sasa 150G SPS tank

[sasa]

Hi guys,
First post here, yay!

Few words about myself:
I am 30 years old, living in Hungary, Budapest (sorry for my English in advance!).
I am in the hobby for more than 13 years, had all kinds of tanks, first softies, later fish only, now SPS tank since 2016 december.

Current system:
160 x 75 x 55 cm glass aquarium
ATB Medium size skimmer
3 x Philips Coralcare LED unit
2 x Jebao RW 15; 1 x Jecod CP40 cross flow pump, 1 x Tunze nanostream 6025
1 x Aquamedic 4 channel dosing pump
1 x 50 mg/h Ozone generator (only used in case of emergency)
~ 70 kgs of dry live rock

List of fish:
15 x Chrysiptera parasema
1 x Naso Elegans tang
1 x Yellow tang
1 x Pseudochromis fuscus (pure yellow)
1 x Cirrhilabrus punctatus (adult)
1 x Pseudocheilinus hexataenia
2 x Ocellaris clownfish

Corals:
Mostly SPS with a few LPS. Not so good at proper latin names though, so I don't even try to list them. I very rarely purchase big size corals, I prefer frags. Sadly in Hungary it is very difficult to buy really special corals so most of the frags (roughly 50%) I purchase brown / bleached.

Maintain:
I follow a standard Berlin method. Strong flow, skimming, nothing more. Used to try algae filter but it reduced nutrients greatly to a dangerously low levels so I removed it temporarily.
For balling I use lab grade Calcium chloride, Sodium bicarbonate and Magnesium chloride + Fauna Marine balling light trace elements + Aquaforest NaCl free marine salt.
I do not do any water changes, but doing regular TRITON water analysis to maintain / replenish missing elements.

That is all for now, few pictures from my tank, I am really curious about your comments on it!

Tank today:

Pictures:

 

[Tahoe61]

Welcome to R2R.

Beautiful corals.

 

[RyanCSGO]

Welcome to R2R!
Great looking tank you have there.

 

[bpapo]

beautiful tank , love the video

 

[sasa]

Big thank you guys, it feels good that you like the tank

I am not 100% happy with it, would build the aquaspace a bit smaller if I'd do it again.
Also I am fighting with montipora eating nudis for a while now just endless pain.

 

[Sahin]

Very beautiful. Love the sps colours. Can you please do video on feeding the fish? I want to get idea of how much you feeding. I've subscribed to your YouTube channel.

Also what do feed the fish?

 

[revhtree Verified Admin]

Nice job!

 

[sasa]

A short update today:

 

[Sahin]

Very nice.

What are you feeding the fish? Thanks.

 

[sasa]

Mainly mysis (50% of food), and i add brine shrimp, Pacific krill, lobster eggs, chopper mussels, red plancton in a rotation. I also add ocean nutrition flakes, but since triton measurement started to show elevated levels of tin i stopped that to see if that causes it.

 

[Sahin]

Hello sir. I'd love to see more top down sps photos.

Also what is the nitrate and phosphate levels in this tank?

 

[MaddyP]

Welcome to the family!!! Great looking tank!

 

[flowflezy]

Beautiful reef. How did u get the rocks like that? All flat very cool

 

[dylana407]

WOW!!!!!!! Very nice job.
Your fish eat better than 50% of the human population. [emoji16].

 

[sasa]

Some night photo from the top. I will post more if interesed tomorrow.

No3 is unmeasurable with regular test. With professional photospektrometer we measured 3 ppm.
Po4 is unmeasurable with normal tests As well. With triton IT is around 0,02-0,06 depeding on if I run the skimmer or not.

 

[Sahin]

Yes please more photos from the top when tank lights are on.

Thank you.

 

[sasa]

Beautiful reef. How did u get the rocks like that? All flat very cool

The reef is 100% dry rock - all natural, just not liverock. The flat rocks were handpicked from the LFS from ~500 kg of dry rock
The rockwork is built dry outside of the tank, drilled and fixed together with solid acrilic rods around 10 mm diameter and and cable ties. Than dissambled, re-built inside the tank and used Aquforest stone fix to cement it.

 

[Reef Able]

Beautiful tank sasa welcome to r2r

 

[sasa]

Also what is the nitrate and phosphate levels in this tank?

Back to the question in a bit more details - just turned on the notebook instead of the phone
Overall NO3 and PO4 levels and unmeasurable with regular test kits like redsea or tropic marine colorimetric tests. That is actually a problem I fought for 4 months. I have an oversized skimmer and since the volume of corals increased they use A LOT OF nutrients for their growth. I suffered from ULNS, even lost a few corals and growth rate was not impressive.
I tried several things, excess overfeeding, amino acids, coral foods. Nothing really worked.
Than I experimented with turning off the skimmer what worked for the nutrients but unwanted elements like PO4 and metals started to build up while nitrate levels did not really raise due to the intensive coral growth. Also cyano kicked in (an unwanted green type I am still fighting)

Now I run the skimmer 9 hours a day (night), ordered 16 more fish (C. parasema) and putting one ration of frozen food to my sump every day while feeding the fish 3x / day, 4 ration of frozen and 1 ration of flakes. From the more fish I expect more urine & waste thus more nutrients. That may enable me to set up an algae refugium for glycol and other sugars 24/7 what will further enable more light (I run my PCC 70% at the moment, that is the limitation of the corals due to insufficient nutrition level).

That is the short story right now

 

[sasa]

pictures from a few weeks later: