Ok! More updates while the babies are sleeping!
So, we decided to move the tank as is and wait on any changes or upgrades. I personally can't stand GSP but we did want to keep a bit to put on the back wall. We ended up selling off about 250 heads of hammer coral. About 150 went to local hobby reefers and about 100 went to the LFS for CORAL CREDIT! ;Happy
We kept the following of what the tank came with:
Flame Fin (Tomini) Tang
Flame Angel
Blue eye royal Dottyback
We added:
Powder Blue Tang
Yellow Tang
Purple Tang
Exquisite Leopard Wrasse
Yellow watchman goby
Pistol shrimp
Diamond watchman goby
Starry Blenny (We call him our grumpy old man fish)
Helfrichi Firefish
Red Lizard Blenny
Mocha Storm Clownfish
Black Snowflake Clownfish
Mandarin Goby
3 cleaner shrimp
2 peppermint shrimp (in the hopes they will eat the one aptasia we have found...)
sand sifting sea star
a bunch of nassarius snails (my absolute favorite snails!)
Purple/green LTA
We are planning on adding 1-2 more wrasses
Video of FTS 7/21/2020
The sump area is a HOT mess. The protein skimmer that is currently running is nearly a decade old. There is wires and cords everywhere and nothing is hooked up to timers etc.. So, its a crash waiting to happen. Shortly after setting up the tank I put my hand in to move a coral and got zapped with electricity pretty good!! We frantically started looking for the culprit and found the old pump to the old GFO reactor was failing and leaking electricity into the tank! We immediately disconnected it and shortly after replaced it with a new GFO/Carbon reactor from BRS. The plan is to redo the sump area, replace the protein skimmer (we are considering the Aquamaxx 180 any thoughts on this?) as well as add a UV sterilizer since we have that pesky Powder blue to wreak havoc on the rest of our fish. We are also replacing the return pump which is technically working now... but is nearly a decade old and we REALLY don't want that failing on us. Some of the lessons we have learned is do it right the first time and replace before things fail. It's a hard pill to swallow but in the long run you end up spending less. Or so we hope!
We also added 4 T5's and are currently running 2 ATI blue plus, 1actinic, and one coral plus which I am considering changing out for a blue plus. I am also scheming to switch out the old AI Hydras (a decade old) and get the Radions (hubby doesn't know this and this is how I am telling him! haha). Our goal is to add more SPS and have a mixed reef. We enjoy SPS, LPS and a couple high end zoas and we love our inverts and fish. We are going for high nutrient, high export.
We added some nice frags that we are excited to start growing out.
Red monti cap (doesn't every new tank have to have this one?
Red planet (our tester acro to see if we can sustain any SPS lol)
several cheap no name chalices
blasto frag
plate coral
bam bam zoas
no name favia
3 different ricordias
candy canes
We prefer to buy what we like and what we can grow vs the name brand stuff. Especially when you are starting a tank. So, we bought cheap, hardy, easy to grow corals for now and will later add the cherry stuff. I also prefer to buy at frag swaps vs online BUT I am ITCHING for a battlebox and hope that in the future we can do that. For now, we are just aiming for stable parameters and getting to know everything. I am testing everything everyday for now. We are going to be setting up the trident so I wont have to manually test so much. But I also like to have a more hands on approach when setting up. We are minimally feeding for now, daily a SMALL amount and sometimes skipping a day. I also do 1 sheet of nori every other day for the tangs. There has been some squabbling but we added everything at once so it has been minimal. For some odd reason the tomini absolutely HATES the starry blenny and attacks him every chance he gets. The starry blenny is fairly large so he is holding his own. We will see how everything stabilizes. The BEST part of the tank? Watching my two year old stand in awe at the creatures. She notices all the little changes and gets SO excited.
parameters:
Salinity: 1.025
Nitrate 5-10
Phosphate .04-.08
PH 8.3
Alk 8 (trying to get it up, I prefer 9 or 10)
Calcium 400 (again, trying to get this up)
Mag 1310
