KonradTO's Student's Tank- Fluval flex 32.5 AIO

[KonradTO]

Hi everyone!
I am KonradTO, I am Italian but let's say I live in EU, as I change home quite often depending on where "wind blows".
This is my first saltwater tank. Before I had many freshwater tanks, terrariums and paludariums, but I was always scared of the costs of saltwater.
I decided to add my experience to the build threads moltitude because I love DIYing and also I aimed cheap (at least, I tried). So maybe someone will find some useful info about my experience.
So, lets start! I decided to go for a "big" nano, a 32g fluval flex AIO tank for freshwater. As I mentioned I travel a lot (I am a phD student, so no permanent positions in sight) therefore I need something cheap that I can "easily" move to another house every 2-3 years. This limits a bit what I can stock the tank with.
Nevertheless I really liked the design with the "inverse" bow front glass and the fact that the lid was so tight that I did not need any ATO. So I went to the store, picked up the tank, its own cabinet, some sand, biomedia and filter material, tests for cycling (the same is done with freshwater) and the first salt mix I found (Red Sea Coral Pro...). Also I had from previous works a 50w heater and a canister filter (Tetra EX600plus), and a 3 stages RODI system.
(08/2021)
At this point I had the tank cycling with washed sand, the 50W heater and the canister filter filled with sponges, biomedia (seachem matrix and bioballs), and filter floss.
In the filter chambers I added some biomedia and left the default sponges from Fluval.
Also I decided to opt for live rocks (lml) mixed with dry rocks. I found a small amount of LR for cheap from another aquarist in the area, so I picked up those for cycling faster/better. Finally I got some macros, a red one which I suppose its a kind of Halymenia spp. and a Caulerpa spp mix. For lighting I had the white light from Fluval, which is great for macros.
This is how the tank looked for the next few weeks.

Some diatoms started to appear despite the RODI. Everything as expected.

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09/2021
After few weeks diatoms started to disappear as they arrived, but I had another surprise. I found out there was an Aiptasia on one of my live rocks. I tryied to kill it with some superglue but instead of killing it I somehow managed to make it spread so I decided to take the rock out and keep only the 2 left.
Caulerpas took off spectacularly. I found out it was a mix of C. brachypus and C. taxifolia (bad news).

I left for holidays 2 weeks and when I came back I had 2 (good, this time) surprises: my dry rocks (ARKA rocks) arrived and my macros where exploding!
I decided to go for a "dual" aquascape. Left side of the tank will be rockwork and reef habitat, right side of the tank will be macroalgae.
Also, from my trip in the mediterranean I brought some macroalgae I found stranded on the beach. Found out later once I was back at home that some microscopic snails and a small hermit where hidden within Diversity started to increase every day.

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10/2021
Coming soon

 

[Peace River]

Congratulations on the reefing adventure and the academic adventure!!! Both are wonderful places to explore and learn!

 

[KonradTO]

Hi everyone! It took some time in the end but I think I can finally manage to upload some following updates regarding the tank. I will try to "feed" the thread in the next weeks.

10/2021

Macroalgae and microalgae started to really take over and also dry rocks started to look more "natural" . Also you can see on the left side of the cabinet that I did some experiments with nannochloropsis (unfortunately I gave up in the end for recurring contaminations).

-The first important difference you can notice is that the original lid from the fluval flex was changed with an acrylic lid. Reason being that I wanted to use supplementary lighting instead of the fluval light only.

- The second novelty is that at that point I added my first inhabitants: A YWG and a beautiful tiger pistol shrimp.
Unfortunately the pistol shrimp died few days after the introduction for some reason.
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11/2021

In this period of time I had applied some drastic changes to the system.
1) As you can see, cyano started to spread on the rocks (and after on the sand). For fighting it I added a jebao wavemaker (SL20) and cut my nutrient input & used GFO.
2) I added a viparspectra light over the rocks. The tank started to look like a proper marine tank

A lot of new toys for me but the downside was that these sudden changes, especially the sudden cut in nutrients, fueled a dinoflagellate (Ostreopsis sp.) outbreak.

This was my first (unfortunately not the last) contact with dinos. After some researching and kind support from the R2R community I solved the problem, mainly with UV, nutrient increase and 3-days blackout.
You find the full thread here
You can see the pictures of the macros before and after the treatment: