Prime Reefer 250 - from the beginning!

[DT Prime]

Gonna do an Apex on this?!

Yeah at some point, maybe once it's stocked and I'm not around all the time next summer. For now I work from home and have no long trips planned so can devote plenty of time to testing, maintenance etc., and I also want to get a feel for things before I start automating since this is my first time. Plus I had no idea what I was doing when I set everything up so I don't have a super sexy setup for mounting it like a lot of the Reefer owners w/Apex's on here

 

[North Borders]

When I did mine, it looked hokey in the cabinet (I have the Reefer Nano). I wound up buying one of those customize it yourself cabinets from Ikea and turned it into an electronics/cable "closet" that I parked next to the Reefer.

 

[DT Prime]

I wound up buying one of those customize it yourself cabinets from Ikea and turned it into an electronics/cable "closet" that I parked next to the Reefer.

Sounds like a good idea, any pics or do you have a build thread?

 

[North Borders]

Yeah, I'm at work right now, I'll shoot you a picture in a bit when I get home

I need to do a build thread as there's not many people picking the Nano version of these aquariums. I think the community might benefit from avoiding my mistakes haha.

 

[DT Prime]

No rush, and thanks for chiming in!

I think the community might benefit from avoiding my mistakes haha.

Ha, that's exactly how I feel! I would also like to do a bigger tank eventually and want visual reminders of all the things I regretted not doing differently.

 

[North Borders]

Here's pics for you!

 

[DT Prime]

Here's pics for you!

You're too modest, it looks awesome! I really like the layout and coral placement. How long has it been running and what kind of lights do you use?

 

[North Borders]

I've been up and running about a year. I've got a Nanobox Duo for the light. Recently started adding SPS in July.

 

[DT Prime]

I've been up and running about a year. I've got a Nanobox Duo for the light. Recently started adding SPS in July.

That's great, especially for something that size it looks full but balanced, I'm sure in person it's even more beautiful. You should definitely throw it on the Broadfield Reefer thread if you haven't already! Hoping I'll also be able to do some isolated LPS up front and fill in the mid and upper regions with SPS. Waiting on my first snails to be delivered this morning though so got a long way to go!

 

[DT Prime]

After the skimmer and filter socks started pulling out some real nastiness this last week I went ahead and ordered some snails and a solitary dwarf yellow tip hermit crab from LiveAquaria to help clear up some of the algae growth. Snails arrived mostly fine, though I'm pretty sure I got 5 regular nassarius instead of two super tongans and three regulars I ordered since both bags were labelled identically and they were all the same small size, and one of the eight trochus' was apparently dead in the bag. Hermit on the other hand was waving it's limbs limply in the bag and seemed brown/pale, I floated it for 20 minutes and then acclimated it for 25-30 minutes during which it stayed in the shell but about 5 minutes after adding it to the tank it floated out of its shell and hasn't moved since. It's been about 4 hours so I just pulled it and the dead trochus out in case it's carrying something and put them in separate cups, they both smell a bit though the trochus is stronger. Anyway I emailed LA, it's a total of like $3 in livestock so will be interested in what they say, either way I'm hoping it was just already on its last legs on arrival and I didn't murder my first addition or introduce something sick right off the bat

The rest of the snails all seem to be happy at least and are munching away. I had a heck of a time getting two of the trochus off the wall of the bag since I was afraid to pull them off, and eventually cut it flat and placed it against the glass so they moved off on their own. I also added 2 bags of Algae barn 5280 pods yesterday to help seed the tank since I used almost all dry rock and sand, and they were buy one get one with free shipping. They were very small so I can barely see any now that they are in, besides a few along the glass, but I'm hoping at least most of the 10k+ are doing OK in there and working on more. Occasionally I see translucent shells or bodies that look like amphipods blowing around, I have yet to see any live bugs bigger than a dust speck though.

Checked all my water parameters today before adding everyone, including Ca/Mg/Alk for the first time. Done a lot of water changes the last week which I'm sure helped but everything looks good far as I can tell:
Salinity - 1.026
Ammonia - 0
Nitrite - 0
Nitrate - 10-20
Phosphate - 0
pH - 8.2
Ca - 440
Mg - 1300
Alk - 8.2

So ends my first month slash 3.5 weeks of reefing! Next steps are to get in an order for a lid, watch the levels and snails for a couple weeks and make sure everybody is cool, and then order a Royal Gramma or Gold Assessor Basslet for the first non-shelled inhabitant I think. Planning to order the lid Monday and then the Basslet probably in the next couple weeks and let it QT a while at a local guys shop, since unfortunately I don't have room, so hopefully there isn't too much of a time gap if any between bringing it home and the lid arriving.

Also bought this Biotek Marine PAR sensor and then 5 minutes after it shipped read that PAR sensors don't really work with LED lights and specifically Kessils. Anybody know if it's even worth trying or if I should just leave it in the box and resell new? I'll post in the appropriate forum as well but thought I'd throw it in here too just in case.

Thanks to everyone who's followed along and/or chimed in with advice so far, not sure I'm off to the greatest start but I'm very sure it'd be way worse without the help I've gotten from R2R!

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

After the skimmer and filter socks started pulling out some real nastiness this last week I went ahead and ordered some snails and a solitary dwarf yellow tip hermit crab from LiveAquaria to help clear up some of the algae growth. Snails arrived mostly fine, though I'm pretty sure I got 5 regular nassarius instead of two super tongans and three regulars I ordered since both bags were labelled identically and they were all the same small size, and one of the eight trochus' was apparently dead in the bag. Hermit on the other hand was waving it's limbs limply in the bag and seemed brown/pale, I floated it for 20 minutes and then acclimated it for 25-30 minutes during which it stayed in the shell but about 5 minutes after adding it to the tank it floated out of its shell and hasn't moved since. It's been about 4 hours so I just pulled it and the dead trochus out in case it's carrying something and put them in separate cups, they both smell a bit though the trochus is stronger. Anyway I emailed LA, it's a total of like $3 in livestock so will be interested in what they say, either way I'm hoping it was just already on its last legs on arrival and I didn't murder my first addition or introduce something sick right off the bat

The rest of the snails all seem to be happy at least and are munching away. I had a heck of a time getting two of the trochus off the wall of the bag since I was afraid to pull them off, and eventually cut it flat and placed it against the glass so they moved off on their own. I also added 2 bags of Algae barn 5280 pods yesterday to help seed the tank since I used almost all dry rock and sand, and they were buy one get one with free shipping. They were very small so I can barely see any now that they are in, besides a few along the glass, but I'm hoping at least most of the 10k+ are doing OK in there and working on more. Occasionally I see translucent shells or bodies that look like amphipods blowing around, I have yet to see any live bugs bigger than a dust speck though.

Checked all my water parameters today before adding everyone, including Ca/Mg/Alk for the first time. Done a lot of water changes the last week which I'm sure helped but everything looks good far as I can tell:
Salinity - 1.026
Ammonia - 0
Nitrite - 0
Nitrate - 10-20
Phosphate - 0
pH - 8.2
Ca - 440
Mg - 1300
Alk - 8.2

So ends my first month slash 3.5 weeks of reefing! Next steps are to get in an order for a lid, watch the levels and snails for a couple weeks and make sure everybody is cool, and then order a Royal Gramma or Gold Assessor Basslet for the first non-shelled inhabitant I think. Planning to order the lid Monday and then the Basslet probably in the next couple weeks and let it QT a while at a local guys shop, since unfortunately I don't have room, so hopefully there isn't too much of a time gap if any between bringing it home and the lid arriving.

Also bought this Biotek Marine PAR sensor and then 5 minutes after it shipped read that PAR sensors don't really work with LED lights and specifically Kessils. Anybody know if it's even worth trying or if I should just leave it in the box and resell new? I'll post in the appropriate forum as well but thought I'd throw it in here too just in case.

Thanks to everyone who's followed along and/or chimed in with advice so far, not sure I'm off to the greatest start but I'm very sure it'd be way worse without the help I've gotten from R2R!

How are things going with the reef? Did you decide what you were going to do with the PAR sensor?

 

[DT Prime]

How are things going with the reef? Did you decide what you were going to do with the PAR sensor?

So far so good, been a busy last week so haven't had a chance to post much but will do a big update shortly, here's a sneak peek

 

[DT Prime]

As eluded to... I got fish!

Picked them up yesterday from a local guy who had them Qt'ing together for a few weeks for a company's tank he maintains, they ended up holding off right before I asked if he could get one or the other so worked out great! After an evening with the lights off they both are out swimming and checking out crevices and eating, hadn't planned on adding any just yet so glad they appear to be doing well and hopefully continue to do so. The gramma hates the man in the mirror and has been hiding out a bit more, the assessor has been swimming happily in the current though picking off some of the many pods I now have as well:

Clean up crew cleaned up the hair algae from a few weeks ago last weekend and continue to look ok, 7 trochus, 4 nassarius (though I've only seen 3 lately...), 4 red leg hermits, and 1 tiny blue leg named, of course, Citizen Snips:

Haven't had a chance to play with the PAR meter too much yet but hoping to get a chance to "map" my tank either this weekend or next. Talked to the manufacturer who confirmed it won't give totally accurate readings for LED lights and would need a multiplier between 1.1-1.2 applied depending on how blue or white the light is, but for my purposes it should be fine. I'm more interested in measuring the differences around the tank than super exact PAR measurements though, so if you want accuracy I could not fully recommend this model. That said it is about half the cheapest "accurate" version and 1/3 of the recommended one.

Will throw a few more pics up as I figure out how to get best results with lighting etc, next couple weeks will mostly involve watching the new residents and monitoring water parameters. Thus will include regular testing for Ca/Mg/Alk to see what if anything I need to be dosing pre-coral additions.

I'll be attending a local reef club frag workshop this weekend I'm very much looking forward to, and also got a soft offer to potentially work for a local company that builds and maintains tanks for local businesses, which would be just fantastic. Also made it to the Monterey Bay aquarium last weekend while in town and would highly recommend to anybody who hasn't been in years like me, some really amazing stuff in there:

They also had some great tropical displays which let me check out some of the fish I wanted in person and got the girlfriend excited, worked out great!

That's all for now, thanks to anyone who's been following along!

 

[Hella_Reef]

How's the build going? There's a guy in Pacifica named Mike who sells corals and quarantined fish www.Fishdoctor.us is his website. Very smart and nice. Looking forward to ur progress. Keep the updates going plz

 

[DT Prime]

How's the build going? There's a guy in Pacifica named Mike who sells corals and quarantined fish www.Fishdoctor.us is his website. Very smart and nice. Looking forward to ur progress. Keep the updates going plz

Thanks for following! I'll get a big one up tomorrow and then hopefully get back to semi-regular updates, been meaning to for a while but didn't realize how long it'd been. Life went a little crazy on me and in turn I went a little crazy on the tank, so far so good but we'll see where it ends up haha. Here's a teaser

 

[DT Prime]

Well I broke the cardinal rule of taking things slow and went coral crazy over the last month.



I'm sure it'll bite me sooner or later but so far so good. Nothing is cemented down yet just glued to bits of live rock rubble, and some will find new homes as they grow, but for now it's been great having so much color and movement. Lost most of a goldeneye chalice that came in looking a little iffy, was fine for week, then quickly started to skeletonize. I threw it in total shade before it was all the way gone and it's starting to color up again so hopefully it pulls through. A couple sps were shedding bits of zooxanthellae about a week ago so I lowered the Kessil intensity to 45% from 50% and they seem to have stopped, nothing else has reacted negatively to it so far. Otherwise everything else is visibly growing and seems to be doing well, around 25 pieces. Doser is doing its job keeping things steadily at 10/425/1470 Alk/Ca/Mg. Colors look good except for a couple purple/blue pieces that have faded a bit, so I'm going to start checking iodine and potassium and dose those as needed. Greens yellows oranges reds and pinks all seem to be doing well though. Shout out to World Wide Corals who have so far supplied everything in there, though I do have a surprise pack coming from Adam at BattleCoral that I'm super excited for. Anyway fingers crossed, so far so good, do as I say not as I do, etc.

Stars aligned in such a way that I received my artfully acrylic lid a couple weeks ago and had to take down my very fancy fish-bagger-drilled-full-of-holes refugiums, and after about a week started to notice bits of algae and diatoms coming back and nitrates creeping up from around 5-10 to 25-50. Then my stock ATO float switch broke and confirmed what others have said about it being untrustworthy.



How that happens I can't imagine but I started just adding 1/3 gallon of fresh water on a timer 3x/day. Salinity doesn't move and I'm able to keep my water level a bit higher in the return chamber, and while Christmas will likely see a real ato system for now it works fine. And it also freed up the stock ATO container to replace the fish bagger fuges!



Drilling glass for the first time was a bit nerve-racking but it came out pretty clean. Soft plumbing definitely doesn't look as clean as all those sexy Reefers in the big thread but there's an upside in being able to move things around relatively quick and easy. Fuge has been up 2 days and DT is starting to clear, and now that none of my CUC have died in 2 months I'll probably supplement it a bit as well. Still just rocking 7 trochus 5 Nass and 4 small hermits.

I also don't scrape my glass as often as I might since one it doesn't bother me and two it gets covered by pods, who are then enjoyed by this little guy!

Been in over a month and while not eating frozen foods he seems to be thickening up on pods and the occasional dumping of baby brine shrimp, which I've been cultivating twice a week. I think the nature of my rock does a lot to keep the pod population up too, the whole left half of my tank is essentially a "pod pile" and I had lots of extra rubble and smaller pieces to strew around to give them hiding places out in the open. Anyway so far so good again.

In sad news the original royal gramma didn't make it after the third day. A second one went in about a month ago and has been doing well though, if not been a bit of a bully, and occasionally he'll snag an almost-too-big amphipod that thought it was safe to come out of an empty hermit shell before dark, which is a fun battle to watch. Dudes got teeth though, so the end is usually the same.

The basslet is still going strong at least, and there's a purple firefish rounding them out for now.

So that about catches it up, assuming in another month or two everything is going strong I'll probably do a third and possibly last batch of fish, anthias and a wrasse being considered, but at this point not much else left to add. Not what you want to be saying 3 months in I'm sure

 

[DT Prime]

Not sure why the first three pics don't come through but here they are:

 

[ksfulk]

Update?

 

[Flameback Pair]

Can we get an update on this tank?