Stainless Steel 5gal Nano

[Corsair]

Hey everyone! I’m Aaron, this is my current tank project. This isn’t my first rodeo, but I have been out of the hobby for a few years. Decided to jump back in when I found this

I always thought a reef would look cool in a frame tank. Came across this 5 gallon with broken glass and couldn’t resist! Things progressed quickly from there

A local glass shop cut new panels from 1/4” glass, black silicone replaced the original tar. The steel was cleaned up and clear coated before assembly

Flat backed dry rock was fixed to the bottom and back glass with silicone, a small amount of sand added

Tank was filled on 4/27 and seeded with Prime and Dr Tim’s fishless cycle chemical.

Equipment is pretty simple. Filtration is a Whisper 20IQ. It has a bio-bag while the tank cycles, but long term I’m only planning to use media when needed.

Lighting is an OG Ai Prime. Took me a while to get it reset and updated, but we got there eventually!

Heater is just an Aqueon 50W preset

The only thing missing at this point is the ATO. I’m building my own, waiting on a couple more pieces to arrive. Amazon sells lots of controller boards designed to refill tanks. It’s a pretty straightforward electronics project to make those run an Aqualifter pump

Here’s where the tank sits today, making its way through the ugly stage:

I added a little bit of live rock figuring I’d get a start on biodiversity, but what I really did was short circuit the fishless cycle. Nutrients bottomed out and dinos emerged. They colonized the old rock, but failed to expand much further.

Last Friday I picked up some cheap overstock/imperfect zoa frags from the lfs. Figured getting some actual animal waste in the water would help the tank move forward. Pretty quickly the dinos started to recede and within a couple of days green algae was starting to crop up

So that’s where it sat when I left town yesterday. We’ll see how it looks when I get back Thursday. No glamor shots of the coral until they manage to survive my trip, lol

 

[Ron Reefman]

Good luck! It looks cool, and I'm all in favor of doing the unusual when it comes to this hobby. I just hope you got a REALLY good clear coat on the stainless steel. If it good stainless and well coated, it should be OK for a long time.

 

[Corsair]

Good luck! It looks cool, and I'm all in favor of doing the unusual when it comes to this hobby. I just hope you got a REALLY good clear coat on the stainless steel. If it good stainless and well coated, it should be OK for a long time.

Time will tell, but it should last for quite a while. There’s about a half dozen coats of gloss coat with urethane in it, and a couple of topcoats of clear satin lacquer. No stamps on the metal to tell the grade, but I would be surprised if it’s not a good quality alloy. The existing corrosion came off with fine sandpaper and didn’t leave any pitting

 

[Corsair]

Got back to town today and saw that the tank had made some nice progress while I was gone. The dinos are more or less gone and I have some hair algae in its place

I brought a new frag back with me from the trip, relocated one of the originals to a less fuzzy neighborhood, and did a small water change

The plan for the next week is to drop some pods in to start picking at that algae, and get to work on building the ATO

 

[Corsair]

Got the ATO setup working. I didn’t care for the off the shelf systems that relied on optical sensors, so decided to roll my own

The core of the system is a board from Amazon intended to fill water tanks, if not necessarily aquariums. It uses a very reliable 555 timer chip to operate a relay. Pump starts when power is lost at the low water switch, pump stops when power is connected at the high water switch. You could use floats or whatever, but given how well salt water conducts and how little current is actually used, there isn’t any reason not to use the tank water as the contact

To prevent corrosion, titanium wire is used where it contacts the water. A hose holder was modified into a splash guard for the electrodes. I don’t love using crimp connectors, but you can’t solder titanium without some pretty fancy materials. The relay triggers an Aqua Lifter pump feeding from the reservoir below. To keep the installation tidy, a single power cord is used with a small transformer providing 12vac for the control board

As for the tank itself, an oddball form of hair algae has taken hold and gone wild. Kind of good news in a way. I wanted to add a small blenny eventually, just means I got to do it faster. Found a nice tail spot, and it has been absolutely going to town on the fuzz. I bet you can tell from the first picture which rock it settled into the first night, lol

I also added a trochus snail and a bag of pods. As tempting as it is to rip all that algae out, the blenny is on pace to eat it all in a week. Until it does, it’s a great place for those pods to hang out and breed. One zoa frag isn’t happy, but the other three don’t seem to care. I’m inclined to leave it alone and let the new herbivores keep doing what they’re doing