This is my 4th reef aquarium. Here's a quick rundown of my setup timeline
2006-2007 50 Gallon Corner Acrylic
2007-2008 75 gallon Glass
2008-2010 120 Gallon Acrylic
2010-Present 180 Gallon Glass
From 2006-2007 I was just getting started in the hobby and had mostly Zoa's Palys, Mushrooms and an Anemone. I was soon made to realize that I needed better lighting and that a corner 50 was really going to limit what I could accomplish on that end so an upgrade was made.
Here is that first tank:
2007-2008 started with a 75 gallon tank, that was 4 feet long and allowed me to get my first T5 lights started. At the time people couldn’t believe that keeping SPS was possible with T5 lights but I was able to grow out a handful of my first SPS in this tank in addition to the softies that were transferred from the old 50 gallon.
This tank had a rock wall type aquascape that extended from the back wall down to the front of the aquarium. I really liked the look but there was one problem and that was that the tank was a little too narrow and as the corals grew out there was hardly any room for the fish to swim so again another upgrade was on the way.
The 75 at the end:
2008-2010
I bought a used acrylic 120 gallon tank before filling it up I went through the painstaking process of buffing out all of the scratches. It only took a few days but it was a lot of work. The lights were upgraded to HO T5’s and now there were a total of 8. I used ATI Bulbs in an equal combination of AquaBlue’s and Blue+ bulbs. I had also made a decision to change how I did my aqua scaping, Instead of another back wall I opted to create pillars of live rock. The main structure of the pillars were all drilled through so that they could be stacked over a ½” PVC stand. Then each of the rocks that made the pillar was drilled out all over the place so that smaller rocks and coral colonies could be pinned into place using small acrylic rods. This made it easy to move corals to other locations as they grew out. It also made them easy to pull out and frag and to dip for pests which at this point had never been a problem. In the end the tank still didn’t have the room I wanted and a 180gallon came up for sale that I couldn’t pass up.
The Acrylic 120:
2010-Present
This tank was set up with the same rock pillar and pinning Idea that I used in the 120. Its funny looking back at the pictures of when it was first set up because my colonies were still pretty small and others have been lost since then. But here it is when I first transferred things over.
The Beginning of the 180, I cant find a good center picture.
Thanks for sharing!
