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Coral Vue Hydros

12"mr.aqua cube! Drilled!


gulfsurfer101

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gulfsurfer101

Things have started to come around to since changing up the tank and adding the trashcan sump. I am even thinking about tossing in some sand to the tank. Not 100% shure on that atm though. I'll be off work the remainder of the year so money will be tight, especially with the holidays but at least I will have time to finish the stand up and finally chill a bit. I also tried my luck at taking s'more pics of the tank but everything comes out really washed up due to leds being so hard to photo. I think I'm getting me a good dslr this tax season. You photo guru's should leave me some advice on some equipment I should be looking at getting to photo my kids and coral.

 

Bottom left

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Bottom right

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This sour apple monti I fragged from a peice I got from glennr1978 wants to go every where

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Edit: I noticed some gha patches forming on a few rocks in here over the last couple days. I cleared out tons of caulerpa from my 30 and basically just left my cheato to outgrow where the cal was just taking over in my fuge. I added the caulerpa to the trashcan sump and almost overnight I can see the gha has receeded and where it's still present it looks rather weak and or dying. I don't know if it is the macro or the tank just now fully cycling since what I'm basically doing is soft cycle but I thought it would be interesting to note.

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gulfsurfer101

Noticed my first fish death. I found what looks to be the remains of my only fish under some rocks during a wc today after not seeing it for the last few days. On a more postive note I was able to get the bulb ran higher above the tank by fabricating my own fixture and hanging it from the ceiling.

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gulfsurfer101

So I found a good use for that tonga rock after all and decided it would be perfect to hold my temporary baffle in place in my trashcan fuge.

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and I made a hanging fixture out of 3/8'' stainles steel tubing with some fittings I had lying around and am getting way more coverage out of the bulb now.

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nice tank and corals, but im not digging your rock scape. id add sand and try to move some rock to the sump and get an islnad look going on

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gulfsurfer101

I've been thinking about adding sand. I have about 30#'s of fully cured livesand in my garage I could always steal from.

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gulfsurfer101

I see what your saying but I'm slowly adding one or two polyp frags from out of my larger tank and setting them where they can grow out and eventually take over the rock around them.

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gulfsurfer101

I added about 10-15 pounds of live sand to the cube today. Maybe it just felt that heavy cause it was wet but I got like a good inch and a half deep sand bed throught the cube. I tried my best to deal with the pile of rocks look but in the end what I got was still just a pile of rocks. I did end up with lots more room on the sand bed though which is pretty nice. Here's the latest after tossing in the sand.

 

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Do you like your Par30? I need a led light for my 12nc. My main tanks has flatworms that are eating my SPS. I have to take all my SPS out and put them the 12nc. Would the par30 be ok for SPS?

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gulfsurfer101
Do you like your Par30? I need a led light for my 12nc. My main tanks has flatworms that are eating my SPS. I have to take all my SPS out and put them the 12nc. Would the par30 be ok for SPS?

I would try to get the par38 with a 40* optics for your tank. A par 30 might not be enough for your tank with sps.

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gulfsurfer101

I would definately opt for that bulb since your lighting a wider area and the cree's are just an added plus.

 

On a side note I added my first real outside introductions into the tank yesterday. I picked up a nice priced mini carpet nem and I picked up one tessalated blenny to the tank. I think it's a female because the colors are not as bright as the males are. The lfs should e-mail me when the get a male in.

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gulfsurfer101

lol, I'm just resting up today. The lfs I go to had a customer apreciation holidy party last night and I took full advantage of their adult beverages thing they had going on. I'll get pics up soon but am kinda waiting for the blenny to come out more. She's exploring but when I come up to the tank she darts back off into the rocks.

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You would be fine with 1 Par38 over the tank. Thats what I'm currently running over my 7.5g Mr. Aqua cube and it works very well. The outsides of the tank are a little dim, but that was the tradeoff and it honestly makes the tank look a little more dynamic. I have 60 deg optics on mine and I can tell you it is plenty for keeping basically any type of coral. I started with a 150W MH and went to this and I'm very pleased with the results. The light output is great without all the negative side effects of MH. My corals are responding well to the light also.

 

I also enjoyed your rockscape in post #8 the best. Your most recent is much better then when you just had a massive pile in there, but I prefered the earlier version. Left the tank more open so it seemed bigger then it was.

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gulfsurfer101

Thanks and I feel almost the same way about the scape but that was the trade off with adding the overflow. I cut the acrylic to where I had just the perfect amount of room to remove the bulkhead if I ever needed to to try and minimize the area I was taking out of the tank but I still lost a good 2 1/2" from the back and that is a lot of space in a small tank. The rocks I had picked out for this tank were put in there not taking into account for the overflow box since I started the tank with an ac30. I did snap a few pics of my new nem and gulf blenny and got some things rearanged since I had to introduce another large peice of rock into here and got rid of some to compensate for what I added in. I'm shure glad I drilled since I used to worry about overlowing the tank when I added anything in here. I would have to siphon a few gallons out to scape or add anything and that was pretty annoying. Now I can just shut off my pump and let some water drain into the sump to do any kind of scaping or spot feeding.

 

Here's the first outsider to make its way into the cube,

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and the next,

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and the first reintroduction of sps since I drilled.

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just a few more randoms

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and latest fts

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Thanks and I feel almost the same way about the scape but that was the trade off with adding the overflow. I cut the acrylic to where I had just the perfect amount of room to remove the bulkhead if I ever needed to to try and minimize the area I was taking out of the tank but I still lost a good 2 1/2" from the back and that is a lot of space in a small tank. The rocks I had picked out for this tank were put in there not taking into account for the overflow box since I started the tank with an ac30.

 

Finding and making space in nano's is definitely a difficult thing to do, especially when the tank starts filling up. Are you planning on putting anything over the top now that you've added a fish? I've had horrible luck keeping anything with fins in my tank and have pretty much given up on keeping one. I'd like to, but my problem now is finding one I like that will also allow me to stay open top.

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gulfsurfer101

No, no top for me, goes against the whole rimless thing I think. I'll see how things go with this fish before I make any final judgement though. I have a few peices of acrylic laying around in my garage if I need to fab something out but I think it would take away from the open top look. I saw that you were having fish loss in your thread. The only thing I can think of is maybe the fish were stressed from being placed into a smaller tank and it might have been too fast of a change for them to adjust. I had a firefish jump from my ap24 but that is notghing suprising like a clown which I also had jump out of that tank but I found the culprit to be a nasty night dwelling crab that I found hunting my tank during a midnight trip to the fridge. He took the toilet express all the way to the ocean.

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gulfsurfer101

No problem man, I wish I had seen those bulbs before I bought mine but oh well, mine seems to get the job done. Those fish losses were trial and error over the few years that I've been keeping fish so that's just water under the bridge so to say. Things are just starting to take off for this tank with my very first introductions and those gulf of mexico tessalted blennies are supposed to be pretty hardy little fish.

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No, no top for me, goes against the whole rimless thing I think. I'll see how things go with this fish before I make any final judgement though. I saw that you were having fish loss in your thread. The only thing I can think of is maybe the fish were stressed from being placed into a smaller tank and it might have been too fast of a change for them to adjust.

 

I agree, I refuse to put something to cover the tank. I tried acrylic, but it condensated so badly that I took it off after a few hours. I'm not into drilling 800 holes in it either. I'll stay open top. The fish thing is strange. My latest damsel was doing really well. Perhaps I wasn't feeding enough. I would feed a few times a week, and thought it was enough. I hate putting a bunch of additional nutrients in the tank, even though I'm sure most of them are eaten or absorbed by the inhabitants. Most of the time when I add a fish they are good to go for a couple months, then wham. Dead. The only fish that I've ever had problems with are jawfish. I can't for the life of me keep one alive for more then a couple days. They seem to get stressed out very quickly. So I'm done with them.

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gulfsurfer101

I don't think underfeeding is the problem. Fish can go a very long time with out manual feeding and will most likely find a scource of food before starve. I have a damsel I bought for a feeder fish to give to my angler during the summer months. I had a heating problem and lost my angler but the feeder fish survived and made his way back to rear chamber of my finnex and has been there over two months. I have not fed the tank in over that long and the fis still is alive in the rear chambers. I would look elsewhere like adding livestock too early. That may have been the downfall to my psuedochromis I had started this tank with. I used live rock from an established set up but still may have encountered shifts during the first few weeks.

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