Waterbox 20 Cube AIO - SPS Dominant; Auto Water Changes

firedancer414 · Sep 28, 2022

Things are good here -
Diatoms went away super fast (a week?) and tank looks clean again. Waiting for next round - cyano? Algae? Cycle has been super easy so far. Added a diamond watchman goby to sift the sand and a Midas blenny, and a electric blue hermit. No snails yet. So up to 7 fish. Feeding 3 times a day until the fish are full and adding 5 mL of phyto per day.

Nitrates have been very manageable, even without auto water changes or a skimmer. With filter sock rinsed twice a week have been doing +0.2 PPM / day. Have only done that one 60% water change in the month and a half of having the tank. The calculator says that I just need to change 0.5 gallons a day which would be awesome.

Have been following BRS’s series with Vic from WWC- going to target 10 ppm nitrates and 0.08 ppm phosphates.

Probably another month and a half until corals, hoping to see some coralline algae first.

Set up the auto water changes tonight also. Excited for it !

Looking stable

Nitrates going up 0.2ppm/day now.

Add, waste, and ATO tubing.

Auto water changes ready to go! Trying 0.5 gallons / day, with 37 gallons mixed - that would be awesome if I can get away with mixing water every 2 months.

firedancer414 · Sep 28, 2022

Video of the water changes

Auto water changes set up, feeding time !

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firedancer414 · Oct 1, 2022

Tank was looking cute might delete later

Happy tank

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About a month and a half after cycling and starting to think about tester softies. Looking at Jason Fox, Cherry Corals, and WWC for a few zoas and maybe ricordia. I want to go aquacultured only and from a few trusted vendors that I know won’t get pests into the system.

I’m a little worried about the pH of the system and needs to figure something out. It’s been sitting between 7.6-7.7. Options are 1) run kalk in the ATO (but the alk demand is 0 right now), 2) add a small algae reactor, 3) add a small skimmer sucking air from the window/outside behind the tank. I am hopeful that 1) will work to keep things really simple for the tank.

firedancer414 · Oct 2, 2022

Went on a road trip checking out some of the best LFSs in my area. Found one I really liked in Mesa, AZ - azreefmonster- lots of great aquaculture - tons of Jason Fox morphs. Left with an Utter Chaos and orange / green ricordia frag. Will hold off on stony for a while but I think I should be ready to fill up the softie islands.

First corals

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Petcrazyson · Oct 3, 2022

Following along

firedancer414 · Oct 5, 2022

Exciting day - filled out the rest of the zoa islands today

Zoas coming in hot !

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Utter chaos has been doing great, so put in an order to my favorite coral vendor these days Cherry Corals

From left to right

Utter Chaos from LFS
King Midas
CC Ultimate AOI
CC Everbrite
Red Hornets
Pink diamond (I didn’t order this but the super nice people at Cherry added it for free - they really are the best)
Purple monsters (hard to see)
Devils Armor

I need to swap the pink diamond (probably with the purple monster) - wasn’t thinking about that it has the same skirt color as the everbrite next to it

Need to figure out best light setting for A360X and rent a PAR meter from BRS at some point. I’ve had it just on blues but usually try to match whatever recommended spectrum from radion. The tank is by a window and I need to see how that affects things too; it’s not direct sunlight but it actually has been pretty nice fill light during the day.

tank has been showing a totally reasonable amount of algae that the 2 hermits and Midas blenny have been managing. I think next time I’m at the LFS I’ll add 4 snails.

Ahh it’s so great being back in this hobby.

Brian

firedancer414 · Oct 20, 2022

Short update …

another causality - I went away on vacation and had left my lid cracked; when I came home found the diamond watchman goby carpet surfing. Will pick up another one at some point. So have 6 fish (2 clowns, Firefish, Midas blenny, cardinal, royal gramma), 2 shrimp, 2 hermits. I also added 5 cerith and 3 nassarius. Will add a few more there’s enough junk in there now to sustain them.

zoas have been doing great - it’s been less than 2 weeks and they all have new heads.

the filter sock has been east to clean I just blast with the hose outside then rinse with RO just takes a few min to do.

the tank has been having a lot of green algae on the glass. It gets a lot of natural light from being by a window. Need to measure how much that affects PAR when I’m starting to add stony corals in a month or two.

I’ve been fretting a bit about filtration and pH and decided that I should add an algae reactor. I sleep in the same room as the tank so pH goes down a ton at night. Hope that will help manage all of these issues with minimum maintain a (I’d rather remove chaeto than empty a skimmer - less gross and less frequent).

Zoa growth, algae reactor

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Dav2996 · Oct 20, 2022

firedancer414 said:
Short update …

another causality - I went away on vacation and had left my lid cracked; when I came home found the diamond watchman goby carpet surfing. Will pick up another one at some point. So have 6 fish (2 clowns, Firefish, Midas blenny, cardinal, royal gramma), 2 shrimp, 2 hermits. I also added 5 cerith and 3 nassarius. Will add a few more there’s enough junk in there now to sustain them.

zoas have been doing great - it’s been less than 2 weeks and they all have new heads.

the filter sock has been east to clean I just blast with the hose outside then rinse with RO just takes a few min to do.

the tank has been having a lot of green algae on the glass. It gets a lot of natural light from being by a window. Need to measure how much that affects PAR when I’m starting to add stony corals in a month or two.

I’ve been fretting a bit about filtration and pH and decided that I should add an algae reactor. I sleep in the same room as the tank so pH goes down a ton at night. Hope that will help manage all of these issues with minimum maintain a (I’d rather remove chaeto than empty a skimmer - less gross and less frequent).

Zoa growth, algae reactor

youtube.com

I have a 20 gallon tank and had a lot of PH issues. Here is what worked for me.
1. Kalkwasser made largest impact for me about 0.3 difference.
2. Skimmer
3. Aim all power heads up to create more surface agitation
4. Cooling fans over water which causes a ton of evaporation.
5. Open windows.

I have a Aquamax 1.5 hobb skimmer it works amazing on my nuvo 20 gallon. I tried tunze 9001 but it dumped skimmate in the tank all the time. It also needed specific water level. Aquamax 1.5 vastly superior but I think it could be overkill for you tank right now. It dropped my nitrates from 25 to 10 in 3 days. I never do water changes I just got the skimmer and it doesn’t flood my tank when I turn it off.

Dav2996 · Oct 20, 2022

firedancer414 said:
Short update …

another causality - I went away on vacation and had left my lid cracked; when I came home found the diamond watchman goby carpet surfing. Will pick up another one at some point. So have 6 fish (2 clowns, Firefish, Midas blenny, cardinal, royal gramma), 2 shrimp, 2 hermits. I also added 5 cerith and 3 nassarius. Will add a few more there’s enough junk in there now to sustain them.

zoas have been doing great - it’s been less than 2 weeks and they all have new heads.

the filter sock has been east to clean I just blast with the hose outside then rinse with RO just takes a few min to do.

the tank has been having a lot of green algae on the glass. It gets a lot of natural light from being by a window. Need to measure how much that affects PAR when I’m starting to add stony corals in a month or two.

I’ve been fretting a bit about filtration and pH and decided that I should add an algae reactor. I sleep in the same room as the tank so pH goes down a ton at night. Hope that will help manage all of these issues with minimum maintain a (I’d rather remove chaeto than empty a skimmer - less gross and less frequent).

Zoa growth, algae reactor

youtube.com

I have a 20 gallon tank and had a lot of PH issues. Here is what worked for me.
1. Kalkwasser made largest impact for me about 0.3 difference.
2. Skimmer
3. Aim all power heads up to create more surface agitation
4. Cooling fans over water which causes a ton of evaporation.
5. Open windows.

I have a Aquamax 1.5 hobb skimmer it works amazing on my nuvo 20 gallon. I tried tunze 9001 but it dumped skimmate in the tank all the time. It also needed specific water level. Aquamax 1.5 vastly superior but I think it could be overkill for you tank right now. It dropped my nitrates from 25 to 10 in 3 days. I never do water changes I just got the skimmer and it doesn’t flood my tank when I turn it off.

firedancer414 said:
Short update …

another causality - I went away on vacation and had left my lid cracked; when I came home found the diamond watchman goby carpet surfing. Will pick up another one at some point. So have 6 fish (2 clowns, Firefish, Midas blenny, cardinal, royal gramma), 2 shrimp, 2 hermits. I also added 5 cerith and 3 nassarius. Will add a few more there’s enough junk in there now to sustain them.

zoas have been doing great - it’s been less than 2 weeks and they all have new heads.

the filter sock has been east to clean I just blast with the hose outside then rinse with RO just takes a few min to do.

the tank has been having a lot of green algae on the glass. It gets a lot of natural light from being by a window. Need to measure how much that affects PAR when I’m starting to add stony corals in a month or two.

I’ve been fretting a bit about filtration and pH and decided that I should add an algae reactor. I sleep in the same room as the tank so pH goes down a ton at night. Hope that will help manage all of these issues with minimum maintain a (I’d rather remove chaeto than empty a skimmer - less gross and less frequent).

Zoa growth, algae reactor

youtube.com

CO2 scrubber made about .15 difference on my current skimmer.

firedancer414 · Oct 20, 2022

This is soooo helpful - thank you for taking the time to share. I was looking for pH numbers like these, awesome !

I like the algae reactor/skimmer/Kalk solutions because it solves multiple problems at once (nutrient export/dosing) while keeping the tank relatively simple.

I hope when I have stony corals that I'll be able to start dosing Kalk both to maintain KH/Ca but also for the pH benefit, that's a pretty wild number.

Petcrazyson · Oct 20, 2022

Isn’t 6 fish a little much for that size tank? Just IMO. If it’s working out though I’m very happy to see you success.

firedancer414 · Oct 20, 2022

Petcrazyson said:
Isn’t 6 fish a little much for that size tank? Just IMO. If it’s working out though I’m very happy to see you success.

Honestly, I'm not sure. I'm monitoring nutrient export (NO3/PO4) pretty closely and think that I'll be able to manage it, especially with the algae reactor/aggressive water changes (I'm doing 20% weekly right now). The harder part for me to estimate is the aggression/stress - I've been feeding a ton (3x/day) which hopefully manages the aggression. Worst case, I need to take one of the fish back to the store for credit, we'll see.

Brian

firedancer414 · Oct 23, 2022

OK, lots of moving pieces for me.

I had another "left the top open a crack after feeding" causality - the midas blenny jumped too. Really kicking myself.

The algae reactor/refugium has been messing with the water levels/noise of the tank. I turned on the ATO and forgot about it in a meeting until the tank was overflowing. I think maybe a quart of water ended up on the floor and made a huge mess. Thankfully no catastrophic damage but learned another lesson. It crashed the salinity of the tank from 35 -> 31 on Friday afternoon and I've been watching it slowly creep up (turned the ATO off and topping off with fresh salt water), it's back to 33.3 on Sunday afternoon. The red hornet zoas shrunk a bit but seem to be recovering, the rest look about the same as before.

In other algae reactor news, I've been running it 24/7 so far and the chaeto (got a softball from AlgaeBarn) is doing great. The first time I had a refugium I had an H380 that was untunable and it was very difficult to not bake the chaeto/deal with temp issues. The pH is in a much better place - it's still increasing but instead of going between 7.7-7.8 in a cycle, it's now between 7.9-8.0 in a cycle, so looks like +0.2 to pH so far.

From a nutrients perspective - running into the same issue of it works too dang well again lol. Nitrate went from 12 on Wednesday to 3 on Sunday (4 days) so I'm now doing -2.25 ppm Nitrate per day. So will experiment with not rinsing the filter sock and feeding more. I really like the heavy in/heavy out philosophy for nutrients that WWC/BRS recommend. If I get to 0 nutrients will start turning down the refugium during the day, although I will miss the pH benefit.

Brian

Petcrazyson · Oct 24, 2022

At least you remembered during the meeting and not after it. You got very lucky with the salinity. Happy the equipment is working for you, especially the algae reactor.