First time reefer. I’ve lurked on the forum a long time but figured I should probably document with a build thread. Warning: Long post below.
Right at the start of the pandemic I started a low-tech freshwater planted tank as I anticipated a lot of time in the house with the then 5 and 3 year old sons. I bought a 33 gallon long aquarium (48" x 12" x 12") as I thought it was nice to get the 4’ profile but not deal with tons of water volume. We had some success and kept the same livestock for the 1.5 year life of the aquarium. It was also super nice that I didn't need crazy lights to grow stuff because nothing is more than about 12" from the lights. Our local LFS sells a lot of coral, and so naturally I had heard for 1.5 years about how cool the coral was from the now 7YO… Hence now we have a 33 long saltwater reef. I wasn’t going to want to maintain two tanks. It was bittersweet to get rid of the plants and fish we had grown over the year and a half we had the tank running, but we were super excited to try our hand at saltwater.
Onto the new build:
I didn’t want to drill the tank and liked the idea of keeping all of the water in one box rather than worry about plumbing because this tank is upstairs in the room we have setup for remote work and kid stuff. So no sump. I decided to use the two aquaclear 30’s from the freshwater tank (they were super quiet too). I made a custom skimmer box for one of the intakes that magnets to another magnet across the glass. I bought some magnets that I hope won’t react in saltwater. (Note - if you look later in another post - these will not work on the salty side of the tank)
I also made a custom media basket for one that holds quilt batting poly and cut down sponges. I plan on running some carbon, sponges, and poly. I bought some Chemipure blue but I figured I’d wait until there were some nutrients in the tank before using it - if at all. I also got a polyfilter pad but haven't run it yet either. I had also considered building in a custom AIO to the 33 gallon, but ultimately opted to go the route of the two HOB.
I’m going to try and keep this new build as budget as possible, but I want to use quality enough equipment (and elbow grease) so we have success too. I’m going to use the glass tops to try and keep evaporation down so I don’t need to use an ATO. I also wanted to keep the stuff hanging off the tank to a minimum so I am going to try and avoid a HOB Skimmer. I didn’t have an issue with the temp in summer of last year with the FW setup, hopefully I don’t cook stuff this summer because others consider glass tops to be a heat issue. I’m going to use reef crystals because it starts higher with Alk: so water changes will dose more in. With a smaller system I think a lot of water chemistry can be fixed by routine water changes. With the FW I changed 9 gallons out every week at the start - but as the system matured it became 9 gallons every other week, then 6 gallons every other week, then finally 6 gallons every 3 weeks as the plants were using up more and more NO3. I plan to start with the reef tank lightly stocked and changing 4 gallons every other week. One downside of SW is that the FW tank’s water change water made great fertilizer for our gardens and indoor plants. I won’t be doing that with the SW.
I picked up about 30 lbs of dry liferock. 20 lbs of pink Fiji sand. I brought it home and smashed up the rock for some smaller pieces so we could glue it into our scape. The 6 YO helped design the scape. I had some extra rock after it got all smashed up so I glued a magnet on one and we hold it on the back glass using the magnet. We only used gel superglue to create the scape.
We cycled that tank with some bottled bacteria and fishless fuel (ammonia). I have two SLW-10 pumps at either end of the tank but I didn’t run the aquaclears as I wanted to colonize the rock and sand, not filter media with the bacteria.
I kept the ammonia concentration pretty low, we cycled fast and I didn’t have lights yet. I also had the water mixed to a low salinity (32 ppt) and kept the temperature around 83F for the cycle. I tested ammonia with salifert. I was testing nitrites and nitrates with some old test strips from the FW tank, but ammonia and nitrite obviously skew the nitrate readings so I didn’t pay much attention to the numbers just looking for presence. Unfortunately NO2 read 0, 5, or 10.
After 10 days I did a 50% WC and brought the salinity to 34.6 ppt, temperature to 78F and the next day I was reading 0 NO2 and my NO3 was only reading 5 mg/L on Salifert kit. I was ready for livestock.
Lighting
This was hard to keep in budget. I ended up getting two hipagero aquaknight fixtures. It would have been nice to get something that I could time on an app, or something that I could control blue and white channels separately, but in a 12” deep tank I figured these would get it done and kept the price low. I use a smart outlet to set the time for the lights. I used an app on my phone and a ziplock bag to map PAR with blues on 100% and Whites around 50%. (https://growlightmeter.com/underwater-par-measurements-for-reef-aquariums/) I don’t know that these readings are going to be super accurate but I figure it gets me in the ballpark and they seem consistent with what I was expecting from other reefer’s and these lights PAR measurements with better sensors. They were also repeatable if I went back I would get the same readings again and again. Since I had a rim and glass covers I couldn’t attach the light stand to the aquarium, so I instead attached a wood 1x2 to the wall and have the lights mounted on that.
I believe I got really lucky because these PAR ranges seem like I could grow a lot of different types of coral. I’ll probably stay away from stony corals because with a small volume and planning on manual dosing (or lack thereof) it would seem like more work than needed.
For salinity I tracked two weeks of salinity and found that in a week I won’t evaporate that much with my glass tops.
I’m hopeful that if I keep salinity between 34.5 and 35.1 that that should be enough stability for keeping coral. That corresponds to 1.0260-1.0264 specific gravity if I didn't top off for about a week. I wanted to record how much the salinity swings, I also used a salinity calculator along with my topoff amounts and how much salinity changes to figure out my system volume is in the ballpark of 28 gallons. Now I have a basis for any other parameter that might need to be dosed in.
We added some livestock. We got a pair of clowns - one lighting and one classic both ocellaris. Both juveniles but the lighting is much bigger so there wasn’t going to be any question about pecking order. I have been feeding frozen brine shrimp, pellets with garlic, and optimum flakes on a rotating schedule and feeding once per day. I have only been feeding what they consume and spot feeding - no broadcast feeding.
My son also wanted a toadstool so bad he had to pick one out - so we got a coral. The toadstool he picked out is kinda unique because he picked one that doesn’t have polyps in the middle. We noticed after dipping and observing in the tank that on the small bit of rock we got with the leather we brought in two aiptasia… I pulled the frag out of the tank and superglued over the aiptasia - but I believe now we have inoculated the tank and can anticipate aptasia popping up later. I believe the clowns and the toadstool were purchased on 12/12.
Something that took a lot of consideration on my part - and I could see the shaking of the head from a lot of people in this forum is that I decided to not go the route of quarantine/treating fish before adding them to my system. My system will only have a few fish in it, and I feel I would have more losses in a quarantine situation than in the actual tank. It also appeared that despite quarantine that Ich still managed outbreaks in many tanks, my quarantine would probably not be super successful compared to a bunch of pros that seem to keep treating and fallowing. A couple days after adding the clowns I noticed some white spots (ich) on the smaller clown. Ammonia still 0. I thought - here I go. But I turned my two SLW-10’s down in the tank and fed well and the spots were gone in a day. Probably just stress - but a reminder that when the fish get stressed I know what is lurking.
By the way - SLW-10s I had been running on Random(else) but this sometimes has the pumps running at 100% which is about 1000 gph each. Two of those plus two aquaclears (running 150 gph each) would make a max of 2300 gph in the display - for a turnover rate of close to 82x my display unless I am missing something about how to calculate this. I moved the two pumps to the top of the water, pointing them slightly up to break the surface and put them on the lowest pulse setting. I think the corals appreciated the slower flow as well but the clowns swim the tank more and don’t stay in the corner. I think too much flow was the big stressor for the smaller clown.
We explored another LFS that specializes in coral and they had a bunch of really colorful and cool coral. They were running a 40% off sale so of course we picked up a bunch more stuff - Duncan, Two Ricordea Florida Mushrooms, Three Zoa Frags (I don’t have pictures of 1 of the Zoas, I since threw it away when it contaminated my tank with some pest algae - more on that in a minute), and some GSP which is isolated of course. I think I paid $50 for all the frags.
The frags we got had some algae growing on them - so I also got two trochus snails since we are importing some algaes into our system. Our frag plugs and snails also had some coralline algae on them so we are also importing some good with the pest algae.
One failure so far is I added a bottle of locally grown pods to the tank and have been dosing in live phyto. I'm pretty sure the clowns took out enough of them because two weeks later I can't spot any pods in the aquarium with a flashlight at night. I'm still dosing the phyto in. I'll have to try adding more pods in the future.
At first I was happy because I started seeing some new algae popping up all over the tank (Life!) besides a really light scattering of diatoms in the sand. But quickly that excitement faded when the algae looked more like a macro than a typical algae. I believe I had Bryopsis sp, and it was everywhere in the tank. Rock, sand, glass…
In lurking on R2R about bryopsis I decided I didn’t want to mess with this - so I went to the two LFS where one LFS told me it was a type of caulerpa, the other LFS said maybe bryopsis. I got some reef flux and dosed the tank immediately. A four days later the algae was struggling so I went to the store to get some hermit crabs (since the snails seemed to have no interest). I asked for two blue legged hermits and some extra shells. I had a small system overall and still just a light scattering of dying algae so I figured two would get the job done in a week or two. When I got home and dropped the shells in the tank - to my surprise all of them started walking around - all 11 of them. So instead of 2 hermits with 9 extra shells, I just got 11 hermits. To be fair they probably had 300 in the tank they grabbed them from.
They made short work of the dying algae - they took 3 days to remove any traces I can see in the tank. Reef Flux + Blue Legged Hermits Review - Five Stars. Sand and rock both look super clean, but I won’t water change for another week just to make sure that I don’t see that macro come back. I’ll probably need to buy some algae wafers/sheets to try and keep them alive until I hit another stage of the uglies. I’ll try to see if I can find some empty shells too.
I picked up some Pulsing Xenia. I was on the fence about adding it because some people describe it as a pest - but I like the look and the tank is for me and my boys. I put this on the rock magnet on the back glass to isolate it. It stopped pulsing the next day but I think it was getting too much flow, it was located in the middle back and the polyps were being battered pretty hard by flow- so I moved it to a calmer area (magnet rock is super easy to move around the tank). I have some subtle pulsing happening today, hopefully it gets back to the pulsing I saw when I got it from the store. It still looks cool just waving in the flow.
That is where we are at today. I've already noticed growth on the leather, the duncan looks like it is ready to be throwing some new heads, and the mushrooms have increased in size just in a few weeks. The corals get fed some brine shrimp or just the supernate from brine shrimp as well.
I’m glad to have started this project - I’ve definitely binged over the last about 6 months information into how to make this successful, and have learned how to glue my fingers together with gel superglue. If I can have just a little of the success we had with the planted - or that many others on this forum - I’ll be thrilled. The now 7YO is doing a science poster for school on coral. Hopefully I can grow his interest and knowledge in the hobby/science as well. Now I just need to convince him we need to wait for some stability before adding more corals to our tank. He really wants a frogspawn and torch...
Right at the start of the pandemic I started a low-tech freshwater planted tank as I anticipated a lot of time in the house with the then 5 and 3 year old sons. I bought a 33 gallon long aquarium (48" x 12" x 12") as I thought it was nice to get the 4’ profile but not deal with tons of water volume. We had some success and kept the same livestock for the 1.5 year life of the aquarium. It was also super nice that I didn't need crazy lights to grow stuff because nothing is more than about 12" from the lights. Our local LFS sells a lot of coral, and so naturally I had heard for 1.5 years about how cool the coral was from the now 7YO… Hence now we have a 33 long saltwater reef. I wasn’t going to want to maintain two tanks. It was bittersweet to get rid of the plants and fish we had grown over the year and a half we had the tank running, but we were super excited to try our hand at saltwater.
Onto the new build:
I didn’t want to drill the tank and liked the idea of keeping all of the water in one box rather than worry about plumbing because this tank is upstairs in the room we have setup for remote work and kid stuff. So no sump. I decided to use the two aquaclear 30’s from the freshwater tank (they were super quiet too). I made a custom skimmer box for one of the intakes that magnets to another magnet across the glass. I bought some magnets that I hope won’t react in saltwater. (Note - if you look later in another post - these will not work on the salty side of the tank)
I also made a custom media basket for one that holds quilt batting poly and cut down sponges. I plan on running some carbon, sponges, and poly. I bought some Chemipure blue but I figured I’d wait until there were some nutrients in the tank before using it - if at all. I also got a polyfilter pad but haven't run it yet either. I had also considered building in a custom AIO to the 33 gallon, but ultimately opted to go the route of the two HOB.
I’m going to try and keep this new build as budget as possible, but I want to use quality enough equipment (and elbow grease) so we have success too. I’m going to use the glass tops to try and keep evaporation down so I don’t need to use an ATO. I also wanted to keep the stuff hanging off the tank to a minimum so I am going to try and avoid a HOB Skimmer. I didn’t have an issue with the temp in summer of last year with the FW setup, hopefully I don’t cook stuff this summer because others consider glass tops to be a heat issue. I’m going to use reef crystals because it starts higher with Alk: so water changes will dose more in. With a smaller system I think a lot of water chemistry can be fixed by routine water changes. With the FW I changed 9 gallons out every week at the start - but as the system matured it became 9 gallons every other week, then 6 gallons every other week, then finally 6 gallons every 3 weeks as the plants were using up more and more NO3. I plan to start with the reef tank lightly stocked and changing 4 gallons every other week. One downside of SW is that the FW tank’s water change water made great fertilizer for our gardens and indoor plants. I won’t be doing that with the SW.
I picked up about 30 lbs of dry liferock. 20 lbs of pink Fiji sand. I brought it home and smashed up the rock for some smaller pieces so we could glue it into our scape. The 6 YO helped design the scape. I had some extra rock after it got all smashed up so I glued a magnet on one and we hold it on the back glass using the magnet. We only used gel superglue to create the scape.
We cycled that tank with some bottled bacteria and fishless fuel (ammonia). I have two SLW-10 pumps at either end of the tank but I didn’t run the aquaclears as I wanted to colonize the rock and sand, not filter media with the bacteria.
I kept the ammonia concentration pretty low, we cycled fast and I didn’t have lights yet. I also had the water mixed to a low salinity (32 ppt) and kept the temperature around 83F for the cycle. I tested ammonia with salifert. I was testing nitrites and nitrates with some old test strips from the FW tank, but ammonia and nitrite obviously skew the nitrate readings so I didn’t pay much attention to the numbers just looking for presence. Unfortunately NO2 read 0, 5, or 10.
Day | NH3 (ppt) | NH3 dosed (ppt) | NO2 (mg/L) | NO3 (mg/L) |
11/28 | 0 | 1.5 | 0 | 0 |
11/29 | 0.5 | 2.0 | 5 | 25 |
11/30 | 0.5 | - | 10 | 100 |
12/1 | 0.5 | - | 10 | 100 |
12/2 | 0 | 1.5 | 10+ | 100 |
12/3 | 0.5 | - | 10+ | 100+ |
12/4 | 0.25 | 1.75 | 10+ | 100+ |
12/5 | 0.5 | - | 10+ | 250 |
12/6 | 0 | - | 10+ | 250 |
12/7 | 0 | - | 10+ | 250 |
12/8 | 0 | - | 10+ | 250 |
Lighting
This was hard to keep in budget. I ended up getting two hipagero aquaknight fixtures. It would have been nice to get something that I could time on an app, or something that I could control blue and white channels separately, but in a 12” deep tank I figured these would get it done and kept the price low. I use a smart outlet to set the time for the lights. I used an app on my phone and a ziplock bag to map PAR with blues on 100% and Whites around 50%. (https://growlightmeter.com/underwater-par-measurements-for-reef-aquariums/) I don’t know that these readings are going to be super accurate but I figure it gets me in the ballpark and they seem consistent with what I was expecting from other reefer’s and these lights PAR measurements with better sensors. They were also repeatable if I went back I would get the same readings again and again. Since I had a rim and glass covers I couldn’t attach the light stand to the aquarium, so I instead attached a wood 1x2 to the wall and have the lights mounted on that.
I believe I got really lucky because these PAR ranges seem like I could grow a lot of different types of coral. I’ll probably stay away from stony corals because with a small volume and planning on manual dosing (or lack thereof) it would seem like more work than needed.
For salinity I tracked two weeks of salinity and found that in a week I won’t evaporate that much with my glass tops.
Date | Salinity (ppt) |
12/11 | 34.6 |
12/12 | 34.6 |
12/13 | 34.6 |
12/14 | 34.7 |
12/15 | 35.0 |
12/16 | 35.1 |
12/17 | 35.1 |
12/18 | 35.1 → WC → 34.5 |
12/19 | 34.6 |
12/20 | 34.6 |
12/21 | 34.6 |
12/22 | 34.6 |
12/23 | 34.6 |
12/24 | 34.7 |
12/25 | 35.1 |
I’m hopeful that if I keep salinity between 34.5 and 35.1 that that should be enough stability for keeping coral. That corresponds to 1.0260-1.0264 specific gravity if I didn't top off for about a week. I wanted to record how much the salinity swings, I also used a salinity calculator along with my topoff amounts and how much salinity changes to figure out my system volume is in the ballpark of 28 gallons. Now I have a basis for any other parameter that might need to be dosed in.
We added some livestock. We got a pair of clowns - one lighting and one classic both ocellaris. Both juveniles but the lighting is much bigger so there wasn’t going to be any question about pecking order. I have been feeding frozen brine shrimp, pellets with garlic, and optimum flakes on a rotating schedule and feeding once per day. I have only been feeding what they consume and spot feeding - no broadcast feeding.
My son also wanted a toadstool so bad he had to pick one out - so we got a coral. The toadstool he picked out is kinda unique because he picked one that doesn’t have polyps in the middle. We noticed after dipping and observing in the tank that on the small bit of rock we got with the leather we brought in two aiptasia… I pulled the frag out of the tank and superglued over the aiptasia - but I believe now we have inoculated the tank and can anticipate aptasia popping up later. I believe the clowns and the toadstool were purchased on 12/12.
Something that took a lot of consideration on my part - and I could see the shaking of the head from a lot of people in this forum is that I decided to not go the route of quarantine/treating fish before adding them to my system. My system will only have a few fish in it, and I feel I would have more losses in a quarantine situation than in the actual tank. It also appeared that despite quarantine that Ich still managed outbreaks in many tanks, my quarantine would probably not be super successful compared to a bunch of pros that seem to keep treating and fallowing. A couple days after adding the clowns I noticed some white spots (ich) on the smaller clown. Ammonia still 0. I thought - here I go. But I turned my two SLW-10’s down in the tank and fed well and the spots were gone in a day. Probably just stress - but a reminder that when the fish get stressed I know what is lurking.
By the way - SLW-10s I had been running on Random(else) but this sometimes has the pumps running at 100% which is about 1000 gph each. Two of those plus two aquaclears (running 150 gph each) would make a max of 2300 gph in the display - for a turnover rate of close to 82x my display unless I am missing something about how to calculate this. I moved the two pumps to the top of the water, pointing them slightly up to break the surface and put them on the lowest pulse setting. I think the corals appreciated the slower flow as well but the clowns swim the tank more and don’t stay in the corner. I think too much flow was the big stressor for the smaller clown.
We explored another LFS that specializes in coral and they had a bunch of really colorful and cool coral. They were running a 40% off sale so of course we picked up a bunch more stuff - Duncan, Two Ricordea Florida Mushrooms, Three Zoa Frags (I don’t have pictures of 1 of the Zoas, I since threw it away when it contaminated my tank with some pest algae - more on that in a minute), and some GSP which is isolated of course. I think I paid $50 for all the frags.
The frags we got had some algae growing on them - so I also got two trochus snails since we are importing some algaes into our system. Our frag plugs and snails also had some coralline algae on them so we are also importing some good with the pest algae.
One failure so far is I added a bottle of locally grown pods to the tank and have been dosing in live phyto. I'm pretty sure the clowns took out enough of them because two weeks later I can't spot any pods in the aquarium with a flashlight at night. I'm still dosing the phyto in. I'll have to try adding more pods in the future.
At first I was happy because I started seeing some new algae popping up all over the tank (Life!) besides a really light scattering of diatoms in the sand. But quickly that excitement faded when the algae looked more like a macro than a typical algae. I believe I had Bryopsis sp, and it was everywhere in the tank. Rock, sand, glass…
In lurking on R2R about bryopsis I decided I didn’t want to mess with this - so I went to the two LFS where one LFS told me it was a type of caulerpa, the other LFS said maybe bryopsis. I got some reef flux and dosed the tank immediately. A four days later the algae was struggling so I went to the store to get some hermit crabs (since the snails seemed to have no interest). I asked for two blue legged hermits and some extra shells. I had a small system overall and still just a light scattering of dying algae so I figured two would get the job done in a week or two. When I got home and dropped the shells in the tank - to my surprise all of them started walking around - all 11 of them. So instead of 2 hermits with 9 extra shells, I just got 11 hermits. To be fair they probably had 300 in the tank they grabbed them from.
They made short work of the dying algae - they took 3 days to remove any traces I can see in the tank. Reef Flux + Blue Legged Hermits Review - Five Stars. Sand and rock both look super clean, but I won’t water change for another week just to make sure that I don’t see that macro come back. I’ll probably need to buy some algae wafers/sheets to try and keep them alive until I hit another stage of the uglies. I’ll try to see if I can find some empty shells too.
I picked up some Pulsing Xenia. I was on the fence about adding it because some people describe it as a pest - but I like the look and the tank is for me and my boys. I put this on the rock magnet on the back glass to isolate it. It stopped pulsing the next day but I think it was getting too much flow, it was located in the middle back and the polyps were being battered pretty hard by flow- so I moved it to a calmer area (magnet rock is super easy to move around the tank). I have some subtle pulsing happening today, hopefully it gets back to the pulsing I saw when I got it from the store. It still looks cool just waving in the flow.
That is where we are at today. I've already noticed growth on the leather, the duncan looks like it is ready to be throwing some new heads, and the mushrooms have increased in size just in a few weeks. The corals get fed some brine shrimp or just the supernate from brine shrimp as well.
I’m glad to have started this project - I’ve definitely binged over the last about 6 months information into how to make this successful, and have learned how to glue my fingers together with gel superglue. If I can have just a little of the success we had with the planted - or that many others on this forum - I’ll be thrilled. The now 7YO is doing a science poster for school on coral. Hopefully I can grow his interest and knowledge in the hobby/science as well. Now I just need to convince him we need to wait for some stability before adding more corals to our tank. He really wants a frogspawn and torch...
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