Rover
Active Member
I started this tank just under 1 year ago with my girlfriend, I believe its one year anniversary is coming up early November! This is a thread to document where I started to where I am, as well as to detail out some of the issues I ran into and some of the hard lessons I learned along the way.
My girlfriend loves the tank and my obsession with it, but her interest extends to her 'babies' and picking corals.
Not so much the maintenance construction.
October 14th, 2018 (Current)
Livestock:
1 x Blue Eyed Kole Tang
1 x LaMarcks Angelfish
1 x Melanus Wrasse
1 x Chinstrap Jawfish
1 x Sleeper Banded Goby
1 x Rainsford Goby
1 x Yellow Clown Goby
1 x Green Clown Goby
2 x Ocellaris Clownfish
5 x Blue/Green Chromis
November 13th, 2017 (Day 1)
You can see the plans for my rockwork didn't last That will be explained in the story!
I found a fairly amazing deal on a 75 gallon aquarium, stand, and sump. Which is funny, because originally the only thing I was looking for was actually a skimmer... and someone was getting out of the hobby... and long story short... it was too good a price to say no.
The below pictures are as I found it:
There was a pile of stuff hidden in this! And I got all of it for $500. The gentleman that sold it to me I think knew I'd be a good home for it, and he said he wanted to see it get used again. The light alone is worth more then twice what I paid for the entire setup!
This is after I moved the haul home to inventory it.
To list what I kept out of this:
- 75 Gallon Aquarium, drilled for two pipes.
- Vertex Skimmer
- BRS Dual Reactor
- 2 Ecotech MP10Ws
- Jebao DCS1000 Return Pump
- MaxxSpect Razr 300W (The biggest one)
- A few bags of salt, a crapton of carbon, kalkwasser, half of an ATO, nopox, nets, buckets, piping, pretty much the entirety of a broken down setup, I just needed to sort and use what I could.
The only thing I flat out noped on was his 50 gallon sump. It was.... gross. Not badly built, but gross as in half an inch of caked in death and decay, and I just wanted nothing to do with it. Plus I wanted a smaller one, and had an idea in mind... I saw a sale on one on reefsupplies.ca, and snatched it up.
The work that I did getting started was to paint the stand, and paint the back of the tank. (The stand was painted white by me, in the above shot. We painted it before bringing it home!)
Beautifully chilly Canadian day to be out painting, but it worked. I rented a home depot cube van to load it up and carry it all home, because it sure wasn't fitting in my car and I don't have a truck. By the way, did I mention I'm on a second floor apartment...? Whee.
Next step was to get it all on the stand where I wanted, and do the plumbing... Oh the plumbing... ;Rage I have never plumbed before.
I got that Eshopps sump, and put everything together. I'm not going to put up the numerous painful pictures of my efforts at plumbing. Short version of a long story that took me the better part of a week, and draining and emptying the tank three times...
I have tiny little arms, but weak little hands. I can't turn a bulkhead fingertight enough to 'work', in the space I had under the tank. So eventually after failing twice and developing leaks, I bought a saw and gashed a massive hole in the bottom of the stand-top so I could fit an oil-pan tool around the bulkheads... Then found out I didn't cut it big enough, took the tank down again, and recut it wider! I didn't crank on them; just enough to get them snug. I read so many threads to fix leaking bulkheads that had people saying 'Just finger tight!' and I'm sitting there twisting my little fingers off and I just couldn't. So I used a tool. It hasn't leaked since! No broken glass either, and I treat the bulkheads and their hanging PVC pipes like fine china.
Then it was on to the preparations to get wet!... Longterm wet, not just leak tests.
First was a simple one. I bought a junction box that was waterproof, a GFCI outlet, and assembled myself a cable long enough to reach where I needed it to reach, and mounted that under my tank. Every single thing thats electronic and in the tank/sump area is run through a powerbar on this.
(Note: This was taken before I cut that hole even wider...)
And then it was time for the rest! I tried to keep things organized, but man it did not work out long term. I've also moved things around since this was taken, but this is where it started. Tank has water and sand in it at this point, but its not even close to full. Sump is still dry.
And then it was all set up! This is the same picture as above, but just for timelines sake...
I neglected to mention what I did with the rock. A local reef store very kindly offered to acid wash the rock for me, and then cured it in a brute garbage can for about two weeks. The rocks in there you see that are green are live rock that I got to help me cycle.
And then I went out and did the dumb thing! Whats the dumb thing? Started throwing stuff in right away because its not like every single place I looked for information said 'don't do that'. ;Shifty
The planned purchase was a pair of ocellaris and a yellow clown goby. We also got a tailspot blenny. Please note that to the best of my knowledge, the cycle was 'done' at this point. I never saw an ammonia spike, but nitrates were going up and there was never any nitrite. I did not buy fish to cycle!
I also got an elegance coral, duncans coral, and some zoanthids. This is the most beautiful that elegance has ever looked. It is still with me almost a year later, but about half the size! However its going strong... it hasn't shrunk any more then that, and has even started to grow.
During this period in my first 3-4 months I tried to be careful not to rush (any more then I was). Here are some photos of fish that did not make it...
Beautiful sailfin blenny we named grampa. He just never decided to eat and withered away. I blame us putting him in without abundant macro-algae, and trying to feed him to keep him alive.
The yellow boi, as my darling called him. She loved this little splash of sunshine. He unfortunately succumbed to Ich... The Cardinal I believe was the one that brought it in. The Cardinal never ate, and withered away. We did purchase live pods in bottles to encourage him, but we bought him the same day he arrived at the store. I learned a lesson there.
Legitly cried when I lost the below. I'll finish that story up later. This fish was our favorite, personality wise and amusement. We nicknamed him windsock. He mostly stayed in that cave you see behind him... and he survived the ich treatment I'll describe below.
This isn't a fish, or dead, but I just found it and its the most gorgeous shot of the elegance I have.
I didn't quarantine because of my tiny apartment: I trusted that buying all my stuff at the same place meant I'd be safe. Guess what? WRONGZO! Ich for me. This came about probably in my 7th month or so...? June I think. We had bought many more fish since then!
We lost the yellow clown goby, presumably the cardinal, and then 3 of the 4 Green Clown Gobies we had bought. It wasn't until I saw it on my tang that I realized what it /was/, and realized I had to treat it.
I kicked myself something fierce, and read until my brain steamed. How to treat... Methods... to live with it... Eventually I decided I couldn't live with myself if I knew they were being preyed on by what essentially are evil burrowing bedbug-ticks, so I got a setup to quarantine in, and went through the painful process of tearing apart the tank, ripping out all the corals and rocks and laying them out in totes, and catching those ******* fish.
I got all of them... At this point it was:
- One Blue-eye Kole Tang
- Two Ocellaris (Originals!)
- One Green Clown Goby
- Chinstrap Jawfish (He lived in a PVC cave)
- LaMarck Angelfish
- Engineer Goby
- Probably something I'm missing
The only one I missed? Yellow Coris Wrasse. Oh our stupid banana. This fish drove me up the wall to catch. Guess what happens when you rip everything out of a tank with a big sandy bottom? It looks like a mud puddle. And guess what happens when he dives into the sand that I can't see cause mudpuddle? ... The little **** gets left behind.
So I know I couldnt LEAVE him behind. I tried bottle trapping and fish trapping and other things over the course of three days. It was killing me knowing he was keeping me from starting the cycle on the other fish that were in QT, plus I put everything back in the tank already. So here is how I finally caught him. TERRIFY HIM.
No really, I scared him into the sand then began my elaborate ploy.
Once he is in the sand, lay down the netting I bought to make a screen top, and weigh it down so he can't get through it. Then start lifting stuff out of the tank in the area he went down in. For this to work, I had to scare him to the right side of the tank.
At this point, he is somewhere just to the right of the rock you see in the sand right at the front of the tank. I had watched him dive in, then careeefully eased the rest out of the way. Being careful not to crush my incredibly curious cleaner shrimp, or any corals.
Then I bottle trapped him. The angry way.
See most people use a bottle trap by putting it in the tank like the green one I had, and putting food in it, and letting the fish go in. This succeeded in trapping LITERALLY EVERY HERMIT CRAB I HAVE, but it wasn't getting the fish. So I made a second one, and then used it by just heaving that bad boy down into the sand roughly on top of the coris, and agitating the hell out of it until it fires up into the bottle.
SUCCESS
I caught the stupid banana.
At this point, I was endeared to that fish. Which is why it sucked when they died during QT... The only fish to die during QT. I treated with copper, and while I know Wrasse' are susceptible to it I was hoping that by going very slow adding the copper he would be okay. He was fine for the first week or so, but then just stopped eating got lethargic and never recovered. Sigh I always kick myself when I lose any fish...
I realize just now I never took any pictures of the QT tank. Well, it worked. We did all of our fish, kept the tank fallow for a little over 80 days, and moved them back. The only casualty was the yellow coris wrasse, and the rest made it. We then went out and bought the 'new' fish, put them /immediately/ into quarantine, and kept them there for a full month. The first two weeks of treating with copper, the next two weeks of observing them to be sure they were okay, and I didn't see anything that made me leery.
This was my second iteration QT. Less water, more airhose, and a sandbox for the new wrasse!
All of the new ones made it through alright. We QT'd a Melanus Wrasse and he quite liked his sandbed to dive into and hide. After the QT was finished, we tossed it out.
We only added the last of the fish to the tank this month, and took down the QT.
It feels so nice to be back to just one tank, without running 2-3 support tanks! Adding all the new fun Chromis to the big tank has REALLY seen the energy of the system take off!
.... And then we lost our engineer goby. It broke my heart. One day he was windsocking around out of his cave like he always did. He shared his cave with our Tang, the pair of them would peek out and swim around together and never bothered each other. I looked over from my gaming station and saw him, and kept playing. An hour later I got up to to go bed and took my cursory nighttime viewing of the tank before I bunked down for the night, and realized to my dismay he was /tore up/. He was curled up around himself at the bottom of his cave, bloody and broken, and the tang was pecking him. I'd never seen the tang do it, and I had no idea what could have possibly caused the injuries I had. I have a picture, but I won't post it.
Short version is... when I put my rockwork back in, I thought I took great care to position my rocks on the bottom glass, even with sand. I know Engineer Gobies burrow. But after looking at pictures from before and comparing them to that night, I realized the rock his cave was on shifted. He must have gotten crushed, and well... There was nothing I could do. I caught him out with my bare hand, and he barely tried to swim away. He got put in a 5 gallon bucket with an airstone, heater, and something to hide in. My hopes got buoyed when he was swimming around a half hour later, looking less lethargic. Unfortunately, come morning he had passed away. We got that fish when he was smaller then my pinky finger, and he was almost the size of a jumbo hotdog when he died. That hurt, cause this was after I thought I had taken precautions, on something I knew better about, almost 10 months after starting. Argh.
On the plus side... Everything is doing okay now. The Chromis haven't gone after each other yet like I've heard they can, and they are even getting along fairly okay with the clownfish, as they seem to be sharing the same part of the water column.
Anyone that saw my opening thread introduction has seen this video, but for those that haven't here you go!
And to finish... Some fun random photos of the last year of my reefing adventure...
Tis my Nori, and you can't have it! Greedy Emerald Crab.
The pretty Melanus Wrasse!
Our green Clown Goby. My girlfriends current favorite fish. He knows what color he is! He hides on any green coral, or the green hair algae... of which... there is a lot.
My girlfriend loves the tank and my obsession with it, but her interest extends to her 'babies' and picking corals.
Not so much the maintenance construction.October 14th, 2018 (Current)
Livestock:
1 x Blue Eyed Kole Tang
1 x LaMarcks Angelfish
1 x Melanus Wrasse
1 x Chinstrap Jawfish
1 x Sleeper Banded Goby
1 x Rainsford Goby
1 x Yellow Clown Goby
1 x Green Clown Goby
2 x Ocellaris Clownfish
5 x Blue/Green Chromis
November 13th, 2017 (Day 1)
You can see the plans for my rockwork didn't last
That will be explained in the story!I found a fairly amazing deal on a 75 gallon aquarium, stand, and sump. Which is funny, because originally the only thing I was looking for was actually a skimmer... and someone was getting out of the hobby... and long story short... it was too good a price to say no.
The below pictures are as I found it:
There was a pile of stuff hidden in this! And I got all of it for $500. The gentleman that sold it to me I think knew I'd be a good home for it, and he said he wanted to see it get used again. The light alone is worth more then twice what I paid for the entire setup!
This is after I moved the haul home to inventory it.
To list what I kept out of this:
- 75 Gallon Aquarium, drilled for two pipes.
- Vertex Skimmer
- BRS Dual Reactor
- 2 Ecotech MP10Ws
- Jebao DCS1000 Return Pump
- MaxxSpect Razr 300W (The biggest one)
- A few bags of salt, a crapton of carbon, kalkwasser, half of an ATO, nopox, nets, buckets, piping, pretty much the entirety of a broken down setup, I just needed to sort and use what I could.
The only thing I flat out noped on was his 50 gallon sump. It was.... gross. Not badly built, but gross as in half an inch of caked in death and decay, and I just wanted nothing to do with it. Plus I wanted a smaller one, and had an idea in mind... I saw a sale on one on reefsupplies.ca, and snatched it up.
The work that I did getting started was to paint the stand, and paint the back of the tank. (The stand was painted white by me, in the above shot. We painted it before bringing it home!)
Beautifully chilly Canadian day to be out painting, but it worked. I rented a home depot cube van to load it up and carry it all home, because it sure wasn't fitting in my car and I don't have a truck. By the way, did I mention I'm on a second floor apartment...? Whee.
Next step was to get it all on the stand where I wanted, and do the plumbing... Oh the plumbing... ;Rage I have never plumbed before.
I got that Eshopps sump, and put everything together. I'm not going to put up the numerous painful pictures of my efforts at plumbing. Short version of a long story that took me the better part of a week, and draining and emptying the tank three times...
I have tiny little arms, but weak little hands. I can't turn a bulkhead fingertight enough to 'work', in the space I had under the tank. So eventually after failing twice and developing leaks, I bought a saw and gashed a massive hole in the bottom of the stand-top so I could fit an oil-pan tool around the bulkheads... Then found out I didn't cut it big enough, took the tank down again, and recut it wider! I didn't crank on them; just enough to get them snug. I read so many threads to fix leaking bulkheads that had people saying 'Just finger tight!' and I'm sitting there twisting my little fingers off and I just couldn't.
So I used a tool. It hasn't leaked since! No broken glass either, and I treat the bulkheads and their hanging PVC pipes like fine china. Then it was on to the preparations to get wet!... Longterm wet, not just leak tests.
First was a simple one. I bought a junction box that was waterproof, a GFCI outlet, and assembled myself a cable long enough to reach where I needed it to reach, and mounted that under my tank. Every single thing thats electronic and in the tank/sump area is run through a powerbar on this.
(Note: This was taken before I cut that hole even wider...)
And then it was time for the rest! I tried to keep things organized, but man it did not work out long term. I've also moved things around since this was taken, but this is where it started.
Tank has water and sand in it at this point, but its not even close to full. Sump is still dry.
And then it was all set up! This is the same picture as above, but just for timelines sake...
I neglected to mention what I did with the rock. A local reef store very kindly offered to acid wash the rock for me, and then cured it in a brute garbage can for about two weeks. The rocks in there you see that are green are live rock that I got to help me cycle.
And then I went out and did the dumb thing! Whats the dumb thing? Started throwing stuff in right away because its not like every single place I looked for information said 'don't do that'. ;Shifty
The planned purchase was a pair of ocellaris and a yellow clown goby. We also got a tailspot blenny. Please note that to the best of my knowledge, the cycle was 'done' at this point. I never saw an ammonia spike, but nitrates were going up and there was never any nitrite. I did not buy fish to cycle!
I also got an elegance coral, duncans coral, and some zoanthids. This is the most beautiful that elegance has ever looked. It is still with me almost a year later, but about half the size! However its going strong... it hasn't shrunk any more then that, and has even started to grow.
During this period in my first 3-4 months I tried to be careful not to rush (any more then I was). Here are some photos of fish that did not make it...
Beautiful sailfin blenny we named grampa. He just never decided to eat and withered away. I blame us putting him in without abundant macro-algae, and trying to feed him to keep him alive.
The yellow boi, as my darling called him. She loved this little splash of sunshine. He unfortunately succumbed to Ich... The Cardinal I believe was the one that brought it in. The Cardinal never ate, and withered away. We did purchase live pods in bottles to encourage him, but we bought him the same day he arrived at the store. I learned a lesson there.
Legitly cried when I lost the below. I'll finish that story up later. This fish was our favorite, personality wise and amusement. We nicknamed him windsock. He mostly stayed in that cave you see behind him... and he survived the ich treatment I'll describe below.
This isn't a fish, or dead, but I just found it and its the most gorgeous shot of the elegance I have.
I didn't quarantine because of my tiny apartment: I trusted that buying all my stuff at the same place meant I'd be safe. Guess what? WRONGZO! Ich for me. This came about probably in my 7th month or so...? June I think. We had bought many more fish since then!
We lost the yellow clown goby, presumably the cardinal, and then 3 of the 4 Green Clown Gobies we had bought. It wasn't until I saw it on my tang that I realized what it /was/, and realized I had to treat it.
I kicked myself something fierce, and read until my brain steamed. How to treat... Methods... to live with it... Eventually I decided I couldn't live with myself if I knew they were being preyed on by what essentially are evil burrowing bedbug-ticks, so I got a setup to quarantine in, and went through the painful process of tearing apart the tank, ripping out all the corals and rocks and laying them out in totes, and catching those ******* fish.
I got all of them... At this point it was:
- One Blue-eye Kole Tang
- Two Ocellaris (Originals!)
- One Green Clown Goby
- Chinstrap Jawfish (He lived in a PVC cave)
- LaMarck Angelfish
- Engineer Goby
- Probably something I'm missing
The only one I missed? Yellow Coris Wrasse. Oh our stupid banana. This fish drove me up the wall to catch. Guess what happens when you rip everything out of a tank with a big sandy bottom? It looks like a mud puddle. And guess what happens when he dives into the sand that I can't see cause mudpuddle? ... The little **** gets left behind.
So I know I couldnt LEAVE him behind. I tried bottle trapping and fish trapping and other things over the course of three days. It was killing me knowing he was keeping me from starting the cycle on the other fish that were in QT, plus I put everything back in the tank already. So here is how I finally caught him. TERRIFY HIM.
No really, I scared him into the sand then began my elaborate ploy.
Once he is in the sand, lay down the netting I bought to make a screen top, and weigh it down so he can't get through it. Then start lifting stuff out of the tank in the area he went down in. For this to work, I had to scare him to the right side of the tank.
At this point, he is somewhere just to the right of the rock you see in the sand right at the front of the tank. I had watched him dive in, then careeefully eased the rest out of the way. Being careful not to crush my incredibly curious cleaner shrimp, or any corals.
Then I bottle trapped him. The angry way.
See most people use a bottle trap by putting it in the tank like the green one I had, and putting food in it, and letting the fish go in. This succeeded in trapping LITERALLY EVERY HERMIT CRAB I HAVE, but it wasn't getting the fish. So I made a second one, and then used it by just heaving that bad boy down into the sand roughly on top of the coris, and agitating the hell out of it until it fires up into the bottle.
SUCCESS
I caught the stupid banana.
At this point, I was endeared to that fish. Which is why it sucked when they died during QT... The only fish to die during QT. I treated with copper, and while I know Wrasse' are susceptible to it I was hoping that by going very slow adding the copper he would be okay. He was fine for the first week or so, but then just stopped eating got lethargic and never recovered. Sigh
I always kick myself when I lose any fish... I realize just now I never took any pictures of the QT tank. Well, it worked. We did all of our fish, kept the tank fallow for a little over 80 days, and moved them back. The only casualty was the yellow coris wrasse, and the rest made it. We then went out and bought the 'new' fish, put them /immediately/ into quarantine, and kept them there for a full month. The first two weeks of treating with copper, the next two weeks of observing them to be sure they were okay, and I didn't see anything that made me leery.
This was my second iteration QT. Less water, more airhose, and a sandbox for the new wrasse!
All of the new ones made it through alright. We QT'd a Melanus Wrasse and he quite liked his sandbed to dive into and hide. After the QT was finished, we tossed it out.
We only added the last of the fish to the tank this month, and took down the QT.
It feels so nice to be back to just one tank, without running 2-3 support tanks! Adding all the new fun Chromis to the big tank has REALLY seen the energy of the system take off!
.... And then we lost our engineer goby. It broke my heart. One day he was windsocking around out of his cave like he always did. He shared his cave with our Tang, the pair of them would peek out and swim around together and never bothered each other. I looked over from my gaming station and saw him, and kept playing. An hour later I got up to to go bed and took my cursory nighttime viewing of the tank before I bunked down for the night, and realized to my dismay he was /tore up/. He was curled up around himself at the bottom of his cave, bloody and broken, and the tang was pecking him. I'd never seen the tang do it, and I had no idea what could have possibly caused the injuries I had. I have a picture, but I won't post it.
Short version is... when I put my rockwork back in, I thought I took great care to position my rocks on the bottom glass, even with sand. I know Engineer Gobies burrow. But after looking at pictures from before and comparing them to that night, I realized the rock his cave was on shifted. He must have gotten crushed, and well... There was nothing I could do. I caught him out with my bare hand, and he barely tried to swim away. He got put in a 5 gallon bucket with an airstone, heater, and something to hide in. My hopes got buoyed when he was swimming around a half hour later, looking less lethargic. Unfortunately, come morning he had passed away. We got that fish when he was smaller then my pinky finger, and he was almost the size of a jumbo hotdog when he died. That hurt, cause this was after I thought I had taken precautions, on something I knew better about, almost 10 months after starting. Argh.
On the plus side... Everything is doing okay now. The Chromis haven't gone after each other yet like I've heard they can, and they are even getting along fairly okay with the clownfish, as they seem to be sharing the same part of the water column.
Anyone that saw my opening thread introduction has seen this video, but for those that haven't here you go!
And to finish... Some fun random photos of the last year of my reefing adventure...
Tis my Nori, and you can't have it! Greedy Emerald Crab.
The pretty Melanus Wrasse!
Our green Clown Goby. My girlfriends current favorite fish. He knows what color he is! He hides on any green coral, or the green hair algae... of which... there is a lot.
