Badfish & LittleMermaids 2.5 Nano Build

[Badfish]

Sorry for lack of info on this thread I was waiting until I had the tank a little more stable before I wanted to talk about my approach to this build. Lately I've read a lot articles on how technology and advances in equipment has made reef keep much easier; while I totally agree with this statement (I have Leds on this tank and they are the main reason why it's able to keep such a wide range of corals), I've also seen tanks more tricked than the cars from those fast and furious movies. Too many people depend on crazy controllers and loads of equipment meant to reduce the amount of water changes need to be done rather than doing research on what makes a balanced system and watching to see what their tank is telling them.

I felt a good way to test this is by using the famous K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) method on this tank and seeing how far I could take it. Again the only maintenance is my weekly water changes and daily RO/DI Top off, I'm using the tanks stock filter pretty much as is:

Mechanical: Porous foam block
Chemical: Replaced Carbon with SeaChem's SeaGel for phosphate control
Biological: BIOMAX insert

no skimmer, no dosing, no feeding... I didn't even test my water parameters up until last week. I wanted to just keep an eye on everything and let the tank tell me how it's going. The only thing I have been worrying about lately is my Alk and Ca levels because I have a lot of stony corals in this tiny guy, I figured that they were being soaked up like a sponge and the water changes would have a hard time keeping up. (The levels for my fresh mixed W/C are @ 8-9 dKH and 460-480 Ca). And with all the different variables from light acclimation to just plain having SPS in a pico, it was hard to tell just on observing growth alone, so I decided maybe it was time to test the tank and see how things where holding up.

All the levels seem pretty good except for dKH it was at 5! So I've been doing small daily water changes with 12 dKH to slowly get it back to around 9-10. Surprisingly none of the corals seem to have been effected too much by it, I was still seeing pretty good growth in my stonys.

(4 new heads on this Acan)

I'm hoping once I get the levels where I want them I can maintain them my using water with higher dKH and Ca for my weekly water changes. Another problem we dealt with was the red Zoas came down with a fungal infection of some sort


but we dipped them in some Furan-2 which seem to do the trick and they are recovering nicely.



Also the last few piece of coral have all been light acclimated so the tank got a final rescaping job, that makes a total of 20 different piece in only 2 gals . I'm thinking the tanks is full, time to sit back and watch it grow. The only thing I'm still looking to add is a unique inverter of some sort... I just have no Idea what .








Thanks for looking.

I'm working on the price list, it should be up in a few days