8.5g cube pico upgrade

[crusso1993]

It's looking beautiful! I have a soft spot for tiny tanks. Im starting to get really nervous about having to move mine.

Sending you good juju when the time comes for the move.

 

[Kaisentlaia]

It's looking beautiful! I have a soft spot for tiny tanks. Im starting to get really nervous about having to move mine.

Thanks! And good luck with the move! Luckily smaller tanks are easier to move than big ones. Fingers crossed!

I just found this thread. Fantastic job designing and putting this tank together. Obtaining livestock is a much bigger challenge than it was pre-pandemic. Especially when you have something specific in mind. Following along.

Thank you! I wouldn't know, got this tank just before the pandemic hit. Obtaining livestock has been pretty hard mostly because of the lack of LFS around here. There was an amazing one but it closed down years ago and I was doing only FW back then.

 

[Kaisentlaia]

Algae ID and peroxide experiments

As I previously mentioned, I've been trying to id the three main kinds of algae growing in my tank and experimenting with peroxide. Since I can't id anything for sure and this thread didn't help, we'll call them Branchy, Bushy and Fluffy:

Branchy​	Bushy​	Fluffy​

I'm pretty sure that Branchy is some sort of Cladophora and Fluffy is either Boodlea composita or some Phyllodictyon , Bushy I have absolutely no idea. Then there's Bubbly (your good ol' bubble algae, some kind of Valonia but don't ask me which one).

I've been reading a lot about peroxide lately so I decided to try a little experiment on a small rock: saved 2L of old tank water from a WC, set up a bowl with 1L of that, took the rock out and dribbled 10ml of 3% peroxide straight on the algae while holding it over the bowl (so the excess would end up in there).
I placed the rock in the bowl and let it sit and bubble there for 4 minutes. I then transferred it in another bowl with 500ml of old saltwater, swirled it around, took it out, rinsed with the remaining 500ml of old saltwater and I put it back in the tank.

Spoiler alert: both Branchy and Bubbly are definitely vulnerable to this kind of treatment. Zoas and mushroom looked a bit ticked immediately afterwards but went back to normal in a couple of hours. Incredibly, coralline algae didn't bleach at all, which is amazing:

Just before treatment​	Bubbling in the bowl​
Immediately after treatment​	5 days after treatment​

After the first 24 hours the only noticeable effect was on BA, which went from bright green and clear to pale and opaque. Bushy looked as green as ever to me, maybe just a little paler than its neighbors on the other rocks, but today looking at pics I can tell it died back quite a bit. So that's great news!

I'm going to give it a little more time and see if it dies completely. If not, I will repeat the treatment. This is very promising and I think I'll pull off all the rocks and give them a little spot treatment + bath in a bucket to get rid of algae. It might not look bad now but I don't want to end up like this again (cue flashback to summer 2022's rip cleaning):

On the same topic, I thought on it and I'm pretty sure this is NOT a phosphate leaching problem. The sand is clean and new, I replaced it last summer and I keep stirring and vacuuming it. The rock is old, yes, but... I added a new dry rock when I started this tank and it now has the same kind of algae growing on it. So it's not the rock either.

I'm pretty sure my problem here is just a matter of an undersized CUC from the start that couldn't keep up with the new growth and some algae strains too tough to manually remove in a consistent manner. Now that I'm finally getting my CUC in order I might as well try a full peroxide treatment and see how it goes from there.

I'm also considering moving some of those algae in the back compartment and set up a small grow light to start a refugium. A piece of each but Bubbly, Bubbly is a bad boy and needs to be exterminated.

 

[crusso1993]

Since I can't id anything for sure and this thread didn't help, we'll call them Branchy, Bushy and Fluffy:

I think those are the scientific names or, at least, they should be!

 

[MikeCRK]

Heyah!

I am just starting my adventure and I found your thread which is run in the exact same size tank
Don't mind them snakes algae, it is really looking cool!

I have just started cycling but have a look if you have some time! I am adding your thread to follow! Good Luck!

 

[Trahs]

The tank is looking so good. Have you by chance tried the Aqamai kps? I have been trying to find a good wave maker for my 10g cube. I have a jebao sow-3 allegedly lowest setting is 500 lph or roughly 130 gph and my return pump is about the same and the difference is drastic, the low setting almost blows the zooxanthellae off the corals lol. Also the lighting looks so good in the video I have the same light on my 4 gallon and haven't found light settings I really like yet.

 

[Kaisentlaia]

Heyah!

I am just starting my adventure and I found your thread which is run in the exact same size tank
Don't mind them snakes algae, it is really looking cool!

I have just started cycling but have a look if you have some time! I am adding your thread to follow! Good Luck!

I mind the algae because although they look nice they tend to choke the corals and shade them too much if I don't keep them in check.

I'll stop by and take a look! Good luck to you too

 

[Kaisentlaia]

The tank is looking so good. Have you by chance tried the Aqamai kps? I have been trying to find a good wave maker for my 10g cube. I have a jebao sow-3 allegedly lowest setting is 500 lph or roughly 130 gph and my return pump is about the same and the difference is drastic, the low setting almost blows the zooxanthellae off the corals lol.

I've been using the Aqamai kps since last summer! In the 3.5 it was extremely powerful and I had to keep it at 15% max, in the 8.5 I started low and right now I'm running it at max 40% and I'm pretty happy with it. I might increase it another 10%.

The pump per se works well but the app sucks. You have to connect to it through wifi which means disconnecting from your actual wifi, and there's no way to backup the settings (lost them all when I reset my phone in December and had to redo them from scratch). Still, it's small and being able to tune it down so much really helps in smaller tanks.

Also the lighting looks so good in the video I have the same light on my 4 gallon and haven't found light settings I really like yet.

I take videos with my phone and it does some kind of auto color/brightness adjustment so the video isn't exactly like the real thing, but I think it's pretty close.

Here are my current settings:

Sometimes I switch to this one when I'm taking videos or pics:

I recently increased the whites and pinks a little, I liked the blueish look better but I feel like there isn't enough light. My old 3.5 is now an ugly unheated frag tank, it looks brighter under generic white led strips, and some zoas in there have a much better polyp extension than in my DT, so I'm trying to set the Fluval to match it but really I'm just eyeballing stuff. I really need to get a PAR meter.

 

[Trahs]

Thank you very much for the info. Ill have to look into the wave maker a bit more for my 10g. Thank you for the light settings as well Ill probably be playing around with that this weekend.

 

[Kaisentlaia]

Thank you very much for the info. Ill have to look into the wave maker a bit more for my 10g. Thank you for the light settings as well Ill probably be playing around with that this weekend.

Let me know how that goes! And post some pics!

 

[Kaisentlaia]

3rd year recap

I just realized a couple of days ago it was my tank's birthday! Well not exactly birthday, the tank is actually much older since I got it from a friend, but I brought it home in February 2020. So let's celebrate with a little recap of this incredible journey:

~2017 - 3.5g​	Feb 2020 - 1.85g​
Mar 2021 - before the 1st rip cleaning​	Mar 2021 - after the first rip cleaning, 3.5g​
Nov 2021​	May 2022​
Jul 2022 - before the 2nd rip cleaning​	Jul 2022 - after the 2nd rip cleaning, 8.5g​

And finally here it is today

Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't consider it three different tanks instead of just one, but the rock is the same and many creatures have been in there since the beginning. It's incredible how tough some of them can be, this is some of them, in 2020 and now after 3 years:

Striped mushroom

Teal noid zoa/paly

Green noid zoa/paly

Unknown starfish

Glass ball anemone

And then there's the plethora of tiny pods (copepods, tiny red and white amphipods), tiny red fanworms, all kinds of worms, sponges and so on. What I love about reefing is that I keep learning new things and experimenting. I hope my little tank will last many more years!

 

[C4ctus99]

This tank looks really good! I like the buildout you have for the equipment with just the simple drain into it. I was considering one day doing a drain similar to that in my tank but I just spent money on it and need to hold off a bit...

 

[Kaisentlaia]

This tank looks really good! I like the buildout you have for the equipment with just the simple drain into it. I was considering one day doing a drain similar to that in my tank but I just spent money on it and need to hold off a bit...

I do like it but it's not skimming as I wanted it to (as you can see from the last FTS). I think it's the comb, the flow looks good enough but the teeth of the comb are preventing the surface biofilm to be sucked into the filter.

If you try to put together something like that in the future, this video shows a way to improve this design... not that I'm going to try that anytime soon but looks like it works pretty well.

 

[Kaisentlaia]

Log time no see, so an update is due.

The tank has been doing really well! Got a few more corals, tried for a fish (Gobiodon okinawae, yellow goby) who jumped through a tiny gap between the lid and the glass and died after a few hours and an Emerald Crab who lasted a couple of months before a molt went wrong and did absolutely nothing to help with bubble algae so I won't get another, but aside from that all is good!

That pink sinularia I got to fill up the back of the rock grew on me so now it's in the front, II really like it!

I also finally found a way to put together those darn rocks, putty and superglue were enough for a year but they broke apart again, so this time I went for Nyos Reef Cement and boy, that stuff is great. I pulled all the rocks, took the chance to scrub away some algae, put them together with the cement and kept the corals moist by pouring water on them for about 10 minutes while the cement hardened, then back in the tank. I'm super happy of the result and they're finally stable!

Most corals weren't happy about the treatment, but they got over it in about a month. I lost my red discosoma a while back and I'm so bummed, I loved that one and it's so hard to find another now that the NSLFS closed down. Been looking online but no luck so far. I also lost the blue discosoma but I was able to get a replacement.

All my mushrooms got very mad at some point this summer, I assumed it was the temperature. The striped mushroom is still quite scrunched up but it did split like crazy. As you can see I also have a little red slime algae going on there but I'm sure it will fade out over time. The rescaping threw things off balance for a while and the tank is still recovering.

I got a couple new mushrooms and they're looking fine, so I guess something did bother the striped one this summer and now it's just a matter of time until it goes back to its old happy and well extended self.

My Purple Monster zoa has also been quite pale and a shrunk since this summer, but all the other corals are quite happy and I do have a few backup frags in my sparta pico which look amazing so I'm not too worried.

An acquaintance gave me a few snails I've never heard of or seen before, Euplica versicolor, and I absolutely love them! They stay small enough to not knock down corals (their max size is about 15mm - 0.6in) but they're still big enough to keep things clean, especially since they spawn like crazy and I have an army of them now.

I got quite lazy on maintenance lately, been doing a 50% WC every other week, adding some amino acids and iodine (increased dose in one go instead of daily), no testing, filling ATO with kalk and that's it. I feed reef roids from time to time when I remember (rarely! ) and I throw in some pellets for the shrimps when they look at me with puppy eyes. I think the refugium light + macroalgae in the filter compartment have been helping a lot with algae growth as well, I haven't been scrubbing the rocks much if at all in the past months but I'm seeing less algae than what I used to. So despite the lack of maintenance, the tank has been looking great!

I'll try for another fish one day but I will get a better fitting lid before I do.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Log time no see, so an update is due.

The tank has been doing really well! Got a few more corals, tried for a fish (Gobiodon okinawae, yellow goby) who jumped through a tiny gap between the lid and the glass and died after a few hours and an Emerald Crab who lasted a couple of months before a molt went wrong and did absolutely nothing to help with bubble algae so I won't get another, but aside from that all is good!

That pink sinularia I got to fill up the back of the rock grew on me so now it's in the front, II really like it!

I also finally found a way to put together those darn rocks, putty and superglue were enough for a year but they broke apart again, so this time I went for Nyos Reef Cement and boy, that stuff is great. I pulled all the rocks, took the chance to scrub away some algae, put them together with the cement and kept the corals moist by pouring water on them for about 10 minutes while the cement hardened, then back in the tank. I'm super happy of the result and they're finally stable!

Most corals weren't happy about the treatment, but they got over it in about a month. I lost my red discosoma a while back and I'm so bummed, I loved that one and it's so hard to find another now that the NSLFS closed down. Been looking online but no luck so far. I also lost the blue discosoma but I was able to get a replacement.

All my mushrooms got very mad at some point this summer, I assumed it was the temperature. The striped mushroom is still quite scrunched up but it did split like crazy. As you can see I also have a little red slime algae going on there but I'm sure it will fade out over time. The rescaping threw things off balance for a while and the tank is still recovering.

I got a couple new mushrooms and they're looking fine, so I guess something did bother the striped one this summer and now it's just a matter of time until it goes back to its old happy and well extended self.

My Purple Monster zoa has also been quite pale and a shrunk since this summer, but all the other corals are quite happy and I do have a few backup frags in my sparta pico which look amazing so I'm not too worried.

An acquaintance gave me a few snails I've never heard of or seen before, Euplica versicolor, and I absolutely love them! They stay small enough to not knock down corals (their max size is about 15mm - 0.6in) but they're still big enough to keep things clean, especially since they spawn like crazy and I have an army of them now.

I got quite lazy on maintenance lately, been doing a 50% WC every other week, adding some amino acids and iodine (increased dose in one go instead of daily), no testing, filling ATO with kalk and that's it. I feed reef roids from time to time when I remember (rarely! ) and I throw in some pellets for the shrimps when they look at me with puppy eyes. I think the refugium light + macroalgae in the filter compartment have been helping a lot with algae growth as well, I haven't been scrubbing the rocks much if at all in the past months but I'm seeing less algae than what I used to. So despite the lack of maintenance, the tank has been looking great!

I'll try for another fish one day but I will get a better fitting lid before I do.

Tank is doing great!