Waterbox 10 gallon build continued after some time off

[SliceGolfer]

Updates?

 

[Quokka]

Love the scape!

 

[wonroc]

Looks great

 

[sharkbait-uhaha]

Soooo Im back with some minor updates, A lot has happened in the past year in my life (mainly good) that kinda made me keep the tank at idle with little to no updates. The tank went through some ups and downs, some new corals, some dead corals. Fish still are alive and tank is back on track you could say. I'll continue to update this thread now that everything is back to normal.

first pic is of the tank before the purchases, in the time I was gone I managed to pick up some torches/hammer for a great deal that I couldn't pass up !

(grim ripper, dragon soul, NY knicks, rainbow/Gold hammer.)

 

[sharkbait-uhaha]

Trying to Catch you guys up to where I’m at now with the tank.

You know how I said my tank was on idle for this past year. Well wife and I found out that we were going to be parents !!!! It’s our first baby so us being new parents kinda went into panic mode and last thing on my mind was the tank. Fast forward to baby being born, I neglected the routinely water changes do to baby having all of our attention, which made my tank get out of whack and cause major GHA and throw chemistry off as well which caused my torches to recede and eventually die. Couple zoas also didn’t make it through the mess.

Fast forward even more to today , the baby is 3 months and I’m able to sneak around to get back in the groove of tank maintenance.

I’ve been doing 20% water changes weekly to try to get rid of the gha along with brushing the rocks and plucking what I can get to but it seems like as soon as I do that more GHA grows within a day or two.

So I been looking into possibly buying a skimmer to help out reduce organic waste and what not, but this tank being a DIY tank I decided why not make one !

Parts were ordered and will post update when they get here.

 

[sharkbait-uhaha]

Hello, Is this thing on ?

Soooo it’s been a minute since my last update but let me tell you a lot has happened in my life but in a Good way .

but now back to the 10g tank , long story short I ended up neglecting it due to having very little time to maintain it now with a toddler work and life .

However I got a text from a friend who I hadn’t talked to in a very long time asking how my tank was doing, I mentioned the condition to him and after a few back and forth text he ended up convincing me to bring it back to life. So I started looking around and putting things back together trying to setup to do a water change .. keep in mind the tank had been up and RUNNING this whole time but without water changes or a care in the world so you can all imagine the condition of the poor tank .

I ended up doing 50% water change, syphoning some sand out , scrubbing the rock and after all that it looked decent enough .

Week or so passed and I did another 50% water change to try to get the rest of the gunk out of the tank and back into pristine conditions .

Happy to say things are back to how they were prior , clowns are still alive happy and BIG , and the only coral that survive this crazy mess was my toadstool .

I’ll end it here for now and will update later with more, I don’t want to bore you guys , big updates on the next upcoming post though !

( attached pics of the neglected tank )

 

[sharkbait-uhaha]

Updating thread, I have been doing regular weekly water changes and trying to get things back to operating levels. Cleaning the sand, rocks was no joke. Turkey basters deff helped but now I feel like my sand bed is running a bit thin. Solution is to possibly add some new sand to replenish the lost sand.
I also purchased some tester corals to see if i'm able to keep frags alive.

 

[sharkbait-uhaha]

Fast forward to a few weeks later and tank has been doing a lot better and frags have been stable . So I decided to go ahead and pick up some more frags from few local reefers .
Dipped every coral, placed in tank and within a few hours everything was opened up . It is safe to say that I am back and addicted, just seems harder to find frags locally now compared to before . Added some pics of tank/frag.

 

[sharkbait-uhaha]

Sunday update, I went ahead and looked online for some frag racks to place my new frags on so they wouldn't be on the sand bed. After surfing the web I remembered that I had a 3d printer packed away somewhere so I went ahead dusted it off and designed a very simple 6 frag holder and used some of my old magnets that I had purchases a long time ago for some other diy stuff( yes they are coated so no leaking/rusting will happen ). I placed the new frag rack in tank and turned out that the rack was too long for my setup so I went back to the drawing board and designed something a bit diff... with the new design I was able to add an extra frag hole and yet save space because I did a 90 degree rack on the corner glass, I got to say it looks a lot better.

FF a few days/weeks later and decided to "upgrade" my lighting to a prime 16HD, I went with the saxby file with minor adjustments to color. Since I already had the 3d printer out I decided to go ahead and 3d print a light shade to help with the blue light hitting my eyes when viewing the tank.

(not sure why pics are sideways, sorry for that )