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Rural Walmart Reef


moblues

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So I'm jumping on the walmart pico bandwagon. Probably won't get any work done on it until this weekend, but I figured I'd post my inital thoughts and see what ya'll think. I want to set up, stock, and maintain this little guy with things that are:

1. From Walmart

2. Otherwise locally sourced though craigslist or the LFS

3. Sitting in my garage gathering dust

Since I live in southeast ohio, this will be a challenge. I'm currently raising a puppy, so running all over creation to stock this isn't appealing...and neither is dealing with a notoriously crap FedEx route for living things. It will eventually live in my lab at work (whenever it finally gets built...) but I'm going to start it at home to avoid moving it twice.

 

Stocking Plans-

Dry rock, dry sand (hopefully still in the garage)

Oz-miscreant emerald crab that really likes pissing off the pocillipora in my "big" tank

Softies and polyps on craigslist (with some luck)

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Love, love this idea!

 

Welcome to the Walmart Pico Club - I look forward to seeing this grow.

Yayaya! Welcome to the wallyworld club!

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Lunch time walmart score! $14.50 and heating is taken care of. I've been using one of these to warm up change water for several months and it works like a champ. They have a pre-set thermostat so you get a constant temp somewhere around 78. It fits quite nicely too.

adb76766.jpg

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Thanks :blush: This is going to be fun... or a hot mess since I haven't fooled with picos before.

This heater works really well, good choice. Don't stress about this being your first pico, we're going to help each other out. Look for advice and tips on the contest thread.

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my laptop is kaput, so posting might be sporadic for a bit and please excuse the thumbnails... but i'm making a little headway on getting this together :D

 

Painted the background yesterday, with genuine walmart camo paint.

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Then I cleaned it up and did the leak test...

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See the camo is so realistic the wild animals wandered right up to it :P

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This heater works really well, good choice. Don't stress about this being your first pico, we're going to help each other out. Look for advice and tips on the contest thread.

Thanks, I'll be poking around for the next few weeks until I have the chance to get this going.

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Where you live? I frequent east liverpool on occasion.

Near athens (no i didn't get arrested this weekend,) so 2-3 hours southwest of east liverpool. there are some decent shops up that way.

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beautiful puppy!!! I love chestnut coats.

hmmm, that sounds a little too cruella deville. it's so difficult staying up on villainess fashion these days :o

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  • 3 weeks later...

Not much going on in tiny town. Up and running since the middle of last week, the rock is still rotting away.

I'm trying to decide whether or not to add a bit of old school crushed coral, its the only substrate I've got sitting around and I'm not real big on the bare bottom look...

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Figured I'd explain why I've got a rather large pile of rocks sitting in the middle of my tank. I had a 50ish gallon mixed reef set up for 6 years before I went to college. My dad agreed to take it over and moved it into the living room; so he wouldn't forget about it for more than a week at a time... It continued to look awesome for a few more years until the glass cracked and dumped the whole load, including 30 gallons from the sump onto the floor. Everything was tossed into trashcans, buckets etc. and most of it got taken to the LFS. There were 2 buckets full of rock that ended up homeless for a decade, that rock will now be the "live" rock for this tank.

I see a bunch of people fussing over how to reuse old live rock, here is my plan. I hope it helps some folks out. The dry rock was soaked in fresh water for a couple days to soften up encrusting whatnot and then scrubbed with a heavy duty brush, the kind used for prepping painting surfaces. Then they went into the tank and I filled it with saltwater. Because there will be a ton of stuff rotting, frequent water changes are a must. I saved the water from my "big" tanks water change (the goal being to avoid cesspool rather than critter ready water) and have been doing a 100% water change everyday.

After the first month or so it should settle down a bit, and then I'll seed it with a pice of rubble from the main tank. I put in more than I need because I'm fairly sure some of the more porous pieces will probably be too foul to keep.

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  • 4 weeks later...

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