112 Gallon Mixed Reef Build

[innovusaquaculture]

Today I added the external reactors I got during the BRS sale. On top you'll see the canister that I use for the 1 micron sediment filter to clear the tank. Below is the dual reactor from BRS for GFO and carbon.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Here is a 15 minute video of the 112 Gallon tank today


About half way through I feed the fish their favorite treat. I'm blessed I get to watch this for hours every day!

I would really appreciate it if you would Subscribe to the YouTube channel, like the video and comment in the comment section! I will post more videos of the tank as I add more to it!

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Today I plumbed in a Jebao 55 watt UV. It is located on the wall behind the lights above the tank. It feeds from the main return pumps in the sump and returns to the main display.

I dis-agree with the BRS guys every once in a while. UV is one of those things. UV light is UV light. It corrupts DNA and makes it impossible for cells to replicate in a water column. Yes an expensive UV unit will give you flow rates included in the packaging, but accuracy in this case is not terribly important. The reality is you really don't know the concentration of organisms in your water. You really don't know the exact water volume you are dealing with. So you are just going to get close to the right turn over for what you are going to accomplish.

Are you preventing bacterial blooms in the water column or are you protecting your fish from parasites? Is the UV unit you have large enough to treat the amount of water you are running through it effectively?

If you run water through it too fast the dwell time in the unit is not enough to damage the DNA in the organisms. Too slow and you can't get enough of them to make a difference.

I'll be adding a gate valve and a Neptune flow meter for my Apex to this install. Those I will purchase from BRS. But this unit at $110 from Amazon, once again, I can but 5 or 6 of these for the same price as a decent UV that BRS sells. I understand why BRS does not sell UV units in this price range. There is no margin in them. But light is light and ABS plastic is ABS plastic, in this case.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

I had the first setback in this tank over the weekend.

I had fragged a small colony of either Speckled Leaks or Speckled Kraks zoas a couple weeks ago. It was my first time fragging. They were orange and purple with speckles and I though they were special. A friend later told me they had a name. He had sold them to a LFS from his tank a couple years prior and we had gone into that LFS and I bought a single polyp of it from them and it had grown out and I decided to cut a couple polyps off it and make a couple frags as a backup and start a colony in this tank.

Anyway, I went to work. I watched several YouTube videos and figured I could do it. For the most part I was successful. My exacto knife cutting skills leave something to be desired. I've watched more videos and know now that a pair of bone cutters to just cut the substrate the colony in on, then carefully cutting the polyps free with substrate attached to them is the way to go.

I probably did to much damage to this polyp. It never really recovered in the new tank. I also moved it straight away after fragging it. I should have let it recover in the original tank.

Over the weekend it developed a white layer around it and detached from the rock and floated away. The other polyps I fragged from the colony are in the original tank. They did not stay attached to the substrate I attempted to glue them too and they appear in different places in the tank as they try to find good homes. A little stingy with the glue, I am. I will attempt to catch them and re-glue them.

Since watching this one struggle over the last several weeks I have fragged a few more of my zoa colonies. I've now used the following ;

Lessons learned:

1. Break the substrate, then cut apart the Zoas and then glue that original substrate to the new substrate.
2. More then one polyp have a better chance of survival. In the future if I purchase new Zoas buy more than one polyp whenever possible.

I'm also working on a new idea for a Zoa grow out nursery frag tank. It will have special pre-made zoa ceramic frag discs that i specifically design and fire in my kiln, ready to easily separate the mother colony from the child colonies and continue the process. I'll probably start that build in September. I need to learn a little about making ceramic frag plugs in the kiln.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

No update in a a bit. I haven't done much with the tank, but sat back and watch the fish. I've added a few zoa frags that seem to be doing great.

I added a PH probe to my APEX system for this tank. I'm hoping to add a Trident to both my frag tank and this tank before the month is out. As soon as I get a full compliment of probes in this tank I will work on software to get data from the APEX then update the live stream with real-time parameters from the tank.

I think I'm going to do it as a ticker running across the bottom of the live stream. What do you all think?

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Another week in the life of this tank. Everything is going great! Here are a few pictures.

I got the coral QT tanks out of my office this week, so there is more room for me to enjoy the tank. There are 6 zoa "rocks" and they are all growing. All have "baby's" sprouting.
All the fish are doing great. The Lyertail that scratched her eye and got pop-eye is just about back to normal!

You can always watch the live stream 24x7 here:

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Ken, the guy that does all the metal work for my tanks, got the light truss done for the 112 this week! Yea!

I took some time today to get it installed. It worked perfectly!

 

[innovusaquaculture]

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Dual Return Pump Action!
I finally got the courage to install the second, redundant return pump! The install went well. While the PVC was drying I cleaned the original pump. What better time to do a little pump maintenance. Now I can do pump maintenance without shutting down the tank. Since I use the same pump across all my tanks I have 3 backup pumps, so not I just swap to a backup and clean the one I am taking out of service and put it in the backup rotation.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Wow. Almost a month since the last update. I can't believe how time flies. I've been trying to be better about this, but I just can't seam to be at it as much as I would like.

Over this month I have been slowly adding zoas and some SPS frags and filling out the Euphyllia garden.

Here is a pic of the garden so far:

I'm not quite sure where everything will end up, but I'll get settled over the next 6 months or so. i have a few more pieces to get out of the frag tank as we go.

What do you all think of growing zoas or something around the bases of the Euphyllia's? Will they eventually grow up the skeleton?

Anyway, The bad news: I've lost two of the seven Lyertails. Not unexpected, though. Five is a good number. The runt just could hold on the the high flow and one just disappeared somewhere. I assume that a cleaner shrimp got her. The male is transforming beautifully!

The tank has passed it's "brown" phase. All the tangs are getting along well. The powder blue and brown had about a week of chasing each other around, but that seams to have stopped. Now with all the brown algae gone I have started feeding the tangs nori every day.

next fish in will be a school of leopard wrasses, 5 blue chromis (not blue/green chromis), and then 2 midnight clown with their anoneme. That may do it for fish, I think.

What is everyone's opinion on Copperband Butterflies in a high flow tank?

The live stream is looking fantastic!

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Another couple weeks since I updated this build thread.

I added a few more coral and got two clams. One I put here in this tank. I've never cared for a clam before. This will be interesting. Any advice?

I've resisted getting a yellow filter for my camera, but I finally gave in and got one. WOW! is all I can say about how easy it is to get better pictures!

 

[innovusaquaculture]

Another couple weeks since I updated this build thread.

I added a few more coral and got two clams. One I put here in this tank. I've never cared for a clam before. This will be interesting. Any advice?

I've resisted getting a yellow filter for my camera, but I finally gave in and got one. WOW! is all I can say about how easy it is to get better pictures!

So the cleaner shrimp in the 112 will not leave the clam alone. I've decided to move the clam to the frag tank and put it somewhere else later. The second one I got at the same time is doing fantastic in the frag tank.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

I added the two Royal Grammas that were in QT and were ready for this tank.

one of the female Lyertails was having noting to do witht he new tank community members and chased them relentlessly. The other 3 female Lyertails and male Lyertail could care less.

Eventually the Royal Grammas were left cowering is a corner. After several days one is finally coming out a bit, but get scared by the Tangs, which are more than 100 times it's size.

The other is just pressed it's self into a corner and won't move.

Hopefully in the next couple days everything will work out.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

The next fish I'll be adding will be at 7pm PST today!

Ill be adding a small harem of divided wrasses. 1 male and 2 females.

You can join in and watch live at:


9The in-tank live stream camera)

 

[Goaway]

I would expect to see more people responding here. Some links didn't work.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

I would expect to see more people responding here. Some links didn't work.

Yes. The stream crashes every so often and invalidates the link.

I set up a domain redirect to the channel: http://live.innovusaquaculture.com

That way people can always find the current live stream.

 

[Goaway]

You have beautiful display. I like to see the fish being, fish

 

[innovusaquaculture]

You have beautiful display. I like to see the fish being, fish

Thank you.

 

[innovusaquaculture]

5 Minutes!