DIY 190 Gallon Mixed Reef Angelfish Dominant Tank Journey

[songeez]

Aquarium

• 190 gallons - 78.8”L x 23.6”W x 23.6”H with 1/2" glass

Sump

• 30 gallons - 40”L x 13.8”W x 11.8”H

Filtration

• Filter Socks (Will be probably replaced with ReefMat)
• Live Rock in Sump
• Seachem Matrix
• Carbon Bags
• Reactor (not currently plugged in, wanna see if I can run without it)

Plumbing

• 1 1/2” pipes
• Bean Animal Overflow

Return Pump

• AquaNova 2400g/h

Powerheads

• 2x Jebao ALW-30
• 1x Jebao SLW-20

Lighting

• Generic Chinese Black Boxes and LED Bulbs // Temporary as I've already had them at home
• to be replaced with 2x Radion XR30 Pro

Skimmer

• AquaMedic Evo 1000

ATO

• Tunze Osmolator 3155

Rock

• Live Rock from two different tanks
• Tuffa
• Croatian Holey Rock

Sand

• Bora-Bora Fine Coral Sand

Salt

• Aquaforest Reef Salt

Instagram: @reefbythelake

Current Inhabitants:

• 4x Trochus snails
• 4x Tectus snails
• 4x Strombus snails
• 2x Scarlet Skunk Cleaner Shrimp
• 1x Sandsifting Starfish
• 1x Lawnmower Blenny
• 1x Diamond Watchman Goby
• 1x Sleeper Blue Dot Goby
• 2x Clownfish
• 2x Firefish Goby
• 1x Copperband Butterflyfish
• 1x Coral Beauty
• 1x Regal Angelfish
• Lots of bristleworms

To be added later:

• One or two large angelfish (Been thinking Blue Ring and Emperor, maybe even Bluegirdled, will see based on bioload)
• Mandarin Dragonet
• Some small peaceful fish for the upper water column movement

How it all started

Me and my partner have decided to pull the trigger on the reef tank. I had a 50-gallon reef tank a couple of years ago, so I'm not a complete beginner, however, my experience is super limited so I would consider myself advanced beginner (if that makes any sense). We've decided to go for 70 gallon tank, ended up with 190g (no explanation necessary ). Since I always like to do everything DIY, it's more fun and I think you value it so much more because of that.

We have started with IKEA METOD kitchen cabinets. I have very good experience with them, they're holding our granite countertops without any issues and any reinforcement for years now. What we did is, we used 4 pieces of 23.6” x 23.6” cabinets and reinforced all of them with solid wood wherever possible.

 

[songeez]

Glass Drilling

After the stand was ready, I ordered the float glass tank, which was just a simple tank without any overflows or holes or anything really. What did we do? When the tank came, within 10 minutes, we were holding the drill prepared to go for it and drill 3 holes in the bottom of the tank. Youtube-born-pro-glass-driller was born. To everyone's surprise, everything went smoothly and we ended up with 3 perfectly spaced holes. Our local glazier cut for us two pieces of black glass which we then attached with silicone to the tank to create an overflow box around the plumbing. So-far-so-good.

 

[songeez]

Tank Placement


Lots of sweat later, the tank was in its final resting place - which is behind our couch in the living room. We finished in-cabinet plumbing, then realized the height of the cabinet is not ideal. Most of the oversized skimmers won't fit there but we were able to find a solution with a little undersized skimmer for now. There are some more expensive options available that will fit, I'll consider replacing the current one with a bigger skimmer when I feel that this one is no longer sufficient.

// Note for my future self - always wash the sand before you put it in the tank so you don't have to take it all out again when the tank is already half full.

 

[songeez]

Rockwork Time!

Thankfully my dad's boss is a huge marine enthusiast with a lot of knowledge and experience, therefore I had someone to ask for help. We were able to buy multiple live rocks from other reefers, two beautiful coraline covered pieces which we then combined with tuffa rock and Croatian holey rock from our local shop. Tuffa and holey rock is dirt cheap here, we paid maybe 40$ for 260 pounds of rock (obviously we haven't used everything) + 100$ for live rock. Tuffa is absolutely great, very light and porous rock, easy to drill to too! Croatian holey rock is not ideal for a reef tank as you really need as much surface area as possible. However with another live rock + Matrix in the sump, I'm pretty sure it will be enough. I just loved the look of the small holes inside the holey rock. And my fish love it too! Especially my Lawnmower Blenny and Coral Beauty. Blenny just keeps jumping through all the holes, it's so much fun to watch.

 

[songeez]

But where do the lights go?


I had some unused Chinese lights from my previous experiments, so we decided to just use those for the time being. All of them will be replaced with Radions XR30 Pro hopefully by the end of the year so bear with me! However, we didn't have anything to attach them to. What do you think we did? You guessed that right, we DIY-ed the light holder too

For that, we used regular aluminum profiles with L connectors and sprayed everything with black spray. It doesn't look very good at the moment with all the different lights and cables hanging there, but it's just temporary so who cares!

 

[songeez]

Fishy time!

The tank has cycled pretty much instantly, the ugly phase was really subtle and in a couple of weeks, we were ready to add the first fish. I'm the person who loves challenges (as you might have already noticed), so we started with a bunch of snails, sand sifting starfish, lawnmower blenny, pair of firefish, a pair of watchman gobies and COPPERBAND butterfly. I know I've been extremely lucky with him, he is eating frozen like crazy, within a couple of hours, he completely erased the Aiptasia from the live rock, and (knocking on wood) he looks pretty happy at the moment.

Week later, a short visit to LFS in Vienna, and I went home with a pair of clowns, Coral Beauty and a beautiful Regal. All of them eat all kinds of food - frozen, pellets, flakes - doesn't matter!

At the moment, I'm at the stage where I don't want to add any more fish for the next couple of months. I just want to make sure Regal and Copperband will settle in properly. I know it's still too early. Regal has been in my tank for 4 days only so anything can happen and probably will happen.

The next step now is to add more corals and figure out which of them will be the least tempting for Angelfish. I already know that my Copperband likes the taste of Duncans as there were some smaller pieces on the live rock and he eliminated almost all of them. For me, fish are always on the first place and I'll just make corals somehow work around them.

If you were able to read up to this point, you must be crazy But also I wanna say thank you! And I appreciate any advice or improvement ideas. I know my setup is far from perfect, I already have a couple of things that I would do differently next time (looking at you, tiny sump!) but it will work for now! At least until I'll go for that dream 500g

 

[LaloJ]

Hello songeez, wow that is an incredible and quite clean job, I like the idea of DIY for our projects on our own, of course that way the fun is increased, I wish you the best of luck with the Regal angelfish and with CBB, they are hard fish to keep, in case you want to deal with equally hard fish, then it would not hurt to fit some QT system, with your DIY skills that should be a not too complicated and fun task, keep up the updates here!

 

[songeez]

Hello songeez, wow that is an incredible and quite clean job, I like the idea of DIY for our projects on our own, of course that way the fun is increased, I wish you the best of luck with the Regal angelfish and with CBB, they are hard fish to keep, in case you want to deal with equally hard fish, then it would not hurt to fit some QT system, with your DIY skills that should be a not too complicated and fun task, keep up the updates here!

Thank youu so much. I really appreciate it Yes, I’m planning to set up a quarantine tank too, as soon as I’m done with the main DT. Should be pretty soon though! I’ll share the updates later

 

[ycnibrc]

Awesome works as far as adding angel try to find juveniles angel so they dont have a taste for corals yet and feed them multiple times per day to keep them busy so they dont pick at your corals. I have a similar tank but just bigger.