Raindog3030
Active Member
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2018
- Messages
- 185
- Reaction score
- 268
- Location
- Indian Harbour Beach, FL
- What state or country do you live in
- Florida
Well, howdy there y'all!
Very excited to be joining this forum, I've been over at nano-reef.com for a few weeks and figured this would also be a great place to learn and grow in the hobby!
So, I guess a little bit about myself is in order?
I first got involved in the hobby as a youngin' with fresh water, mostly cichlids. My Dad and I set up my first tank, a 40g breeder, where I kept mated Kribensis and several other cichlids. Then we set up a 150g system where we kept and bred discus for many years, well after I moved out even! We also had a 75g fresh system that my younger brother and I cared for. I made my first venture into saltwater with a 160g custom tank I picked up from a customer at my LFS (where I worked for a couple of years). I ran a FOWLR system, mostly because I could not afford appropriate lighting with my meager LFS salary! I also ran it with my old 40g breeder as a sump with a bucket carved up to hold filter media...this was also my refugium, when that was a new thing...lol
My first reef was setup from the first batch of Biocubes, I bought the little 5g, since that was close enough to being in budget! Once it was established and stocked, I found the size to be lacking, so I sold it and setup a 20g long. I moved this reef multiple times over the 4+ years that I kept it running with a CF light, AQ HOB, and a Koralia Nano (which was brand new at the time!) and a sea apple...yeah, I'm that guy. Well, after I moved this setup multiple times, it finally crashed. Oh yeah, I also set up a JBJ 2.5 gallon picotope once as a biotope for a pistol shrimp. During the first move, I gifted the big tank to a friend, he set it up and we kept a dwarf pacific octopus for a long natural life of over 1 year! I moved my live stock into my Dad's 150g discus tank, that had not had any discus in it for some time. We drained it, dropped in 200lbs of live rock and my remaining stock of fish. This sytem ran for a couple years until Dad got tired of caring for it, we sold it off to a local LFS.
After so many moves, you discover the most difficult thing to move is several hundred gallons of saltwater, so I sold/mostly gave away the rest of my systems/chemicals/equipment...that was about 10 years ago.
Fast forward to the present, and my wife has convinced me to dive back in to my most beloved of hobbies, reef keeping!
We have setup an almost identical analog of my last, and probably favorite, system. A standard 20 gallon long with an AQ HOB, except this time around, LEDs are not only capable...but affordable! And those Hydor Koralia nanos are cheaper too, so we got 2 instead of one! In any case, we visited the Florida Frag Swap that y'all put on and I can not begin to express how amazed I am at how much this hobby/culture has evolved! My dreams of becoming a garage aqua-culturist may not be dead after all!
In any case, thanks for letting me become a part of your forums and community, so glad to be a reefer again!
Here is an old pic of that 20g Long I kept for so long, just before the sea apple death/crash:
And here is the beautiful bugger that wiped out almost everything (mind you, I had him for over 2 years):
And a current FTS of the new setup:
Very excited to be joining this forum, I've been over at nano-reef.com for a few weeks and figured this would also be a great place to learn and grow in the hobby!
So, I guess a little bit about myself is in order?
I first got involved in the hobby as a youngin' with fresh water, mostly cichlids. My Dad and I set up my first tank, a 40g breeder, where I kept mated Kribensis and several other cichlids. Then we set up a 150g system where we kept and bred discus for many years, well after I moved out even! We also had a 75g fresh system that my younger brother and I cared for. I made my first venture into saltwater with a 160g custom tank I picked up from a customer at my LFS (where I worked for a couple of years). I ran a FOWLR system, mostly because I could not afford appropriate lighting with my meager LFS salary! I also ran it with my old 40g breeder as a sump with a bucket carved up to hold filter media...this was also my refugium, when that was a new thing...lol
My first reef was setup from the first batch of Biocubes, I bought the little 5g, since that was close enough to being in budget! Once it was established and stocked, I found the size to be lacking, so I sold it and setup a 20g long. I moved this reef multiple times over the 4+ years that I kept it running with a CF light, AQ HOB, and a Koralia Nano (which was brand new at the time!) and a sea apple...yeah, I'm that guy. Well, after I moved this setup multiple times, it finally crashed. Oh yeah, I also set up a JBJ 2.5 gallon picotope once as a biotope for a pistol shrimp. During the first move, I gifted the big tank to a friend, he set it up and we kept a dwarf pacific octopus for a long natural life of over 1 year! I moved my live stock into my Dad's 150g discus tank, that had not had any discus in it for some time. We drained it, dropped in 200lbs of live rock and my remaining stock of fish. This sytem ran for a couple years until Dad got tired of caring for it, we sold it off to a local LFS.
After so many moves, you discover the most difficult thing to move is several hundred gallons of saltwater, so I sold/mostly gave away the rest of my systems/chemicals/equipment...that was about 10 years ago.
Fast forward to the present, and my wife has convinced me to dive back in to my most beloved of hobbies, reef keeping!
We have setup an almost identical analog of my last, and probably favorite, system. A standard 20 gallon long with an AQ HOB, except this time around, LEDs are not only capable...but affordable! And those Hydor Koralia nanos are cheaper too, so we got 2 instead of one! In any case, we visited the Florida Frag Swap that y'all put on and I can not begin to express how amazed I am at how much this hobby/culture has evolved! My dreams of becoming a garage aqua-culturist may not be dead after all!
In any case, thanks for letting me become a part of your forums and community, so glad to be a reefer again!
Here is an old pic of that 20g Long I kept for so long, just before the sea apple death/crash:
And here is the beautiful bugger that wiped out almost everything (mind you, I had him for over 2 years):
And a current FTS of the new setup:
