Nautical Nathaniel's IM Nuvo 20

[Tahoe61]

Your tank looks fantastic! I just ordered this tank so I have a question, the return pump you added, how many gph is it? I googled the model but it states that particular return is no longer available. Do the Innovative Marine Spinstreams really make a difference?

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Your tank looks fantastic! I just ordered this tank so I have a question, the return pump you added, how many gph is it? I googled the model but it states that particular return is no longer available. Do the Innovative Marine Spinstreams really make a difference?

Thanks for the kind comments and for stopping by!

The Jebao DC-2000 is now the Jebao DCS-2000 I believe, I found it on Amazon for you. It's a bit more expensive now but still way more affordable than any other DC return pump in it's size range.

The 2000 stands for 2000 lph which is roughly 530 gph but since it is a DC pump it can be adjusted. I keep mine down around 40% or so. Even then it is still moving more water than the stock 211 gph pump that comes with the tank. I find it really useful when I do water changes. I stir up the sandbed and turn the pump on full blast right before I replace the filter floss in my media baskets. It makes things look like a snowglobe but a lot of the dirt and detritus in the sandbed goes into the old filter floss which I replace during my water change.

The spinstreams do work in my opinion. They create a random flow pattern over the whole tank. The two I have spin in opposite directions and at slightly different speeds, so the flow pattern is randomized completely. I'm not sure if that is a design feature or I ended up with two spinstreams from different manufacturing lots or something. With the upgraded pump, the loss of flow they can cause, which you'll read in some reviews about them, is minimized. Mine aren't noisy at all (mostly because I'm using them with the tank they were designed for and they aren't sticking out of the water any). I think they're great and if/when they break or stop working I'm just gonna buy replacements because the benefit they provide is definitely worth the ~$15-20 I spent on each of them.

 

[Tahoe61]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a detailed and helpful reply. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for the kind comments and for stopping by!

The Jebao DC-2000 is now the Jebao DCS-2000 I believe, I found it on Amazon for you. It's a bit more expensive now but still way more affordable than any other DC return pump in it's size range.

The 2000 stands for 2000 lph which is roughly 530 gph but since it is a DC pump it can be adjusted. I keep mine down around 40% or so. Even then it is still moving more water than the stock 211 gph pump that comes with the tank. I find it really useful when I do water changes. I stir up the sandbed and turn the pump on full blast right before I replace the filter floss in my media baskets. It makes things look like a snowglobe but a lot of the dirt and detritus in the sandbed goes into the old filter floss which I replace during my water change.

The spinstreams do work in my opinion. They create a random flow pattern over the whole tank. The two I have spin in opposite directions and at slightly different speeds, so the flow pattern is randomized completely. I'm not sure if that is a design feature or I ended up with two spinstreams from different manufacturing lots or something. With the upgraded pump, the loss of flow they can cause, which you'll read in some reviews about them, is minimized. Mine aren't noisy at all (mostly because I'm using them with the tank they were designed for and they aren't sticking out of the water any). I think they're great and if/when they break or stop working I'm just gonna buy replacements because the benefit they provide is definitely worth the ~$15-20 I spent on each of them.

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a detailed and helpful reply. I really appreciate it.

No problem! I love helping folks in the hobby, especially if they're going to be using the same tank as mine!

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

General tank update:

Everything is going smoothly, corals and fish are all happy and healthy. No water parameter issues and no algae growth besides the normal film algae and a few spots of brown/green coralline. Hoping my pink/purple coralline takes off in some spots but it definitely doesn't like the Maxspect Ethereal.

I now have two pistol shrimps since I got a new one to pair with my little watchman goby after I thought the original shrimp I got with him had died (there was little shrimp bits all over the tank and the shrimp I had around a year ago would eat its molts). I'm going to see how well they both do in my tank for now, the smaller of the two likes to stay paired with my watchman goby but the bigger one seems to be a little more self-sufficient. If I see that it is struggling I will consider getting another goby to pair with it.

Coral Report:

• My acropora are growing well under my new Maxspect Ethereal, I get about a milimeter of growth around their base each week and around 1-2 mm of growth on the tips. I get around 1-3 mm of growth on my montiporas too.
• My Gold Torch, which I got from MACNA, is finally looking almost like it did when I bought it after struggling to adjust to my tank. The tentacle length is there but it still hasn't fully grown all of its light purple tips back yet. I thought my other torch (far right) was a wall-type of euphyllia but it turns out it is just a really thick branching type because it started splitting into two last week. My frogspawn that is hosted by my orange ocellaris clown all the time is one of those kind that makes three heads every time it splits so now it has 9 heads after starting from one.
• My blasto has started to widen, it was pretty much a spherical shape for the longest time but I think it is starting to go through another growth spurt and begin widening its base. The colony now about 3.5 inches wide, 2 inches tall and 2-3 inches from front to back with 17 or so individual heads.
• Zoa growth is pretty explosive right now but some of my zoas are growing faster than others. Thankfully the slow growing ones are only cheap zoas. My Sunny D and Everlasting Gobstoppers zoas are ridiculous and usually make 4-6 new heads a week. I feed them reef roids and reef snow once a week now instead of twice a week.
• Sadly my prized giant clove polyps I got from MACNA withered away this past week and are gone now. Not entirely sure what happened there...
• My JF Sunset Stylocoeniella is growing fast and grows ~1-2mm around its base each week. It's still one of the wildest corals I have seen with a ultra contrasting green and dark purple base color depending on the thickness with ultra bright orange polyps that extend from the base.
• My leather corals are growing like weeds and I will be able to frag them again in another month or so. Each time I frag them I get 5-6 frags that will be the same size as the mother colony in 3 months in my tank. The local market for these corals is saturated though since my LFS frags a huge mother colony every other month and gets 20 or so frags. I may try shipping the next batch... (The store credit I got for these corals last time was around $3 per frag, the LFS turns around and sells them for $20-$40 depending on the size ;Meh)
• I got a small niblet of a colt coral (Klyxum sp.) from a friend of mine after his decorator crab decided that the mother colony needed to be cut into pea-sized chunks. Only a few pieces survived so he gave me two. One of the pieces came off of the frag plug and was lost but the other one is happy and always looks like a fluffy little pink bush.
• My green rock flowers are doing well, I was considering giving them away and getting some super bright multi-colored ones or filling in their spots with some plating monitporas, but I don't think I will be able to remove them without heavily damaging or possibly killing them, so they're going to stay put for now!

Whew! That was alot! I think I am going to try to do these updates weekly on Friday's from now on, maybe not as big as this one though

Thanks for stopping by in advance! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them! Let me know if you want to see specific pictures of anything!

I do daily posts about my reef aquarium on my Instagram too if you want to really stay up to date with the progression and happenings of my tank, link in my signature

Most up to date picture:

 

[rockstarta78]

That's a really clean setup. Tank looks really nice.

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

That's a really clean setup. Tank looks really nice.

Thanks!

The top looks really clean but the cable management in the stand and behind the tank is abysmal, my next project is to get all of that sorted out!

 

[DSC reef]

What a sweet tank! That's the nicest blastos colony I've seen in a long time. Sorry about the clove polyps though. Love the setup.

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

What a sweet tank! That's the nicest blastos colony I've seen in a long time. Sorry about the clove polyps though. Love the setup.

Thanks! I got the Blastos around 2 years ago. It was the first coral I really dished out a serious amount of money for, the single polyp frag I got was $60. That was a lot for a college student with a crappy on campus job that only paid $140 every two weeks, probably not the safest financial decision to make at that time but oh well

 

[DSC reef]

Lol. Good purchase in my eyes. If I based any coral purchase on a safe financial decision I'd have a bare tank!

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Lol. Good purchase in my eyes. If I based any coral purchase on a safe financial decision I'd have a bare tank!

I figured they were a good investment

 

[Beauman34]

Pensacola-aquarist came across this thread while researching lights and I live in Pensacola as well and was looking at an SB reef lights 16" and was wondering why you changed it and if you had any advice on a light for me? I have a 29g biocube

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Pensacola-aquarist came across this thread while researching lights and I live in Pensacola as well and was looking at an SB reef lights 16" and was wondering why you changed it and if you had any advice on a light for me? I have a 29g biocube

I'm a tech-y person and wanted something with a little more features than the SB Reef Lights. It was a good light and was doing a good job helping grow my corals, I'm just a particular person that gets an itch for something different sometimes and has to scratch it or it will bother me for weeks!

If you're interested, I still have my old light and I'm trying to get rid of it. It's the 16" Pro model that has the built in timer functions, remote controller, and only needs a single power chord (the base model requires 2 for full functionality). There's absolutely nothing wrong with it besides a little rust from where some saltwater splashed on the mounting hardware.

 

[Beauman34]

Ahh I gotcha haha how long did you use it for?

 

[Beauman34]

Ahh I gotcha haha how long did you use it for?

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Ahh I gotcha haha how long did you use it for?

6 months

 

[wannaheli]

Love the tank. The Maxspect makes the tank super high tech looking. I also hope to have a goby / shrimp pair down the road in my 20. Please post pictures of them if you have any.

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Love the tank. The Maxspect makes the tank super high tech looking. I also hope to have a goby / shrimp pair down the road in my 20. Please post pictures of them if you have any.

Here you go https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ_hPMhlBN6/?taken-by=nautical_nathaniel

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

10/13/2017 Weekly update:

Something's going on with my Blasto, it's upset about something and I can't seem to figure out what it's problem is. The past couple of days it hasn't had full polyp extension. It's not to the point where I'm worried about it too much though. I added some chemipure blue nano to the media baskets right before it started acting up after having a little clarity issues and I think that's what is annoying it so I took it out. This is how it looked last night:

Like I said, I'm not too worried about it because everything else in the tank is acting perfectly normal. Water parameters are all good, Acros all have good PE, torches are happy, zoas all open, etc. It's done this before where it essentially has a temper tantrum about something and then after a couple of days it's perfectly normal, if it keeps doing it I'll make a separate thread and see what the consensus is.

Now for something a bit more fun we all have that one coral that we can't seem to grow and for me it is acans/micromussa. I have had two really nice frags before now that I wasn't able to keep longer than a week despite all my other corals thriving! Well, I had an interesting set of circumstances come about and now I have acans in the tank again.

I went to a different LFS than I normally go to on Monday to get some RODI water since I can't have an RODI unit in my apartment. For some reason, the guy there tried to give it to me for free. Well I wasn't going to have that, I know it costs money to keep the resins and filters going good and I'm not usually one to accept something for nothing so I decided to buy a coral from them. They don't usually have a huge selection at this store but they always have a small $20 tank filled with all sorts of stuff and I spied these orange acans that looked really healthy so I decided to get them.

When the guy got to the counter he noticed that there were two different pieces in the bag despite only picking up one frag plug, turns out the guy who cut the frag had made an extra cut that for some reason didn't split all the way. When it was bagged, it broke off, so now there was effectively two acan frags in the bag. The LFS guy just said it was lucky and went ahead and rang me up for one, so I almost got free water and ended up getting two frags for the price of one

I got home, dipped the frags in some M.E. Coral Wash Off concentrate and put the little frag that broke off on a plug. Both corals cleaned up very well with no algae or pests on them, the dip did kill some pretty cool looking pods though that came in with the corals. So far they are looking pretty good after 4 days in the tank, they appreciated some reef roids last night as well. They're not as fluffy as when I got them but I expected that to happen since they are new in my aquarium.

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Update on the Blasto, starting to look better, had a decent chunk of tissue necrosis on the two forward facing polyps but it seems to be in recovery mode now. I'm ruling out the light as the main culprit as my Blasto has always done well under higher light but I still adjusted the UV channel on the Maxspect Ethereal down to the ramping range of 40%-48%. The assisted setup program I was using had it at ramping from 75%-80%!

My theory is that a nutrient spike caused by the death of a large tiger pistol shrimp is more to blame in addition to some heavier than normal feeding (trying to get my little watchman goby fattened up) and some laziness on my part (let the filter floss get too dirty). I had a significant influx of dark film algae and a diatom bloom as a result from this as well. By the time I caught it, the Blasto was the only coral affected significantly. All the others, including my rock flower anemones, are all fine.

This is what the Blasto colony looked like Monday (10/16). When I got in from work yesterday, all but the two in the front and the top middle polyps had much better polyp extension and even the upset polyps still looked better than they did on Sunday and Monday. The top-middle polyp is the oldest polyp on there and the one that I started this colony with, so keeping it from tissue necrosis is my main goal.