This tank has been up and runnings since February 2017. The rock had been established in other tanks. Some of it was a years old and others were months. There were a couple rocks straight from the ocean. The sand bed was out of a high phosphate crashed tank. I rinsed it out before I put it in. It is about 2 or 3 inches deep. There was mud and some weeds in the back corner from the Mission Bay. (Pacific) 10 gallons of the water was out of the ocean and it was 60% filled with ocean water from the local aquarium that pumps it through some kind of a filter before it gets to a tap for public use. From Feb till about September it was home to a pet octopus harvested in northern San Diego. We kept old reef lights on it during this time and the pod population grew.
The octopus lived with us for a little over a year, not really sure, at least two seasons with a chiller before we sent him to a better place.
Phosphates were pretty high and there was Cyano on the back wall. There were Malaysian clams living in the sand that were left over octopus food. I dumped some non scientific amount of swimming pool quality Lanthanum Chloride in the tank and the levels went to undetectable on my Salifert test kit.
The skimmer was an old euroreef with 2 cobalt needed wheel pumps on it. Not really any to quantify the flow, but it seemed to skim well. (Switched it yesterday for a reef octopus 150 with a controllable dc pump.)
The tank was fallow for about 6 weeks? During that time I manually dosed calcium, magnesium and sodium carbonate to get my parameters where I wanted them and make sure they stayed. We added a Caribbean blue tang and a Scrawled Cowfish to test the water. Then we started adding frags from our starter tank that was now around 16 months old. (Dates are very approximated.)
The tank is 120g with a 30ish gallon sump.
I generally shoot for:
ALK; 9.5 - 12 DKH
Cal; 450
Mag; 1400
Nitrate; close to 0 (on salifert)
Phosphate; close to 0 (on salifert)
1.025 salinity
76 degrees F
12x water volume turn over through the sump per hour.
I landed on my numbers pretty arbitrarily. The back of a business card I got at MACNA in San Diego, the label off of my salt mix and the ambient temperature of my house. Well, that combined with what I could remember from keeping a reef in the 90's.
My reef in the 90's used Kalkwasser and the high pH/DKH seemed to pay off. I use a calcium reactor now and I prefer the high DKH for help keep my pH up. I have had the least problems with my tank when I am over 9.5 DKH. Unfortunately the business card I found recommended phosphate levels >.2 ppm, and that is high enough to scare me a little. Phosphate gets blamed for too many tank crashes. I am just more comfortable keeping it low until I get some peer reviewed research on it.
For this reason I had to resort to the PO4 recommendation chart on my salt mix bucket. When I do change water, I use the Red Sea salt mix. The bucket says less than .03 PO4, and that is what I want to hear. I they have made great products like skimmers and tanks since clear back to the 80's. I went with the black bucket line because of the graphics. (It is the same way I choose my wine.) I think that their aquarium building skill in no way reflects their ability to mix salt. Instant ocean was more affordable and I used it for a long time but I have a degree in art and I feel like the graphics on their bucket are borderline offensive. If Tunze made a salt mix with better graphics than Red Sea, I might use that since I like their pumps and skimmers.
Some times I just throw caution to the wind and use ocean water since I live 5 miles away from it. There just isn't any compelling data that I could call Proof that one is going to be better for my coral or my system than another. Some are closer to where I want my levels to be than others and it makes life easier. With my once every two or three years water change schedule I am not sure that it would matter how good or bad the salt is.
Circulation is 2x mp-40 blowing across the tank in anti sync from each other on upper front of the side walls. 2x mp-10 mounted on the back edge of the right side wall. They are always on at 90%.
Light is Radion. G4pro. Two 30's and two 15's. I did some research before buying them and felt like they were the best for me at the time. I have not considered non LED options. I have used the others in the past but I think I just love the tech. The light is on about 10 hours a day. There have times when it was on for 12. I normally have a ramp up time of primarily blue light for two hours and ramp down for two hours. I use a corral lab preset in mid day and just blue, purple, white and 1/2 red on the ramp portions. I am currently running the lights at 70% on these settings and the highest par value is 550. Lowest is 110. I have run them brighter and better color seemed to coincide but there are always other variables so I cant point directly at PAR.
I really cant remember which coral got there first. You cant guess based on size. They all came in as frags the size of my the end of my little finger. About three of them were the size of a car key. I have some that are still the same size a year later and others that earn me a few hundred a month in frag sales and trade. The tank kills clams as a general rule. I am sure that there are still one or two Malaysian clams in there. There is a Derasa clam that has beaten the odds. Maximas will look good for a while, inevitably they fall off the shelves and are dead within a day of hitting the sand. We are pretty sure there is a predator in the sand bed.
Fish, 20 springeri damsel, 1 dragon face pipe, Scopas, Mimic yellow, Lavender tangs. Couple pair of goby, 2 barnacle blend, 4 red firefish, 4 purple firefish, yellow spotted wrasse, Pair of green mandarine goby, 2 breeding pair cardinals, Green wrasse, sixtine wrasse, copper band butterfly, and some others that I cant think of. The barnacle blennys are the only fish that are male and felmale that do not breed on a regular basis.
More than 30 various sized hermit crabs, more than 20 emerald crabs, two fire red shrimp, one cleaner shrimp, 8 Acropora crabs, bunch of Trochus,and nerites (they breed a lot), 10 turbo snails, 10 ? astria snails, 20+ random snails.
The tank is on an auto feeder that dumps much more food than the fish can eat in 10 minutes twice a day. I have not really focused on one specific kind of food other than usually more pellet than flake.
I make an effort to not impact my plankton population. No filter socks, or traps. I use propeller pumps, Main drive pump has a design that seems to do less damage than the pumps of the 90's. I believe that the microfauna population is one of the keystones of my system. At any given time I can pull half cup of water out of it and see things moving around with a magnifying glass. In the night it is even more dramatic. My cardinals spend the nights constantly feeding on whatever comes out at night.
The sump grows Chaetomorpha. (At my house we pronounced it Keeto because we pronounce algae as al-gee. Strange scientific latin derivatives.) We modeled the system based on the "Dynamic Aquaria" book from the 90's that is basically all about algae turf scrubbers. It is our main source of nutrient export. I believe it works as a giant buffer for fluctuations in my system. I have a 150 watt purple "grow light" from
amazon on it. The more I feed, the faster it grows. There seems to always be some level of PO4 and often no Nitrate. I have tried supplementing nitrate, but I would prefer to just feed more often. It is not a perfect science. The tank is over crowded with fish and I see some stress from it.
I use GFO. I use little and run a 1/4 cup charge for about a year. I have turned off the skimmer and pulled the GFO on my other small reef, but it has only been 6 or 8 months and I am still waiting to see if I am ok with it.
I have tried to work out some kind of scheduled maintenance on the system but things just kind of work on their own. I am sure that I clean the skimmer at least once every 9 days, but I dont clean it unless it has got liquid in it and normally the neck is coated with 1/8 inch of sludge.
I harvest Chaeto when there is no room for it in the grow area. It is lit reverse daylight from my tank and runs 16 hours. It does make a dent in the pH drop at night, but not a big dent.
I generally hate testing my water. Normally it is about 3 days after I have decided that I need to test before I actually do it. If I find a problem, I normally correct it pretty quickly. (2 or 3 days) During any correction I test a least daily but normally am and pm. I recently got an apex, but before that I used a Seneye. It would text me when temp or pH was off. I think it is important to have some kind of live monitor on those 2 things.
I run a calcium reactor. I like the idea of it. It puts minerals and organics back into the water in the proportions that they came out. I run magnesium at a 1:10 ratio with crushed coral from 2 fishes. Research says all suppliers are different. Since that one worked for me I will just use it as long as it is available.
I check my ALK 2x a day when I have made an adjustment to the reactor or drip rate. When things stabilize, 2 days later I cut the test frequency in half each time I see the same level with 2 consecutive tests.
The system never had an intentional water change until this week after a one month period of troubleshooting tissue loss on random corals. I gave up and just started diluting the problem until I could get more information. I use ICP testing as a snap shot of what is going on when the tank looks good and bad. I try to have one test per quarter with some notes and photos. I have some corals that are always the same colors but I do get dramatic shifts in some when I change lighting, food, or GFO.
My tank looked best here (if it looks like a frag, I probably got it as a stick.)
//lab.atiaquaristik.com/share/7d9605e7a3bda51bceb4
And here
//lab.atiaquaristik.com/share/6119d18b9a1c9cd255be
Other than the calcium reactor, I don't manually add any chemicals to my tank. I've tried them, and haven't had great success with them, so I've reverted back to skimmer and water changes only.
