknose goby
Randalls goby

For most of my time in the hobby I've kept pretty strict rules about my fish stocking. With this system I was dramatically less strict and tried out a lot. I definitely have too many tangs. There isn't much fighting between them but they will probably outgrow the tank in a year or two. Same for the Meredithi angel. For the remainder of the time that I have this 180 I'll be going back to my strict rules with stocking fish (the last batch of fish that outgrew the 180 is currently in a 300 gallon pond but I think that is undersized also).

 

[KJ]

I couldn't remember who had those words in their signature.

I had asked Greg if I could have permission to use his words in my signature. He is a really nice guy and he told me people would hate me for that,lol , but I feel this is true;)

 

[Tft12]

I had asked Greg if I could have permission to use his words in my signature. He is a really nice guy and he told me people would hate me for that,lol , but I feel this is true;)

Haha. I really like it. I think it nudged me to make a build thread.

 

[dylana407]

Everything looks good until I saw the bare bottom.....lol. Nice tank

 

[Tft12]

Everything looks good until I saw the bare bottom.....lol. Nice tank

Haha. For the 20 years or so that I’ve been in and out of the hobby I’ve always had sand beds. I prefer the look of a sand bed and I also really like a lot of sand dwelling critters like pistol shrimp and jaw fish. I’ve been removing the sand bed from that tank little by little for about a month.

 

[Tft12]

The last time I had a somewhat successful SPS tank was about 15 years ago. I ran a skimmer and some chaeto, manually dosed B-ionic, and only tested Ca, Alk, and maybe Magnesium, so I didnt really get on board with testing and controlling nitrate and phosphate since things had gone well that time. Whenever I’ve infrequently tested those things on this system my nitrate initially was undetectable and then 20 for awhile and sometimes 50 ppm and much higher, while phosphate was tending to be around 1.3 and up. Generally my nitrate and phosphate were exceptionally high. During most of those times (until a Bryopsis outbreak) I didn’t have algae or Cyano issues and my corals looked as they do in the pictures (acceptable to me). The times I killed my SPS were when I stopped my alk dosing for a couple months because I got too busy and when I let the Bryopsis smother my frags/colonies.

Recently I started getting quite a bit of Cyano growing on my sand bed with some also growing in dead spots in my rockwork (you can see some in my pictures). I decided this was my high phosphate and nitrate levels finally showing effects so I started removing the sand bed to get rid of detritus and also the let me more easily crank up the flow.

I just did my first nitrate and phosphate tests since removing any sand and my nitrate was under 0.25 ppm on my Red Sea kit and phosphate was 0.3 ppm on Hanna checker (down from about 50 and 1.3 ppm respectively). Hopefully this will help the Cyano issue without shocking my corals too much. I didn’t expect such dramatic nutrient level changes and I’m actually a little nervous about it. We’ll see how it turns out.

 

[Monkeytank]

How did you affix the rock to the sides? Looks very cool.

 

[cracker]

me to Monkey tank . Hoe did ya get the rock to stay in place?

 

[Tft12]

How did you affix the rock to the sides? Looks very cool.

Thanks.

I bought this tank used and it came pretty scratched up and with super glue dripped down the front viewing panel so my plan for this system was to experiment a lot and find out how I was going to plan a future build.

I had a fmacy adhesive/bonding product by 3M leftover from a different project that didn’t work out. I can’t remember the name of it. I think the Jurassic gel from BRS probably would have worked. The most important part I found was getting a very straight cut of the Pukani rock which was pretty difficult for me with my hand saws. I found that a cross section of Pukani has a lot of holes so if you place a cross section of it on a thick layer of glue there ends up forming a lot of “knobs” for the glue to get ahold of the rock. The rocks were heavy and I thought I was probably going to end up with just a bunch of dried glue on the wall but I tried to pull them off to test it out and couldn’t.

I thought the fish would like the overhang more but I think they feel exposed over there. Also, since the rock is directly against the back wall, a fish that’s getting picked on can’t dart behind anything in that half of the tank. I just added the rock somewhat below them a couple days ago to give them a little more cover on that side of the tank.

I had a Leopard puffer in there for a year or two and it would spend the whole day upside down hunting the bottom face of the overhang, so that was neat. The Marginalis butterfly and Potter’s do that sometimes.

Overall I don’t like the effect as much as I thought I would and there’s the issues that I knew would come along with the rocks not being removable. I’m glad I gave it try but it didn’t go exactly how I expected and I probably wouldn’t do it to a tank that was in good shape.

 

[Tft12]

This is the main Montipora section of my tank.

 

[jaxredsoxfan]

Very nice tank. The rock on the back wall gives a different look, I kind of like it. Thanks for sharing it

 

[Tft12]

I started experimenting with corals on tiles since I removed my sand bed. I’m enjoying them so far. I’ll see how I like it when some of the corals grow out.

 

[FactoryKTMmotocross46]

Can we see some pictures of dump truck? I came to look after I saw your video.

 

[Tft12]

Can we see some pictures of dump truck? I came to look after I saw your video.

Ha. I don’t think I have any pictures from when he was in this 180. He’s been in a 300 gallon “pond” tank along with the others that outgrew this 180.

He’s in a 300 gallon in the photo.