Well, I've posted a few random bit's and pieces of my system here and there. I figured I should finally start a tank thread.
Tank
A 60gallon breeder, 48"x24"x12". I love the long, wide shallow tanks. Though they can, and do pose a few problems. One being how little room you have to work with when coral start to grow taller. Two being water evaporation, I'm not sure about everyone else, but I add close to 5 gallons fresh topoff water every other day. A little over 10gallons if I go a week with out topping it off.
But overall I love my little tank. It's been running for about a year now.
Lighting
I use a 36" T5HO aquatic life fixture, suspended above the tank(around 12" or so) with an aquaticlife hanging kit. The suspension kit makes tank cleaning a breeze, no heavy canopy to lift or dangle.
I have my reasons for using a to small light fixture over this tank, as well, more on that later.
In the T5HO fixture are ATI bulbs, 2 aquablue special and 2 blue+. In the near future I may swap out one of the aquablue special's for ATI's newer Coral Plus bulb.
The new configuration would be (front to back)
Blue +
AquaBlue Special
Blue +
Coral +
If all goes well I'll switch the other Aquablue Special for another Coral +. There's also plans to add two DIY LED strips to this tank. One in the front and one in the back. These will be made with a combo of blue and royal blue 3watt LED chips. Depending on how many LED's I plan to add will also impact my choice in T5HO bulbs in my fixture. If possible I may get rid of the actinic bulbs completely, I'm tired of how quickly they stop being beneficial to coral and the replacement cost of a little over $40 twice a year. That being said the future Lighting will be a combo of T5HO and LED. Best of both worlds. LED actinic supplementation, and T5HO for growth and everything else.
Well at least until Plasma lights hit the seen, then so long LED's, goodbye T5HO's, and what were those VHO things.....when I had a reef we used real sunlight dang nabbit, kids and there special lights these days
Filtration
Not much on this system. Two aquaclear HOB filter's, and one Corallife 65gallon
super skimmer.....at least it's running..
One aquaclear is filled with Boyd's Chemi pure Elite and rubble, the other is filled with BlueLife's Clear Fx Pro filter media and a sponge(cleaned weekly). Then there's the skimmer, it works, thats all I'm gonna say for now.
Future plans include
Finally adding a two part sump. First part being a 30gallon macro algae refugium, which will overflow into the "sump". The sump will contain the heater, skimmer, and return pump. And maybe some more live rock, over all I'm hoping to get a 48"x18" x13" or at least a 36"x18"x13"tank. The 30gl macro algae tank will have a 4" deep sandbed, and will be filled with various algae's, and small rubble. Hopefully keeping my pod population up and my nutrients down.
Stand
I made the tank stand myself, with cutting edge 2x4 technology. Leaving what I hope to be plenty of room for the future sump. The height of the stand was intentional, I wanted a shallow tank that when walked up to, it would be easy to view from the top down. But when sitting on the couch I would have a nice pleasant through the glass view. Again this is more or less possible because of how shallow the tank is. I also over built the stand, so I'd have some usable counter space as well.
Flow
Is provided by one modded maxi jet 1200, and whatever the aquaclear's kick out. I plan to add at least one more Koralia powerhead as money allows( in other words quit buying coral, and upgrade)
Feeding goes as follows
1- Turn daylights off, leave actinic's on.
2- I mix up some rod's food, cyclopeze, and coral frenzy, into a nice soup.
3- Turn off all sources of flow(including skimmer), squirt a little bit of the soup (just a little) over my favia's, acans, and other lps.
4- Then here's the hard part( at least for me, cause I have little patience) do nothing more for at least 15minutes. This is the amount of time (for my tank, and coral. may vary on different tanks ect ect. Each system is unique and different.) it takes for my lps to really open up and start "feeding".
5- At this point I turn my small aquaclear HOB filter back on just to get a little flow in the tank, help those sweepers to move around and catch food. Then I proceed to target feed every open polyp, eye, mouth, head, anything that's open and looking for food. They really love mysis shrimp, or any big meaty chunks.
6- Stand guard with my two acrylic pointer sticks, and keep my clowns and chromises from stealing food.(you don't have to do this, but that's just me, my fish get fed enough as it is, greedy pigs) ( I love copy and paste)
For the fish I feed a pellet food, and whatever they eat from the coral feeding routine.
Live Stock
2 clown fish's
4 chromis
2 peppermint shrimp
Lots of baby snail's(forgot what kind, long pointy shell's, nocturnal, reef safe)
And a couple of hermit's. I know I need more than two, but the dang little
@#$%$# @$#%'s always knock my frags over. So that's that.
Coral
I'll get back to this list soon. Pics forth coming soon.
An old pic of the tank, shortly after setting up.
I've since, taken out the other two maxi jets and intake filter. Just to much direct flow, need more gentle flow.
How do those coral plus look/ run by themselves and with the other bulbs on? Think it's worth getting rid of the actinics and just going aquablue specials and coral +'s ?
How do those coral plus look/ run by themselves and with the other bulbs on? Think it's worth getting rid of the actinics and just going aquablue specials and coral +'s ?
I know you posted pics of all those beautiful zoa's just to **** me off
Well Miz, just so you don't feel so bad. I've been battling some nasty hair algae and green cyano for awhile now. I had just done another tank cleaning and dipped all my zoa's in a peroxide mix, just a day before I snapped all those pics.
Some opened right back up, others are taking longer. And a couple (including one of my speckled red AKA darthmaul mini colonys) may just melt away. I'm glad I have two back up colony's of the SR's that are thriving, other wise I'd be crying.
This is what all my zoas looked like, or worse.
Only posting this picture for you Miz, but we ALL have or "bad" moments with our systems. Not everyone likes to admit it, or show it. But if it'll put a smile on your face, you've had a bad string of luck lately. But I hear upgrading your tank really helps fix it.
These still need dipping
And now I'm just waiting to see which ones pull through.
It seems like the Fruit Loops and Chong Bongs are handling the dip the best so far
Though, the Fruit Loops seemed to have morphed a little here and there(bright orange'ish mouth). Not sure if that's from being repeatedly covered in hair algae or something else. There still one of my favorites.
I'm smiling yes But only because crappyness an all you still have some freaking awesome looking zoas!!!! Lol
I will say though, I'll take some melting zoas any day over HA. Then again I don't have the zoas you have. Mine don't even have names!!! Lol