After some time off, 20in modded cube
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- Thread starter tnyr5
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This is an amazing tank and something I’m hoping to emulate with my 18” 25 gallon cube. Do you have an tips for someone new to keeping Acropora species? Also any pictures of how your sump is set up?
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My sump is an embarrassing tangle of wires, tubes, and salt creep lol.
But I can certainly give you some tips for setting up an sps tank
- Use real live rock, the hitchhikers you might have to deal with are a small price to pay for stability in 3 months instead of a year and a half of frustration with dry.
- Learn with the tried and true classics. They actually look like their pics and are much more forgiving. Most of them are equally easy, as well.
- It doesn't matter what your "Big 3" parameters are (within reason); it matters that they stay there.
- Light should be thought of as a parameter, and it should scale with your NO3/PO4. The lower they are, the less light you need. The fixture and type of light doesn't matter nearly as much as getting the scaling right.
- Try not to rely too heavily on, as they would say in "Dune", "machines that think." Tridents, apexes, auto water changes, programmable lights...all well and good until they have a blip and you don't notice, and it will happen lol. Far better to set things up so that they're easy to do, which will make you do them. Have a work table to do tests and do them often; set up a mixing tank for salt water so you just have to turn a valve or two to do a water change. That sort of thing.
- A big UV sterilizer plumbed into your return line will prevent most dinoflagellate outbreaks.
- You will never get Acropora flatworms if you cut every new frag off its plug, remove any bit of dead skeleton, and dip them once every 5 days for a month before nailing them down.
Well, that's my brain dump for now lol.
But I can certainly give you some tips for setting up an sps tank
- Use real live rock, the hitchhikers you might have to deal with are a small price to pay for stability in 3 months instead of a year and a half of frustration with dry.
- Learn with the tried and true classics. They actually look like their pics and are much more forgiving. Most of them are equally easy, as well.
- It doesn't matter what your "Big 3" parameters are (within reason); it matters that they stay there.
- Light should be thought of as a parameter, and it should scale with your NO3/PO4. The lower they are, the less light you need. The fixture and type of light doesn't matter nearly as much as getting the scaling right.
- Try not to rely too heavily on, as they would say in "Dune", "machines that think." Tridents, apexes, auto water changes, programmable lights...all well and good until they have a blip and you don't notice, and it will happen lol. Far better to set things up so that they're easy to do, which will make you do them. Have a work table to do tests and do them often; set up a mixing tank for salt water so you just have to turn a valve or two to do a water change. That sort of thing.
- A big UV sterilizer plumbed into your return line will prevent most dinoflagellate outbreaks.
- You will never get Acropora flatworms if you cut every new frag off its plug, remove any bit of dead skeleton, and dip them once every 5 days for a month before nailing them down.
Well, that's my brain dump for now lol.
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Mine is wall-mounted for easy bulb changes. There is only one T in my return line, which feeds the external skimmer. Water from the skimmer returns to the sump. The rest goes through the UV and into the tank.
Pygmy?
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Of sorts. It's a Joculator.
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