Tomtom's 20Long Mixed Reef

tomtom2245 · Apr 15, 2016

Thought I would introduce myself to the forum and start a thread for my tank while I was at it. I've been in the hobby for about 8yrs now but have lost track of how many times I've moved in that span so I haven't been able to keep one tank up and running for more than 1.5yrs without moving it. My current tank is a 20L mixed reef running with a HOB filter and Reef Octopus Skimmer, DIY 40 bulb LED fixture, MP-10, Neptune Apex, and a Bubble Magus dosing Cal/Alk/amino acids. Livestock consists of 2x snowflake clowns, 2x Bengaii Cardinals, and too many different corals to list but some are duncans, dendros, black suns, maxi minis, squamosa clam, green stylo, birdsnest, some chalices, and other SPS. Now for some pics!

revhtree · Apr 15, 2016

Love it! Great tank and welcome to R2R!

booth2010 · Apr 15, 2016

Great looking tank, welcome to R2R

Chrisfish · Apr 15, 2016

Welcome, very nice tank. You picked the right place.

tomtom2245 · Nov 3, 2016

So lots of updates since I last posted. I redid most of the scape because the clam was getting too big for the spot it was in so basically redid the whole aquascape around the one clam. Trimmed back a bunch of corals and got some good credit at a LFS. Also swapped out the HOB filter for a HOB refugium, much happier with that. Added another MP-10QD on the right side of the tank and got a WXM module to tie both of them into my Apex. Next step is to figure out how to wire in my DIY LEDs so they can be controlled via the Apex as well. Now for some pics.

tomtom2245 · Nov 10, 2016

I'll have pics and a quick How To coming later but I managed to convert the PWM signal from my LED drivers to a 0-10V and then connect that to my Apex. Now the lights are fully controlled from the Apex and I can simulate sunrise/sunset with them now.

tomtom2245 · Nov 13, 2016

So the converting of the LED PWM signal so I could connect them to my Apex went way smoother than expected. I wrote up an article on the whole process here:

https://www.reef2reef.com/ams/how-to-connecting-a-diy-led-to-an-apex-dimmable-outlet.121/

And here is a random pic of one of my frags just because!

saltyfilmfolks · Nov 13, 2016

Awsome!

Daniel@R2R · Nov 14, 2016

Lookin' great, man!

tomtom2245 · Nov 22, 2016

So I did some fragging of one of the maxi minis in the tank tonight. In some of the tank shots above, it's the purple and green one on the left side. I had two of them in the tank so I decided to try and cut the big guy up into fourths to see how they do. I've split them before in half multiple times and have had no problems and have heard of people doing fourths, so we'll see how they do! They are currently sitting in a Tupperware container with rubble rock .

tomtom2245 · Dec 27, 2016

Started dosing nitrates via Spectracide stump remover as they were consistently measuring 0 and I wanted to see if I could improve my SPS health. I had pretty consistent growth but not terribly fast growth and I noticed polyp extension was always b at right after I fed the fish. I have now been keeping my nitrates around 3 and can already tell a difference! Growth on some of the acros has picked up a bit and polyp extension is way better. The only downside is I can tell the red slime I vanished awhile ago is trying to make a comeback, but still struggling. Here's a pic of some of the polyp extension.