My RSM 250 (and what it started as)

[Jigity_jigity_joe]

Well alright, I’m finally going to try and document my reef keeping adventures. This thread will be pretty picture heavy in the beginning hopefully no one minds. I set up this tank on august 2021. It started with a nuvo 10 I set up in 2017. My wife (girlfriend at the time) encouraged me to get back into the hobby and plus I was finally making some real money and able to slightly invest in some solid equipment which was a nice change from my past set ups. I set it up slow and took my time. I had a lot of success with that tank.

I was feeling pretty good about what I had going, simple water changes, a home made chaeto reactor, and the occasional addition of some esv 2 part, and reef roids and brine shrimpkept everything trucking along quite well. by the last picture the tank had been set up 2 years and things were getting crowded. I was surfing Craigslist and found a nuvo 20 for $100 locally, score! I transferred the 10 into it and added some more rock, and got ready to buy more goodies, that started July 2019.

The final picture I took of the 10

The 20

I really had a great time with the 20, things kept going the right way and I was loving it. Still doing things the same way I did when I had the 10.

Then as things do from time to time, it went south, I was chasing numbers and going against my instincts thinking things could be better and it didn’t work out, ultimately the tank was very sad, and I ended up taking everything that was alive still and setting up the 10 again with the survivors, I don’t have many pictures of that tank, I was pretty discouraged almost to the point of selling it but I couldn’t let go. The 20 went back into the 10 sometime around June 2021.

Then there I was, 2 months later in August surfing Craigslist one day and I stumble up a Red Sea Max 250, for $200 with all the return pumps and I talked him into selling me it with the aquatic life 4 bulb t5 fixture for another $100.

Im gonna post just this for now because I’m doing this on my phone and don’t want to lose my progress, to be continued..

 

[Jigity_jigity_joe]

And for some reason it keeps posting all those extra pictures at the end and I keep trying to edit and delete them but it’s not working so I don’t know what to do about that, sorry everyone haha

 

[Jigity_jigity_joe]

After deep cleaning the 250 and filling it with fresh rodi and mixing the salt in the tank I then put live sandsome more rock and transferred the 10 into it. This is a moment I look back on and wish I would have taken it a little slower, and I had not also realized it would only be another 4 months until we sold our townhouse and bought our current house and I’d have to move the tank an hour north. Anyways, I pushed the tank through new tank syndrome and it was looking pretty good.

I did adjust the scape a few times before the move.

And then my wife broke down the 20 that she had set up in our room as an anemone tank and I adopted her rock and fish and 2 rock flower anemones

And then it was moved

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Tank looks great so far!!

 

[Jigity_jigity_joe]

The tank was moved on march of 2022. My brother and I emptied the tank, put everything in five gallon buckets, loaded the tank in the back of my Subaru and tied the stand to the roof and off we went.
My last photo of the tank before the move:

And the first photo of the tank in its new home

Then came the dark period. I was driving 3 hours a day to commute for work, did not have a lot of spare time on my hands, between that, the little ones, and the house. That on top of the shake up of things moving, discovering about a month ago that my calibration water for my refractometer was setting me closer to 40ppt instead of 35, and I also believe with my new light set up since I could not hang it from the ceiling it was mounted too close, things were going very poorly and I was not sure what I was doing wrong. I do not have many pictures of the tank during that stage and I was mostly just keeping the ATO full and feeding the fish.