After one week I measured a small increase in nitrate level of about 3ppm. I added grounded up frozen food into the system daily and run with skimmer on. Lights are on 12 hours a day schedule with 4 hours of T5s. The ATI lights are awesome. I keep waiting for some brown algae to grow on the rocks but all rocks and glass were cleaned. To speed things up, I poured in Dr Tim's One and Only and transported my percula clownfish from my IM fusion 20 and shutdown my skimmer for 48 hours. Exactly the third day, the brown algae started to grow on the rocks and sand. Great! sign.
Started to transport my clean up crew from my IM Fusion 20 and also ordered a nice size batch from LiveAquaria. I forgot to mentioned, I had my biopellets reactor turned on and running the entire time. My goal is to get biopellet ready to reduce the tank of nitrate and phosphate levels to prevent any nuisance algae bloom. Whats nice about the BR135 is it's recirculating biopellet reactor and you can adjust inlet and so to not complete zero out your nitrate/phosphates which is not good for your corals.
After the second week I started to tear down my IM Fusion 20 and moved all my corals, live rocks and the rest of the livestock which is just a hippo blue tang, snails, and hermit crabs.
The tank is now completely cleaned with absolutely no overgrown algae. Sand bed, rocks, and glass are completely cleaned. I had to sink down strips of nori (via rubber bands and coral plugs) for the snails and hermits to feed on. Hopefully it stays this clean going forward.
Another amazing thing is all my corals are doing much better than in the IM Fusion 20 under kessil lighting. All of them have unbelievable polyp extension and the gorgonian has it's polyps out amost 100% of the time even during the day time. Not sure if its the lights or the water quality that helping.
I can also see clearly how LED (kessil 360WE) darkens the corals in the shadow areas. Hopefully, the T5s will help to put some color on those dark areas.
Here is the shot of the tank taken today, this is the third week after rocks and sand were put into the tank.
There still plenty of room under the tank for ease of maintenance. I have two containers of DampRid which helps to absorb any moisture in the cabinet.
The ELOS skimmer works great and easy to dial in. Only negative is the collection cup just sits on an o-ring seal. If you touch it, it will tip and leak out, thus, I used rubber bands to hold in place. It doesn't look nice but it does the job.
Next up is deciding what other live stocks to put in and learn how to take macro shots of corals.
