The Mancave Nano Peninsula

[Kongar]

Post #43 for the latest pics

Latest Post Rockwork Redo Video - 04 Dec 2022


Pre Rockwork Redo Video - 3/27/22


FTS March 27th 2022

Hello all,

Since it seems to be the cool thing to do, I figured I’d start my own build thread. I’m new to reefing, and maybe you all will enjoy coming along for the ride. Hopefully someday in the far flung future, this tank becomes an epic one - let’s see if we can get there.

Let’s start with some goals first. My basement is a mancave. It has this strange half height wall at the bottom of the stairs to the left of the television area. It’s fairly non functional, but it would make a good spot for a peninsula tank.

Here’s a couple of shots of that spot.

A 20 gallon is narrow enough to fit on that wall, so I decided on the IM Nuvo 20 peninsula. I’ll have a nice view from three sides, and the AIO works well since there’s no place underneath for gear. I’m shooting for nice and clean and compact.

Rounding the equipment out for the initial setup:
2 AI prime 16hd lights
2 AI prime flex arms 12 in
Tunze 3155 ATO
Trigger systems 5gal ATO reservoir
Vortech mp10wqd
Cobalt 100W heater
IM nano skimmer
15lbs of reefsaver rock
20lbs of Fijipink caribsea sand
Media basket
HW salt mix
Aquatic life RODI 75gpd
GFCI breaker extension and power strip

I’m also NOT looking for a fish room, full of brute trashcans, waste sinks, and clutter. The goal here is a small nano tank that doesn’t require renovations to the house. I know a lot of people upgrade to bigger tanks down the road, but as of now - I’m pretty sold on staying small. That philosophy drove the aquatic life RODI purchase, and I’m planning on using nothing more than a couple of 5 gallon buckets that can be tucked away in the nearby bathroom closet.

Here are my buckets and salt in their closet.

My mixing station is the shower. Doing my mixing over a drain is great if I forget to turn the water off or spill something (already happened more than once)

Lastly, my RODI unit just gets pulled out of the same closet and screwed into the faucet. It takes me exactly an hour and a half to make 4 gallons of RODI water with this setup, and about 5 min on either end to setup and/or break down.

Next post: the aquascape and cycle.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy my thread - and I hope to demonstrate success with a low maintenance nano reef.
Kongar

 

[Aere]

Nice! Can't wait to see the journey. When you said fish room full of brutes I felt that. Haha.

 

[Kongar]

Nice! Can't wait to see the journey. When you said fish room full of brutes I felt that. Haha.

HA! My apologies for “trash talking” your brutes.

 

[Kongar]

The aquascape, cycle, and two fish.

I bought 20lbs of dry rock, but only ended up putting in about 15lbs of it into the tank. Any more and I’d have broken some of my aquascape rules. No more than 2/3 of the way up the tank, and room to scrape the glass. I went with a small island that’s low to the sand - that’ll be Euphyllia island. The larger structure has a cave, and a flat top - an eventual home for a few sps. The sand space in the middle is specifically reserved for an elegance coral. Elegance and a torch are must haves. I’m not planning on going crazy with frags or fragging for that matter. I want a few big showpiece corals. If I’m serious about sticking with the 20 gal - I think I need to plan the corals out, and where they’ll live long term.

The aquascape was finished and water added on May 8th 2020. I cycled with a piece of shrimp. My tank cycled in 6 days. Quite pronounced spikes, and it happened faster than I expected. I waited a bit longer just to be sure, and then added a pair of snow onyx clowns on May 24th. Here’s a video showing my first inhabitants and my aquascape on the day I added the clowns.

 

[Kongar]

Let’s talk about those back chambers.

This is the one thing I don’t like about this tank. Because it’s a peninsula - there is simply no room in the back chambers for gear.

The first chamber has a media basket in it. I now run chemi pure blue nano and a piece of filter floss. I run 5 nano bags, and replace 1 bag every week (the oldest).

I bought the AIO bundle, and it came with the media basket and some IM carbon and gfo. This was my first mistake with the tank. The bags of gfo are huge, and I thought you were supposed to just run that stuff - like all the time. My tank probably had zero phosphates for months, and I didn’t have a phosphate tester until recently. If you search my user profile, you’ll see that I’m now battling dinos. I don’t think this was the direct cause - but it probably didn’t help.

The second (middle) chamber houses the eshopps nano skimmer. It just barely fits in there.

The third chamber - well... I’m going to show you some Houdini right now.

The return pump is at the bottom and the return line comes up the middle. The ato sensors are split apart because the water level varies too much back there for the sensors to be on the same magnet clip. The level sensor is top left, the float is top right. The water line is clipped on the back and shoots into chamber three. Look close and you’ll see the cobalt 100W heater in there. And you see that green light? Yessir - that my friends is a seneye shoved in there. So let’s add that to the build:

+1 seneye reef monitor with web server

Every month, I get the unfortunate task of taking most of that chamber apart to get at the seneye and change the slide. This also entails readjusting the ato water levels because they have to come out in order to remove anything except the cobalt. It’s not optimal at all, but it gets the job done. It’s otherwise a very nice tank. If I didn’t insist on running a skimmer, I’d have the second chamber free and a lot more room. But there you have it - if someone says all that gear can’t fit in this tank - there’s your proof it does.

Lastly, let’s take a peek at the back of the tank. The ATO reservoir is behind the tank against the wall, and all the controllers and magnets are zip tied and hidden away on the back of the tank.

Next post: Lights!

 

[Kongar]

Oh, I forgot to mention one thing. The IM skimmer arrived broken, the pump was physically smashed. I regretted that purchase anyways, so I went ahead and replaced it with the eshopps skimmer.

-1 IM Nuvo skimmer
+1 eshopps nano skimmer

 

[KingTideCorals]

Eshopps nano for the win no doubt!

Excited to watch the build.. just dreaming of my man cave set up now LOL

 

[Kongar]

Eshopps nano for the win no doubt!

Excited to watch the build.. just dreaming of my man cave set up now LOL

You know, I was going to go bigger and more traditional. But everyone spends a lot of time down there. It’s really nice having a tank always in your peripheral view. It’s also a big attraction whenever someone comes over. It’s really just a perfect spot and perfect addition to that room.

 

[Kongar]

Lighting

So I started with these:

They really didn’t work out for a peninsula. As you can see from my prior post - there isn’t room to clip them onto the chambers, and they ruined the look of a peninsula if I hung them on the long side. So I changed tactics and hung the two AI prime 16hds from the ceiling. I think it looks MUCH better.

The second mistake I made with the tank was not measuring par. I was cooking my corals. The duality of monitoring and a built in par meter made the seneye attractive to me. After mapping out ~100 par on the sand, ~150 par on the small rock, and ~200 on top of the big rock I settled on this lighting schedule. You’ll notice how much I had to turn down the overall percentage. These are the BRS ai prime 16hd settings scaled down to about 25%. You might say two primes are overkill for such a small tank - but I get a more uniform coverage this way, and the fans never come on and make noise (bonus). They start at 10AM and go off at 8PM. There is a one hour ramp.

Next time I’ll show you my corals

 

[Kongar]

So my last update was on Sept 1st. Little did I know I was about to get a double kick in the jimmy, sick fish and a massive dino outbreak. Let's start with some moderate success first - the fish. I stocked with a pair of clowns and a sixline. They were doing great for months. Here they are looking for dinner - you'd swear I never feed them.



Then one day, the wrasse starts swimming funny and flashing. A little while later both clowns start doing the same thing. White stringy poop - so I catch all the fish and move them to a quarantine tank. Whatever they had killed quick - the wrasse didn't make it. The clowns however pulled through with general cure. Took a while, but I'm happy to report they are back to normal and back in the DT. My young son decided he was going to pick the replacement fish - so we now have a royal gramma along with the clowns. Incredibly satisfying to save at least two of the fish when I was sure they were goners. Thanks to those in the sick fish part of the forums for the help!

 

[Kongar]

Well it has been an exciting (or more like stressful) few months. Internal parasites and a real bad bout with dinos. The dinos had been around since July - but I was too noob to recognize them. They continued to get worse and really did a number on my tank. I did manage to beat them back with dinox - and it's been just short of a month with no signs of returning. I'm back onto a "normal" maintenance routine, and the tank is finally starting to behave normally. It's been 9 months, and I think I'm only now starting to approach something resembling stability and maturity. The dinos took out all of my CUC, and my torch which was doing so well. Sad to see him go. But thanks to the help from many on this forum, we're seeing better days now.

In addition to the dinos, my fish had internal parasites (white stringy poop) - again, I think the clowns always had it but I was too noob to recognize it. It killed my sixline, and just about killed both my clowns. But thanks to the help from this forum, I got a QT set up, gave them some general cure, and nursed them back to health in about 6 weeks. Sucked losing the wrasse, but it was very rewarding to help the clowns get healthy again. They are back in the DT with a new friend - a very shy Royal Gramma who wouldn't come out of his cave/hole for a picture today.

All in all, still REALLY enjoying this hobby, and despite the difficulties of maintaining a reef - I think I'm doing alright. Enough blabbing - here's some pics!

FTS 1/6/21 - As you can see, I've added some corals. Not a lot, I'm striving for bigger colonies in a nano tank. (room for them to grow). I also added another chunk of live rock in the middle.

My elegance coral is doing fantastic and is the real grower in the tank. My favorite, and honestly the reason I got into the hobby.

2 Acans, a freebie mushroom, and a blasto. All doing pretty good. The red acan has sprouted 7 new little heads. The blasto is growing fast, and the mushroom is literally moving around (only recently learned they can move)

Down the peninsula view: You can see my yellow hammer making a recovery from dino death, some freebie zoas, and a blurry dragon soul torch to replace the loss of the original torch to dinos. It has lost quite a bit of yellow color and become more purple. Not sure if that's a result of the dinos, my light, feeding... I think this will be a cool view someday once the hammer and torch grow out. I'd like to get a cool frogspawn on the right side of that rock too.

Lastly, the other side of the tank has a fuzzy leptastrea and a blue chalice (that's honestly struggling a bit right now - I think the high phosphates from no water changes for so long). I very recently added the green monti cap as my first foray into SPS. Eventually, I want a few cool acro frags along the top of the rock ridge, and let them grow big up to the lights.

Still very small corals, and frag-like. But I'm shooting for the 10 year tank where I can say "look at my original pictures of little baby frags, and compare it to my completely overgrown nano tank"

Lastly, some equipment changes. I was originally running a media basket with floss, and chemipure blue carbon bags in the 1st chamber. I was running the eshopps nano skimmer in chamber 2. My battle with dinos showed me the value of UV, so now the first chamber has the IM UV unit in it, with filter floss on the top. With nowhere to run carbon, I decided to pull the skimmer, and go with the IM media reactor running carbon and GFO as needed. With a 20 gallon tank, I figure I can do 50% water changes every week if I wanted and still not be a pain in the butt. So... no more skimmer and I'm thinking it'll probably stay that way.

Pic of the back chambers 1&2 with UV and media reactor.

We'll see how it goes from here! Thanks for reading!

 

[Kongar]

Update Feb 13th 2021

Finally having some success with stability, no sick fish, and no dinos. Tank has been pretty stable, and some signs of maturity are showing. Added some SPS and other misc. corals. No other changes to the tank since last post. Took a short video of the tank - thought you all might enjoy seeing the progress.

 

[Kongar]

Today I write about the gear bug, or whatever it’s called. Knock on wood, I’ve been Dino free for a few months now. One thing I added during the battle was a UV sterilizer. While it didn’t outright kill the dinos completely - it was the only thing that made a dent in them besides dinox of course. I’ve been hesitant to pull it out as I fear a return of dinos. The problem with that is how much space it takes up in a nano peninsula - in particular it made it impossible to use my media basket.

So, I’ve been on this gear journey. First I was hanging bags of carbon and gfo. Worked fine for the carbon, but the gfo just clumped up and was ineffective. I bought the innovate marine media reactor designed for my tank, but it worked like crap and clogged up. Then I went with a brs dual reactor - that worked great, but it really killed the asthetics of the tank. And all these things are just complications, things were so much simpler running chemipure blue nano packets in the media basket, and frankly, I think it worked just as good.

I pulled out my UV bulb yesterday and was shocked to see it completely covered in some kind of brown sludge. Like there was so much crud on it, I can’t imagine it’s been doing anything productive - and no dinos, no fish issues. So I said forget about it, and ripped it all apart, and after all that tinkering - I’m back to my original setup as laid out in one of my first posts. Media basket with floss and chemipure blue packets in the first chamber, my eshopps nano skimmer in chamber two, and everything else jammed into chamber three (still can’t believe how much crap I’ve stuffed in there).

So much simpler maintenance. Water changes are a breeze. Drain, fill, add a nano pack and pull out the oldest. Tank looks better this am than it did with all that fancy gear hanging off the back. Simpler really IS better.

 

[Aqua Man]

no more skimmer and I'm thinking it'll probably stay that way.

After beating down Dino once and then them coming back I pulled my skimmer. Installed a UV in that spot. I Also have a 20 long.

looking good. That Acan and elegance look like they are very happy!!

 

[Kongar]

Thanks! Ya it’s funny, I have some corals that just thrive no matter what happens, and others that just seem to struggle. I thought elegance corals were supposed to be finicky and prone to dying. Not mine, he’s on track to be a showpiece. I think he’d continue to grow even if I turned the lights off and filled the tank with gasoline Ditto for that acan.

Unfortunately, though I do have a return of dinos. Not nearly as bad as before. But those little buggers are persistent. But they aren’t too bad this time, I caught em early, put the uv back in, and I’m hitting them with another round of dinox. I’ve mostly beaten them back within a week, all corals except the gold hammer are doing ok.

 

[Kongar]

Some pics and an update: Dinos round two, and phosphate control.



Dinos round two:
They've mostly been "eliminated" - whatever that means I've finally learned that disturbing the sandbed - even just a little bit, is the trigger for a dino outbreak. I did some tests, and if I disturb just a tiny patch of sand, in one week it will be covered with slimy snot. The rest of the sand is clean and white, and the dino outbreak will fade. There's something in undisturbed sand battling the dinos back, and seems to be the only thing holding them at bay. Yay for tank immaturity at a year old. I guess I thought these issues would have cleared out by a year, but whatever - it'll happen when it happens.

Unfortunately though, this last major outbreak and treatment with dinox took it's toll on some corals. I lost my gold hammer - my dino canary in the coalmine. This last bout just did it in - it melted away in a couple of weeks. I also lost an acro frag - my favorite one unfortunately. Just bit it as soon as I put in dinoX. Two other acros and one birdsnest went through serious tissue necrosis, but have for the moment, stopped. They might make it, but I'd say they are on shaky ground. The rest of my corals have recovered and some continue to grow like weeds. The green monti cap grows fast, the elegance coral is a pig and visibly grows daily, and my latest fast grower is a transparent green frogspawn. That might be the fastest grower out of all of them - it was just a speck when I put it in the tank a little while ago. I'm regretting the placement of that leptastrea - I have a feeling that it will take that entire rock over soon and kill everything else there.

I don't think I'll ever use the DinoX again. It works, but it's tough on acros. If it was just an LPS softy tank, I'd use it, but not anymore. Now that I understand the sand thing better, I think I can manage it - and at least keep the outbreaks localized.

Feeding and Phosphates:
I've been feeding TDO pellets since day 1. But my phosphates are high. I tried playing around with different gear options, but they were all either too clunky or inconsistent. So as stated earlier, I'm back to the nano skimmer and chemipure blue in a basket as originally built. This works great for everything except phosphates which I just couldn't keep from rising. Larger water changes weren't an option as my nitrates were too close to zero. So I've switched up the only thing I can think of - no more pellets, and I'm feeding exclusively frozen now. Specifically Rod's. The fish love it, and frankly, I think it's better for my corals. Lots of varying sizes, and I can see a feeding response from all my corals every feeding. I think this is better than light, and the occasional reefroids. Now they get little bits of food almost every feeding.

But the good news is my phosphates. They went from 0.163 to 0.08 in one week. To me that's a pretty big change for simply changing the food, and indicative of where the phosphates are coming from. I'll have to monitor and test and make sure they don't drop too low. Maybe if they do I'll feed pellets once or twice a week to keep phosphates up. But we'll see how low it gets. So ya - I guess lesson learned - don't use pellets unless you have a repeatable method of removing phosphates, because there's a lot in there

Anyways, hope you enjoy the pics!

 

[Kongar]

5/30/21 Memorial Day Weekend

Starting to see some real success finally! Haven't seen dinos in a couple of months - I attribute it to not touching the sandbed at all. Even though I've crossed the one year mark, there's still some immaturity there - and whatever is at the bottom of that sandbed is keeping the dinos at bay. There's been an explosion of coraline algae, alk uptake, and coral growth. Fish are fat and happy, no signs of those internal parasites that did my wrasse in (and almost did my clowns in). My Royal Gramma continues to watch me more than I watch him

Some changes:

1. I've bumped the lights up at the start of each month by 5%. I'm up to 55% on the highest sliders using the BRS settings for the ai prime 16hd. Trying to get the par up for the sps. Right now I measure about 300 par at the top of the rocks
2. I've switched food to exclusively Rod's frozen. No more reef roids, no more pellets, no more AB+. This is helping with my phosphate control. I've been hanging around .141 phosphates and 3 nitrate. I decided to just let things be and see if stability works better than low phosphate numbers.
3. I moved the lights up about 6 inches to get a better spread. Not sure it made much of a difference - but it's also why I started bumping the intensity up as well.
4. Switched to reef nutrition phyto. Less volume and less nitrates/phosphates. Still going to continue dosing it during feeding time. It's triggering a feeding response in the corals, and even though this may be wrong, I swear it helps with the dinos.

Bad news:

1. Lost my gold hammer - that last round of dinos was too much for him. Too bad, that was a stunning and colorful coral.
2. Lost more snails. I've only got 1 trochus snail left, a couple of cerith snails, and like a billion of the tiny cerith snails. I put in 11. I counted 61 a month ago. I've also got a boneyard of cerith snail shells near my elegance coral. He's taken up snacking on every snail that wanders by. Stone cold snail murderer that elegance coral is. It's ok, something needs to keep those little guys in check - they multiply like rabbits.
3. I had to move my mushroom - he was starting to kill my blasto. I've got two problems really - that mushroom and the leptastrea are taking over everything they touch. I shouldn't have put the leptastrea on the main rock. I'm going to have to replace that rock sooner rather than later I think else it'll kill everything and I'll have a tank with one giant leptrastrea coral colony. =\
4. Starting to get some bubble algae - my emerald crab has decided to take up residence in a single crack and never leave. He just pops out during feeding time, eats some rods, and ignores all the algae in the tank. He used to eat the bubble algae and pick at the rocks... Not anymore =\

Good news:

1. Coral growth explosion
2. Pineapple sponge explosion - supposed to be a sign of a healthy tank so I hear
3. No sign of pests or fish disease.
4. Coral coloration is coming back! Yay! For a while - every coral in the tank (including LPS) was crap brown.

PICTURES!
Orange filter, colors look right to my eye except the coraline algae looks more pink than it is (it's really more purple)

 

[Kongar]

And a full tank video for your enjoyment!

 

[Aqua Man]

Starting to see some real success finally! Haven't seen dinos in a couple of months

Looking good!

 

[Kongar]

Looking good!

Thanks! I think so too. It’s tough when you’re new to the hobby. But it’s getting better. The problems still happen, but I’m... I guess... more “in tune” with the corals? I know somethings off just by looking at them, and I can keep things more stable as a result.