CADE REEF 600 S2 Build Thread

[trevorhiller]

Posting an update video of the tank, the growth has been quite impressive if you compare to my October 2022 images. The tank is looking quite filled out finally. I wish I had better photography/videography skills to do the tank justice. Everything is colored up and growing minus a Jason Fox Flame acropora that has based out huge and is just brown.... every once in a while it will get some yellow smudges on the tips, but it's been brown for the last year it seems.

I recently added a Royal Gramma, brining my fish total to 6. I purchased him from the local Petco along with a Watchman goby. Unfortunately the watchman goby died in QT-just 2 days before they were meant to go into the tank. He survived Copper Power, Metronidazole and Prazi and was in the observation period prior to addition. I think it may have had internal parasites because it was quite small and thin despite heavily feeding/eating. Unfortunately, the metronidazole-laced foods didn't seem to be enough. Fortunately, the Royal Gramma was fine and went in without a hiccup.

I have a few acropora that I got from another reefer on here in trade for some equipment and they are colored up nicely and basing out on their frag plugs. I need to get around to figuring out where I want to mount them because I'm running low on room.

 

[trevorhiller]

Top Down View of the Progress

I don't have a fancy portal viewer, so I floated my iPhone on some plastic blister packaging from my Misco refractometer.

 

[lubeck]

Tank is looking great

 

[trevorhiller]

Tank is looking great

Thanks! I’m pretty pleased with the progress.

Can’t wait to get more space though!

 

[shakacuz]

any updates!?

 

[trevorhiller]

any updates!?

Everything is sort of on cruise control. Still using the Radion & Reef Brites for lighting. I’m dosing calcium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide, calcium chloride and Tropic Marin Balling C. I manually dose 2.5 mL Tropic Marin Trace A&K daily for trace element supplementation. (Actually have been dosing calcium manually too because one of my Versas broke, but that’s only temporary).


Today I added a tail spot blenny that just finished QT. This plus 2 clownfish, a Banggai Cardinalfish, Tomini tang, Royal gramma and a flame hawk fish complete the line up.

I haven’t added any new corals lately because I’m running out of room! I actually had to do some serious pruning of my red Montipora capricornis. It was huge and was accounting for about 1/3 of my daily alkalinity dosing!

My tinkering has been focused on a 150 gallon in-wall build and the basement renovations surrounding it, so this tank is just coasting and growing out colonies for the new tank.

For maintenance, I do a 5 gallon water change once a week and suck out detritus with that. I’ve stopped using any filter socks and still run 110 grams of Rowaphos in a BRS mini reactor. My UV is still running and I’m dosing ozone at night for two 30 minute increments using the Ultra Reef skimmer and an Ozotech set on setting 1.

For feeding, I feed 1 cube of mysis daily, 1 cube of variety frozen food (I mix it up for the fish) and the Avast Plank auto feeder feeds a mix of dry pellets, flake and freeze dried food for 1 minute, 4x daily.

This input/output mix keeps my phosphate around 0.02-0.08 ppm and Nitrates 10-15 ppm.

I think that about covers it! Let me know if there’s anything specific I can answer!

 

[trevorhiller]

Here’s a quick video showing off the new fish. He’s bold! Day 2 and he’s already out swimming with the big guys. He has great personality and looks quite healthy.

Sorry of the poor video quality as usual. But this time I didn’t even try because I didn’t want to scare him into hiding with cleaning the glass.