Pico Reef Tank Build Thread - Lifegard 3.8

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kiswanson

kiswanson

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Ready for sand, rocks and water! Notice I also put a small Levoit HEPA filter to ensure there is never an issue with smells from the tank.
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Picked up a marine pure ball and rubble/branch rock that has been cycled in a system fed with ammonium and kept separate from fish and coral, so hopefully pest free and able to help establish bio diversity in the tank quickly. This is from our LFS Aquatics Unlimited. The rock also looks good t right away.
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It’s always a question how much these bacterial additives help, but for my Red Sea e170 Max my tank really stabilized and nutrients were controlled with the combination of NoPox dosing, regular PNS probio denitrifying bacteria addition, and oceanmagik phytoplankton daily dosing. I’m not sure if all of that is needed, but my tank looks really good with that combo and I don’t have nitrates problems despite having a pretty heavily stocked tank. I also have added copepods from algae barn, but that was more to establish a population for my mandarin dragonet.
 
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Weasel1960

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Would Like to talk to you about your light at some point. Was going to put 3 of those on a 4 foot tank along with 4 T-5 bulbs. Will be curious to see what your spread and par will be.
 
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Would Like to talk to you about your light at some point. Was going to put 3 of those on a 4 foot tank along with 4 T-5 bulbs. Will be curious to see what your spread and par will be.
I won’t be measuring par in this little tank. I don’t think I would use A80s for a larger tank. I would think either A360x’s or Ap9x’s
 

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Now that I’m looking at it, I guess cutting the green part would let me take out the basket without removing the Lifegard inlet strainer, so I may consider doing that.
#intank
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For me, the top arch of the media basket was getting snagged on the Lifegard strainer. The basket wasn't reaching all the way down.

If you can cut the green part, it might be less work and work out much better.
 

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A nice bucket, CaribSea Fiji pink “live” sand, a 5 gallon jug of salt water from the local fish store, filter floss, and a 1 gallon jug of RODI water for dealing with evaporation
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If I could do it over, I might've just rinsed the Fiji Pink until the water was crystal clear. I stir up a lot of dust whenever I syphon the sand during regular maintenance.

However, I didn't really go through a bad "ugly phase", so maybe the live sand did help.
 
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