Hello friends,
This is a journal and build thread of 3 of my reef tanks, namely Grace (29 G biocube), Bozeman (3.8 G imagitarium) and Healdsburg (fluval spec 3).
I am relatively new to reefing, I had freshwaters tanks since I was 12. For past 4 years I have read about reef keeping (after seeing corals in SF California Academy of Sciences), and started my very first reef tank nearly two years back, when my family was blessed with our first kid, my son Ryan.
Our very first tank, a biocube 29, started its humble journey as any other reef tank, without any fancy things, with everything stock (lighting, pumps ) except bioballs removed.
We never had a lot of money to spend on it, but patience was ample, and online community has always guides us to learn reef keeping. I always played on the safe side and went with easy to keep corals , slow changes , good , vetted equipments and a rigorous water change. I did lost 4 corals, on the way, due to my ignorance around placement :-(. But in one in one year our 29G gallon tank aka Grace started supporting decent amount of livestock
Ryan grew up quiet a bit as well
Around this time, I kinda developed a rhythm, and most corals was thriving. Which became a real estate issue sooner. GSP, liam's clove, radio active dragon eye zoa and vargas cespitularia, pretty much all of them nearly quadrupled in size, I added additional LR to increase real estate. My tank maintenance cost also came down, due to me buying RO Buddie, and almost all equipment upgrades being done already. At this point, I had decided to use my QT tank, that I bought couple of months before 1 year mark, a fluval spec 3 to convert into a pico reef tank. By this time I had also learned little bit of electronics, and I would see Apex and GHLs in local reefers setup or in the LPS and pondered about installing them. But the functionality i wanted was not there or not hackable in a way I wanted. So I tried doing minimal controller type thing and tested it on my QT tank, which was being converted into a pico reef. Thus Healdsburg was borne
I migrated most of my zoas from Biocube to healdsburg (named after a small town in california, famous for its flowers). Over the next 7 months I kept on hacking on the electronics to make an affordable controller for nano/pico tanks, one that solves my problems first, test it on healdsburg, while reducing the softies, LPS footprint on my biocube by giving frags to local community and moving some other corals to Healdsburg. After running healdsburg successfully for 7 months, I was more aware of rockscaping, coral placement, and my controller software/hardware was also usable. So , oneday at petco I saw a 3.7 Gallon imagitarium tank, and it kinda whispered me "take me home." Thus bozeman was born (name after the infamous, prettiest smalltown from montana)
Since then, I have kinda settled down on tanks, focusing on three key things:
- Regular and through maintenance of these tanks focusing on consistency & stability (whats happening, can I spot any difference, do I explain the difference, can I control it? ... etc)
- Making Grace, the 29G biocube slowly mixed reef, with sps on top for slow growing. Learning about dosing , alkalinity and other fine details of sps keeping in the process
- Making my DIY controller usable by others, particularly those who may not afford an expensive controller or simply does not have the means to do so.
Currently these tanks look like this:
Grace:
Side view:
Healdsburg:
Bozeman:
And my son Ryan, he is happier than ever he literally talks with the clown fish and says many things in words thats beyond me :-O
I am generally active on my DIY controller thread, but I was thinking of moving my build thread here, from now one, I'll maintain my tank journals, here, consolidated.
Thanks for reading,
This is a journal and build thread of 3 of my reef tanks, namely Grace (29 G biocube), Bozeman (3.8 G imagitarium) and Healdsburg (fluval spec 3).
I am relatively new to reefing, I had freshwaters tanks since I was 12. For past 4 years I have read about reef keeping (after seeing corals in SF California Academy of Sciences), and started my very first reef tank nearly two years back, when my family was blessed with our first kid, my son Ryan.
Our very first tank, a biocube 29, started its humble journey as any other reef tank, without any fancy things, with everything stock (lighting, pumps ) except bioballs removed.
We never had a lot of money to spend on it, but patience was ample, and online community has always guides us to learn reef keeping. I always played on the safe side and went with easy to keep corals , slow changes , good , vetted equipments and a rigorous water change. I did lost 4 corals, on the way, due to my ignorance around placement :-(. But in one in one year our 29G gallon tank aka Grace started supporting decent amount of livestock
Ryan grew up quiet a bit as well
Around this time, I kinda developed a rhythm, and most corals was thriving. Which became a real estate issue sooner. GSP, liam's clove, radio active dragon eye zoa and vargas cespitularia, pretty much all of them nearly quadrupled in size, I added additional LR to increase real estate. My tank maintenance cost also came down, due to me buying RO Buddie, and almost all equipment upgrades being done already. At this point, I had decided to use my QT tank, that I bought couple of months before 1 year mark, a fluval spec 3 to convert into a pico reef tank. By this time I had also learned little bit of electronics, and I would see Apex and GHLs in local reefers setup or in the LPS and pondered about installing them. But the functionality i wanted was not there or not hackable in a way I wanted. So I tried doing minimal controller type thing and tested it on my QT tank, which was being converted into a pico reef. Thus Healdsburg was borne
I migrated most of my zoas from Biocube to healdsburg (named after a small town in california, famous for its flowers). Over the next 7 months I kept on hacking on the electronics to make an affordable controller for nano/pico tanks, one that solves my problems first, test it on healdsburg, while reducing the softies, LPS footprint on my biocube by giving frags to local community and moving some other corals to Healdsburg. After running healdsburg successfully for 7 months, I was more aware of rockscaping, coral placement, and my controller software/hardware was also usable. So
, oneday at petco I saw a 3.7 Gallon imagitarium tank, and it kinda whispered me "take me home." Thus bozeman was born (name after the infamous, prettiest smalltown from montana)Since then, I have kinda settled down on tanks, focusing on three key things:
- Regular and through maintenance of these tanks focusing on consistency & stability (whats happening, can I spot any difference, do I explain the difference, can I control it? ... etc)
- Making Grace, the 29G biocube slowly mixed reef, with sps on top for slow growing. Learning about dosing , alkalinity and other fine details of sps keeping in the process
- Making my DIY controller usable by others, particularly those who may not afford an expensive controller or simply does not have the means to do so.
Currently these tanks look like this:
Grace:
Side view:
Healdsburg:
Bozeman:
And my son Ryan
, he is happier than ever he literally talks with the clown fish and says many things in words thats beyond me :-OI am generally active on my DIY controller thread, but I was thinking of moving my build thread here, from now one, I'll maintain my tank journals, here, consolidated.
Thanks for reading,
