From reading all these posts I think there is a lot of confusion between "Self-sustaining" and "Not A Pain In the Butt". Self-sustaining a reef isn't going to happen because it's a growing environment and it needs to consume things to continue to grow. Sustaining the fish is not that difficult. I've been keeping salt tanks for over 3 decades and reef tanks for close to 3 decades.
My reef tanks have gone for years at a time with the fish fish population only getting live brine maybe twice a year. The rest of the time the fish survived off of what the tank produced. And I wasn't keeping just a fish or two. I'm talking about 100+ fish in 400g tank. And the fish were spawning and happy. I didn't start feeding my reef till I decided to try keeping anthias.
But even today as I feed the display tank. I have a frag tank in which the fish are flourishing without being fed by me. I have a 180g frag tank (8x4x1) The tank is bare botton and just as egg crate and tons of frags. The frag tank is part of my 1100g system. But currently the frag tank has a population of fish that includes a maturing imperator angel, Navarchus angel, Mis-Bar Red sea regal, pair of gold flake angels, pair of platinum clowns, chevron tang, 4 yellow tangs, barienee tang, juvenile sailfin and red mandarin. Now that's a pretty big fish population for a tank with no rock in it. But the fish are doing amazing. Amazing even by my standards of decades of experience. I am so impressed that these fish are fat and healthy with whats they pick off of aggcrate. And with that population in the tank you can still grab just about any frag and find a dense pod population.
My experience is lots and lots of live rock. Provides lots of surface area for filtration and for food growth.
I have a huge and diverse fish population. To deal with all the fish waste I have lots of corals, lots of chaeto, and literal square feet of xenia.
For mechanical filtration I have a 12+ year old Deltec skimmer.
For feeding the fish the system is self-sustaining (excluding the silly anthias). But for the corals it's not self-sustaining, but it's also not overwhelming. It's about making life simple. Currently my system is safe for about 3-4 weeks with zero human interaction. The 3-4 weeks is when I have to add more Kalkwasser to the Kalk reactor. My calcium reactor takes care of my trace elements. I get alerted when I'm out of CO2 or the reactor clogs. My skimmer has a self cleaning neck that I built, and all my RO waste water runs through the skimmer collection cup and then out to the sewer. My skimmer maintenance is down to cleaning the pumps (about every 3 years). My RO system replaces 20-55g of water a day depending on how hot the weather is. When the RO filters are shot I get an email. In the past 20 months I have done 1 water change of 80g.
I'm a litigation consultant, and when I go into trial I can walk away from my tank for a month at a time without any worries. My only tank time is to keep the algae off the front panels so I can check on the tank from the webcams. After a month of ignoring the tank I pull out a 5g bucket of chaeto, I add a couple of cups of Kalk, and I pull out maybe 200-300 heads of xenia. I run an Ultra Reef reactor with about 2 cups of carbon and I change that every couple of months.
That's not alot of time investment for a reef tank. It's not self-sustaining, but it's also not real time consuming.
And does this low maintenance system work.... It works for me... Does it work for the corals? Well I told you about harvesting hundreds of heads of xenia, but the other corals are thriving.
And how about those fish I'm not feeding. This past Tuesday Jake Adams of Reefbuilders was visiting and we watched a pair of Golden Angels initiate spawning behavior.... Golden angels - Super cool. And while we were watching them we spotted a frimandi pseudo chromis swimming with a dangling egg cluster. That was just Tuesday. In the last year we have had spawing bangai cardinals, spawning damsels, spawning red scooter blennies, spawning target mandarins, spawning flame back angels and spawning Bellus angels. I feel confident saying that this fish population is doing well.
But as we all know... Anyone can type a bunch of stuff and hit post and claim anything their imagination can think of.
So take a look and tell me how you think the low-maintenance system is doing
Display tank -
www.o2manyfish.com/webcam - and the outside frag tank is at
www.o2manyfish,com/fragtank
Keep an eye on the angels, try to find a skinny one
Dave B
