DavidRod's 210g OUTDOOR Bare-bottom Tank

[davidrod8]

Wow! Amazing!
I am in central FL, and I had no idea this could work! An outdoor tank!!! Way to think outside the box/home

Houston's weather is actually very similar to the Tampa area... Hot and Muggy in the summer, cold and wet and in the winter. I mean, "cold" not really but we usually get snow once every 10 years or so. This winter it got down to the 30s, the heaters were able to keep it warm just fine.

My tank sits under a roof, probably a good 3 feet from the edge, so that does help. It is not "out in the open"

 

[davidrod8]

I am very much an indoors person but I gotta say that outdoor setup looks amazing! Are bugs an issue? It's still relatively cold where I live but the bugs will be back any time soon and even though my tank is indoors and not against an outside wall the blue glow attracts 1000s and many are so tiny they can fit through the holes in the screens if I have the windows open and end up in the tank.

Our weather allows us to be outside pretty much year round. Our winters are mild compared to yours so the tank handles that fine, summer is really the big challenge as it gets hot from late April until October. July / August / September are just killers, well over 100 F and 100% humidity.

I was getting a lot of "moss" before but those seem to have die down. Love bugs were flying around last month, tons of them, and I did see a few of them made it to the sump. I just figure there are bugs in the ocean so I doubt they would do any harm.

Once thing to note is that my lights are usually on from 9am to 8pm. It's still daylight when the lights go off so Im not running into any issues at this point

 

[davidrod8]

I added string lights to the pergola and it looks amazing! Very relaxing to be out there in the evenings.

Tank has been doing amazing, corals are doing great for the most part, just a couple of Gonis that are not opening up as much.

In terms of livestock I haven't added as much lately as the stores are pretty much wiped out and online prices are out of control. Fish wise I added a few more blue chromies, I'm now at 11 although it is hard to see them all at one, most of them are schooling and bring a ton of life to the reef.

As for corals I added a large colony of alveopora, that sits all the way to the right, probably about 10 heads and a NY Knicks torch. I have to say that Euphillya are quickly becoming my favorite coral and have been expanding my collection. I'm not up 7 hammers, 6 torch and 2 octospawn. Gonis used to be my favorite but they are becoming too unstable in this tank.

As for equipment I ordered a 1 HP (Aqua Euro Max Chill) chiller as the one that I currently have is struggling (1/4 HP Teco TK-1000) to keep the temps under 80. I'm also adding a couple of light strips to see if I can get more color out of the corals. There is so much daylight in the tank that the colors don't pop as much, and it isn't until it gets dark outside that you can truly get some nice colors. My friend loaned me a 12" TrueLumen Pro LED Aquarium 453nm Blue and the difference in color is unreal. I ordered 2 48" ones, which are currently on sale at half price. Looking forward to trying those out.

 

[davidrod8]

Summer in is full swing here in South Texas and temperatures have been soaring! I was not able to get the Aqua Euro Max Chill as the factory has a 6 week backorder so I ended up going with the EcoPlus 1 1/2 HP commercial chiller. I went way above my requirements but I wanted the peace of mind, plus eventually I'm thinking of getting a bigger tank so that's one piece of equipment I won't have to upgrade.

Turns out humidity plays a huge role in the tank temperature. With high humidity, it was much harder for the previous chiller to cool down the tank, sometimes staying on until 2-3am to bring the tank down to 79, while on the days with low humidity it was pretty fast.

With the new chiller, I still see about a 1 degree difference in temp, but the chiller only goes off for a few minutes every hour vs being on for several hours.

In all honesty, the corals seem to do much better at 82 vs 79, they open up so much more than at the lower temperatures. In the back of my mind there is still the thought that should the chiller fail, I have a couple of extra degrees to work with vs being already at the top.

Lights wise, I loved the TrueLumen Pro LED Aquarium 453nm Blue 48" so much that I went ahead and ordered 2 of their 24" so that they go the length of the tank. The difference in color and shimmer is outstanding. One of the issues I do see is that since the tank is outside, there is a ton of daylight so it is hard to get those blues shinning in there until nighttime, which right now is around 9pm.

As far as other issues go, I'm still registering very low (0) Nitrates and Phosphates. Most of my corals are doing amazing, except for my 2 Elegance which have declined considerably. Gonis which once thrived in my tank have either died or are pretty much gone, not sure if it's because of the low numbers in Nitrates/Phosphates.

I added a Gyre 4k last week and the flow in the tank has increased tremendously. Since I don't have sand, this has helped clean out a lot of the debris at the bottom.

As you can see on the picture, I also added an outdoor sink which has helped a lot when cleaning socks/skimmer, etc

 

[davidrod8]

Tank has been pretty stable over the last few weeks. The only change has been my nitrates/phosphate which I didn't test for a few weeks and now come to find out they are pretty high. I was taken aback by this as I hadn't seen any major changes in the corals. I mean, I did lose the elegance corals but the rest is doing amazing.

As for changes during the last 5 weeks, well, there's been quite a few of them...

1.- Good friend of mine had to take down his tank for personal reasons. I ended up buying up all of the livestock in tank, so during the 4th of July weekend, I added over 30 new corals to my tank. Corals were mostly LPS (Gonis, Torches, frogspwans, Cancy Cane, a few acans, dendros, brain and a couple of rocks with a ton of zoas. It also came with 3 fish, black Storm Clown, Scissor Tail Bi Color Blenny and a Leopard Wrasse. I had some concerns with the Wrasse since I have a BB, but it has being doing great.

2.- I have been looking at upgrading my lights for a while, but I have to say the prospect of spending over $3k in Radions just makes me sick. They are nice lights, had them on a previous tank, I just feel like they are overpriced. I visited a fellow reefer and saw that they were using a Chinese Black Box. I was quite impressed with the light. Ordered one to see how it would lit up my tank, OMG! The difference was def noticeable. Went ahead and ordered 2 more and switched them. I have them hanging towards the middle/front of the tank and I also left in there the t5s that I have. I also screwed the blue strip lights to the top of the aquarium and now even with all of the daylight that I get on the tank I still get to see some of the nice colors. At night it's insane!

3.- Roller Filters: Coral Vue has a liquidation page in their website where they sell open box items. I noticed that they had Klir 7" filters in there before, but wasn't too sure. One of the local reefers put a note in the local club's website about his experience so I decided to give it a try. I was tired of dealing with Filter Socks and had switched over to media baskets with Filter floss. Results were ok, but I was going thru the filter floss very fast. While this was easier than the socks, I was having to change it more often. I installed 2 of the 7" Klir Filters about a week ago and so far they seem to be doing the work. it has definitely been a lot less work on my side. I will update on my next post about my experience.

4. - Reef Moonshiners. I have been looking at a few methods to take my tank to the next level in terms of coloring and growth. I have to say after reading up on Moonshiners I felt like this was something that made sense to me so I decided to jump in. Still waiting on the results of my first ICP test but I already started dosing the "daily" elements. Will provide an update on this method next month.

As for future projects I'm adding an UV Sterilizer, ended up going with the Aqua UV 57W.