This Old Tank

[rev138]

I had a tank thread for my office 5.5 gallon on the old site. Looks like it didn't survive, so here we go again.

 

I started this tank in 2006 because I was having a lot of fun with reef tanks at home, and I wanted to take a piece of it to work with me. Over the next few years, the tank had it's ups and downs, but things were generally good. Here's a shot of the tank in it's prime:

 

 

Two years ago, I got a new job, and took the tank with me. I also decided to upgrade from my custom built 50/50 PC canopy to a 70w metal halide lamp. The tank began to steadily degrade since that point. Part of it was the light. Running an open topped tank with a hot light, in an office with dry air created crazy amounts of evaporation, which I struggled to keep on top of, causing the salinity to yo-yo up and down. Also, I was pretty badly injured about a year ago, and I started slacking off on maintenance, and the tank started to suffer from neglect. I had the aforementioned evaporation problems, and I stopped doing regular water changes. My duncans, which I grew from 3 heads into twenty started to melt away, my 20 or so heads of candy cane started shriveling and dying, and by that point nothing else was left.

 

This past Christmas, I got a gift certificate to my LFS, and I decided to make a concerted effort to turn this tank back around. To start with, I replaced the MH lamp with a glass top and a 12" LED strip. This stopped the evaporation in it's tracks. The tank went from burning off almost a liter of water a day to about a liter per week. Second, I resumed weekly 1 gallon water changes.

 

After a few weeks of this, things started looking better. The candy canes stopped dying, and the 2-3 pitiful, bleached heads of duncan that had been closed for weeks started to open back up a little bit. The relatively small amounts of algae which would build up on the glass pretty much disappeared as well. I'm guessing it was the 2 year old 20000K bulb I had in there which was causing it.

 

I managed to reverse the coral loss, but they were still far from happy and healthy looking. I decided to take a gamble and see if I still had environmental problems, or if the corals were just so damaged they'd need a long time to bounce back. I bought a $10 head of hammer coral and popped it in. It opened right up, showed good color, and looked all around happy and healthy after a week, so the other day I put $20 down on a small blastomussa merletti frag that had a nice bright yellow sponge stuck to the plug. That one is doing great too. I think that's encouraging, and I'm hoping with time, patience, and continued dilligence, my duncans will be restored to their former glory. They're still small, but they open a little more and show better color each day.

 

Here are some shots from today:

 

 

 

[jlbzixxer]

gotta say i love your avatar , but glad things are back on track hopefully the ducans and candy canes

bounce back

[rev138]

Equipment:

• 5.5 gallon AGA tank
• Koralia Nano 240
• AC20 HOB converted to grow chaeto using a 10w submersible halogen bulb
• Visitherm Stealth 50w heater
• Ecoxotic Panorama Pro 2.0 12000k/455nm 12" LED strip
• 10-ish pounds of live rock and 10-ish pounds of live sand.
• DIY ATO (more below)

Stock:

• 20 or so heads of candy cane
• 2-3 heads of duncan poyps (hard to say which ones will make it. At least 2 of them)
• 1 head of hammer coral
• 5 or 6 heads of blastomussa merletti
• 4 astrea and 2 nassarius snails

 

I built the ATO back when I started the tank. It cost me less than $20, and has worked reliably since then. It's very simple, with no moving parts:

 

[Julian_blnc]

Can you explain your ATo

Is there pipe or tubing on the inside?

[rev138]

Here it is when I was building it:

 

 

I started with a 1.5L pesticide sprayer from Lowe's. I drilled one hole near the bottom and one near the top, and put little 90 degree plastic fittings held in with silicone. The bottom spigot sits just above the water line. A length of 3/8" plastic tubing runs from the top spigot down to the water line. The top is sealed with a bathtub drain plug, and then capped with a threaded PVC end cap. I sprayed the whole thing black.

 

When the water line drops below the end of the tube, air gets in and water comes out the bottom. Once the water line rises to the end of the tube, it starts taking up water until the column of water in the tube reaches equilibrium with the water in the bottle, and the flow stops.

 

Under normal circumstances, the bottom spigot lets out a few drops of water per hour. I know when it's empty because the water level in the tube drops all the way to the bottom.

 

I made a stand for it out of PVC and an old CD so it sits at the right height, behind the tank.

[GHill762]

Can you explain your ATo

Is there pipe or tubing on the inside?

looks like the water comes out the bottom fitting (without a tube), and when the water reaches up high enough to block the clear tube, it can no longer let water out because it can't let air in to breath (like holding the top of a straw filled with water).. this would only work with a container that can't flex..

 

 

guess you beat me to it.. it's an interesting design for small tanks... very clean..

[rev138]

Thanks. I can't take full credit. I saw something using the same principle online, but I worked out my own version.

Another benefit to getting rid of the clamp on lamp: Due to the small size of the tank, having that lamp forced me to put the HOB and the koralia next to eachother on the same side of the tank. When I switched lights, I moved the HOB to the left side, so it gets better flow.

[Julian_blnc]

I didn't see the bottom fitting, nice design, might have to use on a future pico

[rev138]

It's especially nice because when I go on vacation, it's simple enough to train a co-worker to refill.

[markalot]

Hey hey, thanks for telling us about your tank, I almost missed this thread. Looking forward to more pics of the turnaround. Yay for glass lids and led

[rev138]

Since I last updated, I got a couple of rics, a nice electric blue mushroom, and some zoanthids. Here's a new FTS. I just re-arranged everything, so most of the corals are still a little pissed off.

 

 

It's surprising to me just how much difference lighting makes. Those zoas with the green fringes looked totally brown at the LFS. I was actually on the fence about getting them, I thought they might be too drab, but when I put them in my tank, to my surprise they were BRIGHT green.

 

 

They should look even nicer once they recover from being transplanted and fully open.

[rev138]

Newest addition:

 

 

At this point I think I'm going to stop getting livestock and let stuff grow out ... unless I can find a nice GSP frag

[rev138]

New FTS:

 

[muntwo]

looking good