Kassuns Reef

Stopped home this afternoon for lunch and to let my dogs out and snapped a few pictures with my iphone. I also moved some of our power heads around to change the flow and re adjusted our protein skimmer. Sea Clone skimmers are so touchy and need constant attention.

Today while peering into our reef tank we saw our carpet anemone spitting out a large mass. So not to have the mass decompose in out tank i took out a turkey baster and sucked the mass out of the anemones mouth. To my disappointment, it was our Goby. Now that explains why our anemone hasn't been hungry. Wallace past away last night between the hours of 12am and 10 am. My he rest in piece.

The most expensive piece of your reef tank is the lighting. Depending on what you want to keep (fish only, SPS corals, LPS corals, soft corals or a full blown mixed reef tank) will depend on the lighting you purchase. I went to Marine Depot and purchased a DIY 250w metal halide bundle for roughly under $100.00. All that I had to purchase locally was a heavy gauge extension cord,a fuse box to mount the components in and a computer fan to provide air flow for cooling. Reflector's cost can add up pretty fast. I chose to buy a solar tube from Home Depot and a rivet gun. Then I downloaded a template to make my own reflectors online. After the full lighting DIY project was complete I spent roughly $160. If I was to purchase a ballast bulb and reflector, it could have run as much as $300 or more. I also supplement dusk and dawn with 2x65w antinics and created a custom DIY led moon lights that I run off of a standard 12v power supply. At this moment I have 1 250w MH. I will be adding another 250w to my reef tank in the near future.

I purchased an off brand 250w 10k metal halide which should have been a good balance of white and blue, however the off brand bulb is more like a 65k bulb which is more yellow than anything. Lesson learned,not try and save a buck when it comes to bulbs. I will be switching out the bulb with a 20k in a few weeks. This afternoon my wife and I decided to go to our favorite local reef store "underground Aquatics" where we picked up some dosing chemicals, DT's photo plankton, and a large spine sea urchin to help control our green hair algae problem. Tomorrows task will be using a dremal tool to enlarge the space between sections in or fuge to increase the water flow.

I upgraded our fuge lighting with 2 96w 27K compact florescent bulbs and set the new timer to a 10 hour on and 2 hour off period to increase our macro algae growth for filtration.

Here's a what a clean skimmer looks like. I can actually see the bubbles now. I added a container that will scifon out the collection cup so I don't have to check on it daily to empty it.

I started mixing the salt and ro/di water on Wednesday. Then I let it set up mixing for 24 hours with power heads, heaters and an air pump to oxygenate the water and stabilize the PH. I checked the salinity and it was at 1.022, so I adjusted it to 1.025 by adding some more salt. The salt I chose to go with is Reef Crystals, due to it's higher concentrations of calcium, magnesium, trace elements ect..
I mixed up roughly 30 gallons in all. The water change took about an hour or less. I have a drain pipe set up to drain the water out of my tank to the basement stationary tub. Before I used to drain it into 5 gal buckets and empty them one by one, but this works so much better and saves a lot of time.
I have a Maxi Jet 1200 that I have hooked up to a plastic hose that I place in my water mixing container ( 32 gallon brute) and pump the fresh saltwater up and into my tank. The most important thing when doing a water change is to make sure that you temperature and salinity match up, so as to not stress your fish and corals.
I usually do a 10% or 20% water change every 2 weeks. Because doing a water change is time intensive, I am going to start doing weekly 5 to 10 gallon water changes, so it's not one large volume change every 2 weeks.
This is always a good chance to clean or scrape the algae that has grown, and that the mag float wasn't able to remove. I also took the opportunity and cleaned my power heads and protein skimmer that was so dirty you couldn't see through the 1st acrylic tube.

This weekend I will be changing out my lights and their layout in my canopy, laying out the grids in my fuge with egg crate/light diffuser panel and starting up a culture of live brine shrimp to feed my tank.

-Kassun

He's not quite sure about his new tank mate. :)

Well I went on my bi- weekly visit to our local fish store. Today i bought another pepermint shrimp and a cleaner shrimp to help Franki, our Scopus Tang fight off a bacterial infection.

I Bought salt yesterday (reef crystals), and started a water change this evening at 8:00 pm and finished at 9:30 this evening. Tomorrow I will start on Aptasia removal.

Here is a picture of Frankie getting to know our new cleaner shrimp.

Here is a better picture of the sump that I purchased that I converted into an over the tank refugium. This has 2 benefits for our reef tank. It allows a safe place for pod population to grow that will feed our small fish and a separate section to grow macro algae.

I have done a lot of research and the best light cycle for a refugium is 10 on and 2 off. During the 2 hours of darkness if you have an LED light that shines directly into the return line the pods will swim towards the light, thus getting sucked down into the tank. It's a pretty slick and effective method.

Here are a few pictures. This our fish room, which is a very small closet that was converted for an in wall tank.

Well it's been a few days to let the sand settle. We are still in the process of blowing off the gunk on the rocks and will be doing a 50% water change this weekend as well as siphon off all that gunk that has built up from moving the sand around. Our camera doesn't like to take crisp pictures so here are a few pictures of the foam rock wall installed. We did a final check and all the inhabitants are accounted for.

We currently have:

1 - Diamond Goby
1- Neon Dottyback
1- Yellow Tang
1 - Blue Tang
1- Scopas Tang
2- Clown Percs
1- Brittle Starfish
5- Blue Chromis's
2- Peppermint Shrimp
1- Cleaner Shrimp
20- Blue Hermit Crabs
6- Turbo Snails

I had a brief chance to check out the tank this morning. All live stock is accounted for, except our new Scopus Tang and Peppermint shrimp. All the others were swimming around checking out the new aquascaping. Our Goby found a good cave to hide in on the far right. The rock wall turned out great and adds a lot to the look. This weekend I will start on the left hand side back wall and hopefully have it install on Sunday.

The Picture is a bit rough since I took it with my Iphone.

I'll Post some beauty shots with our digital camera tonight.

Our puppies waiting patiently as we started our install this morning

Well it's been several hours and the tank is starting to recover from it's cloudiness, hopeful in a few more hours I can resume aquascaping.

:: Foam-Rock Wall ::






Basically to construct your wall you need 7 simple items:

01. Egg crate or light diffuser panel you can find at your local Home Depot or Menard's.
02. Great Stuff Foam spray insulation "red can", foam is inert after curing.
03. Base rock
04. Zip ties in a variety of lengths
05. Epoxy Finishing Resin (z-poxy)
06. crushed coal, sand and argonite.
07. cement drill bit and drill.

It is very simple, but you will need patience. 1st decide what you want to construct. My wife and I did the right side and a section of our back wall. I measured and cut the egg crate, then zip tied it together and re checked my measurements. Then I drilled holes in the base rock and zip tied it to the egg crate. The next step was to foam around the rock work. After this was complete we let it set up over night to fully cure. Once the foam is fully cured it is inert and will not pollute your tank. We then mixed up epoxy and brushed an area at a time and sprinkle a mix of sand and crushed coral on the epoxy. The epoxy does two things. First it acts as a UV protective shield for the foam and secondly it allows you to adhere the sand to cover the foam. Once you are done with the epoxy and sand you will want to shake it off and do a few rinses. Let it dry and check to see if you missed any spots. If so just go back and do some touch up.

When we went to install it we ran into a few problems, moving the 4" sand bed was a mess and created an awfully big sand storm in the tank. We had to use a knife and nippers to adjust the height of the foam and egg crate. Once we finished, we were just able to catch the top of the egg crate under the lip of the trim on top. I used a few clamps to hold it in place and put the largest piece of Live Rock on top along with sand. Now all that is left is to wait for the sand to settle and start re aquascaping. If you have any questions, fell free to ask.

My inspiration came from a post on Reef Central. The guy did an amazing job. http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1300282

Here is the sand storm

Today my wife and I installed our 1st DIY foam/rock wall background. We have been working on our wall for the past few weeks and put the final coat of epoxy and sand on last night. Gave plenty of time to let it cure overnight and installed it this afternoon. The old addage mesure several times cut once came into play. We had to make some minor adjustments to the foam and all in all it went in pretty easy. We finished around 3 pm this afternoon and right now I am waiting for the sand storm to clear in the tank. We are hoping that none of our smaller fish swam into our carpet anemone during the sand white out. Hopefuly the sand storm will clear up by bed time so I can arrange some rock.

Our 75 has been up and running now for approximately a year. I added an over the tank wet dry filter to a sump last week. I chose to position the sump above my tank due to the limited space in my closet area/fish room. The plumbing was pretty straight forward. With the addition of a sump I was able to remove my HOB refugium and protien skimmer, giving my display tank a cleaner look. My new sump/refugium holds approximately 15 gallons of water and is fed by a Maxi Jet 1200 with a gravity feed back into the display tank. Inside the sump I have 2 different sections. The 1st section has a few different types of macro algae; Cheato, Caulerpa, Mangroves and cultivates a pod population. It also house my protien skimmer. The second section has a few pieces of Live rock, corals, a 2 inch live sand bed and a phosphate sponge.

Here is our 75 gallon reef after an upgrade from a leaky 65 gal tank. Our 65 gallon developed a small leak in the front bottom along the trim. Well my misfortune ended up with a $15.00 difference between a new 65 and a 75. Unfortunately Underground Aquatics was out of 90 gallon tanks, so a 75 it is. The filtration consists of a custom built do it yourself, hang on the back refugium.

This has 2 benefits. A place to hide some equipment and a safe place to culture pods and grow macro algae. I have no mechanical filtration, all my water is filter naturally by macro algae and the live bacteria that grows on my Live Rock. As time allows I will post simple "DIY" do it yourself projects that I have done to my reef as well as explain how to maintain a reef tank. As well as go into detail on what equipment and live stock I have.

I have been maintaining a saltwater reef tank for the past 9 years. I originally started out researching setting up a reef tank from few sites such as Reef Central and Nano Reef. I took the plunge and purchased a 11 gal Via Aqua all in one aquarium. Over the years as with anyone in this hobby moving up in tank size is always a must. The reason being is that a larger reef is easier to maintain due to a larger volume of water. Plus with this hobby you never go smaller. I now maintain a 75 gal reef tank with a 15 gallon over the tank sump. I have decided to share my piece of the ocean online as well as post easy and simple do it yourself "DIY" projects.