TeenyReef's 10g Fusion - ATO Disaster

[teenyreef]

On 3/12/2019 at 5:55 PM, Tamberav said:

I think I like the bare bottom look better. It's not like it isn't covered in mostly corals anyways!

I'm loving it, and it's really nice to just suck up the detritus from a couple spots where it accumulates. The bottom is starting to get some coralline, but my long term goal is for the corals to grow onto the bottom. 

 

But not the Sunny D's. They're already trying to move onto the bottom and that would be Very Bad, because that's how they would get to all of the other rocks leading to Total World Domination.

[teenyreef]

I took some pictures recently but never posted them. Sadly, it's been two weeks now. But trust me, things are looking even better now 🙂

 

Teenyreef's 10g coral recovery pictures: 

 

The acans are getting colors again, even though I haven't reduced the lighting. So water quality does make a difference!

 

 

Check out the rainbow colors 🙂

 

 

The green monticap is well on the way to full recovery:

 

Red Setosa, 90% happy again:

 

California tort is doing great and is nice and blue where it's growing closer to the light.

 

[teenyreef]

The sps/acro corner.

 

That no-name brown acro has taken over and turns a pretty purple when it gets enough light, and a pretty green where it doesn't.

 

This is the ORA Pearlberry. Most of the colony broke off and got turned into frags. This is what's growing back from the encrusted base. In this tank it gets less light and is a pretty green and purple color. With more light it looks like the classic pearlberry.

 

Jason Fox Brainfreeze montipora. I probably shouldn't put an encrusting monti here, but it grows slow. And if I have to trim it back, the frags sell for good money!

 

This is a little stick of Katropora from the 40g tank. I expected it to die but it went in just as things started turning around. It's hard to see but it's encrusting nicely at the base. I will probably trim a little off the top soon in hopes of encouraging it to start branching out.

 

The bubblegum montipora is coming back from the dead. And it's getting bubblegum color on the highest part.

 

[teenyreef]

Just to show how huge the progress has been, here's the top down from a little over four months ago, right after I went bare bottom and started doing massive water changes. I'm going to crop some of the corals out of the picture and show before/after closeups a little later.

 

2018-10-28 IM10 Top Down (four months ago):

 

[teenyreef]

Playing around with print to JPG in Lightroom. Here's a before/after of the red setosa:

 

[Snow_Phoenix]

Looks really good, teeny. I like the zoa colony at the bottom. The monticaps look very nice too - good the see the green one is bouncing back already. 

[Porkpie5000]

On 2/25/2019 at 9:41 AM, DaveFason said:

I wish I could calculate but I am curious how many sales you have sent my way because of this tank. I cant thank you enough!

-D

I can say for sure that this tank is the reason that I did business with you Dave.

 

On that note, @teenyreef do you have a picture of how you are fitting both the NanoBox mount and your skimmer in the middle chamber at the same time? 

[Justind823]

I say get a clam for this tank! A little extra natural filtration couldn't hurt!  If anything else it would be  a fun experiment in lowering nitrates. 😎

 

It's been awhile since I stopped in and it's looking great as always

[teenyreef]

22 hours ago, Snow_Phoenix said:

Looks really good, teeny. I like the zoa colony at the bottom. The monticaps look very nice too - good the see the green one is bouncing back already. 

Thanks! I'm thinking of replacing the Sunny D's with something else, though, as they grow really fast and tend to take over wherever they are placed. 

[teenyreef]

10 hours ago, Porkpie5000 said:

I can say for sure that this tank is the reason that I did business with you Dave.

 

On that note, @teenyreef do you have a picture of how you are fitting both the NanoBox mount and your skimmer in the middle chamber at the same time? 

I do, I'll have to find it as I posted it in this thread quite some time ago for someone else who asked. I seem to remember that my mount is an older style, though, with the thicker part of the base on the outside of the tank. Others with newer lights seem to have the thicker part of the base on the inside of the tank which leaves less room. 

[teenyreef]

1 minute ago, teenyreef said:

I do, I'll have to find it as I posted it in this thread quite some time ago for someone else who asked. I seem to remember that my mount is an older style, though, with the thicker part of the base on the outside of the tank. Others with newer lights seem to have the thicker part of the base on the inside of the tank which leaves less room. 

Found it! @DaveFason might be able to do a custom mount if the one you have doesn't work. Here's what mine looks like:

 

 

[Snow_Phoenix]

21 minutes ago, teenyreef said:

Thanks! I'm thinking of replacing the Sunny D's with something else, though, as they grow really fast and tend to take over wherever they are placed. 

Perhaps fragging it into a smaller colony and selling/trading off the excess coral would be better? I've been trying to come across Sunny D's here for a while now. But they're listed as 'premium' and 'collector's item' here, so the price for a single polyp is unusually high. I might as well hoard the ordinary, underrated zoas like Eagle Eyes and Dragon Eyes lol. I really wish they'd sell more colonies here like before. Now it's always frag, small frag, tiny frag. 😞 

 

Three years ago and I could get a palm-sized colony of Radioactive Dragon Eyes zoas for only RM 30 or less, depending on intensity of color and season/availability. 

[Nano sapiens]

On 1/27/2019 at 6:12 PM, teenyreef said:

I'm still chasing high levels of nitrates and phosphates in the tank.

 

But I sure wish I knew where it's all coming from. I feed about 1/4 to 1/2 a cube of frozen daily, and I only have two small fish. I've made sure the back chambers are clean, and there's no detritus accumulating in any corners. So for now I'm just chalking it up to changing conditions after removing the sand bed, and giving it time.

Our sand beds do a lot of the 'heavy lifting' in regards to bacterial activity and the nitrate cycle.  So the removal of it will change how the system functions.  I see you are increasing your water changes to combat for increased NO3 and the corals are looking great!.  You will likely see levels stabilize over time., but if they don't, you could try a ceramic block in the back chamber (or similar) to increase the surface area for bacteria to colonize.

[yoshii]

Great to see your corals making a comeback, they still look beautiful. Sorry I missed it, but what was the cause of the trouble originally? Tank crash?

[teenyreef]

22 hours ago, Justind823 said:

I say get a clam for this tank! A little extra natural filtration couldn't hurt!  If anything else it would be  a fun experiment in lowering nitrates. 😎

 

It's been awhile since I stopped in and it's looking great as always

I've never kept a clam before! I've just heard so many stories of people having bad luck in the long term in nano tanks. But now you've got me thinking about it...🤔

[teenyreef]

12 hours ago, Snow_Phoenix said:

Perhaps fragging it into a smaller colony and selling/trading off the excess coral would be better? I've been trying to come across Sunny D's here for a while now. But they're listed as 'premium' and 'collector's item' here, so the price for a single polyp is unusually high. I might as well hoard the ordinary, underrated zoas like Eagle Eyes and Dragon Eyes lol. I really wish they'd sell more colonies here like before. Now it's always frag, small frag, tiny frag. 😞 

 

Three years ago and I could get a palm-sized colony of Radioactive Dragon Eyes zoas for only RM 30 or less, depending on intensity of color and season/availability. 

It's crazy how different the coral market is in different parts of the world. Here they usually are priced at about the same level as "average but not the cheapest" zoas and palys. Mine grow like crazy and I probably should just frag them and sell a few locally or online here. Wish I could share them with you!

[teenyreef]

10 hours ago, Nano sapiens said:

Our sand beds do a lot of the 'heavy lifting' in regards to bacterial activity and the nitrate cycle.  So the removal of it will change how the system functions.  I see you are increasing your water changes to combat for increased NO3 and the corals are looking great!.  You will likely see levels stabilize over time., but if they don't, you could try a ceramic block in the back chamber (or similar) to increase the surface area for bacteria to colonize.

I agree, and I'm just kind of waiting to see if things stabilize in more time. The nitrates have definitely stabilized, as the water changes are keeping them at about the same level every week. It seems that it just takes a lot longer for phosphate levels to stabilize or change in response to new conditions in a tank. 

 

Ironically, I have a chunk of bio brick in the third chamber, and I was wondering if I should try taking it out just to see if it's somehow contributing to the phosphates. I don't see how, but there's really nothing else in the tank that I can think of that would since the rocks are so old.

[teenyreef]

10 hours ago, yoshii said:

Great to see your corals making a comeback, they still look beautiful. Sorry I missed it, but what was the cause of the trouble originally? Tank crash?

Hi Yoshii! Thanks for taking time out of living the dream to visit my thread 🙂

 

I had a slow mini-crash when I was experimenting with not doing water changes and using carbon dosing to export nutrients. The first six to nine months seemed to go well, but, in hindsight, lack of water changes combined with too many fish and an old sand bed made things gradually get worse. When the effects started to become visible, I removed Doug the Puffer, pulled out the sandbed, and did lots of water changes. Things improved literally overnight, and now I'm just waiting for parameters to stabilize before going to more normal water changes.

[JBM]

55 minutes ago, teenyreef said:

I've never kept a clam before! I've just heard so many stories of people having bad luck in the long term in nano tanks. But now you've got me thinking about it...🤔

 

I cant say that ive kept one in a nano long term. Bc i kept one for a year in a pico (5.5g aio) . It did well, mostly because of the weekly religious 15% water changes. This was probably 9-10 years ago now. As leds were in their infancy stages. You know, the days of buckpucks, huge dc power supplies and huge aluminum heatsinks.

[Justind823]

1 hour ago, teenyreef said:

I've never kept a clam before! I've just heard so many stories of people having bad luck in the long term in nano tanks. But now you've got me thinking about it...🤔

I mostly say it because I just picked up an aquacultured maxima about a month ago now (which have a better stories than the wild caught ones)

 

It's been a long time since I kept one and I had forgotten how much they add to the tank. Really fun to keep, so I highly recommend it!

 

They are a lot hardier than people give them credit for once they are established in a mature tank. 

 

[Nano sapiens]

1 hour ago, teenyreef said:

I agree, and I'm just kind of waiting to see if things stabilize in more time. The nitrates have definitely stabilized, as the water changes are keeping them at about the same level every week. It seems that it just takes a lot longer for phosphate levels to stabilize or change in response to new conditions in a tank. 

 

Ironically, I have a chunk of bio brick in the third chamber, and I was wondering if I should try taking it out just to see if it's somehow contributing to the phosphates. I don't see how, but there's really nothing else in the tank that I can think of that would since the rocks are so old.

For what it's worth, here's my 'theory'.  When an established sand bed is removed, so are the benthic micro alga, dinoflagelates and other photosynthesizing bacteria (PSBs).  En masse, these organisms sequester a great deal of PO4 (and also organic phosphate, that can be transmuted to inorganic phosphate, and visa versa, by microorganism activity).  When a sand bed is vacuumed regularly, some of the benthic organisms are removed, but due to fast reproduction, the ones lost are replaced in short time.  So you end up with a cycle of the system's phosphate being 'sequestered/removed/replaced' over and over that amounts to having stable low PO4 readings in the water column in an established reef aquarium.

 

I am interested to see if enough bacteria can establish without the sand bed in your system to stabilize PO4 at a lower level (without massive water changes), or whether you will have to resort to using a phosphate remover on a regular basis.

[teenyreef]

4 hours ago, Nano sapiens said:

For what it's worth, here's my 'theory'.  When an established sand bed is removed, so are the benthic micro alga, dinoflagelates and other photosynthesizing bacteria (PSBs).  En masse, these organisms sequester a great deal of PO4 (and also organic phosphate, that can be transmuted to inorganic phosphate, and visa versa, by microorganism activity).  When a sand bed is vacuumed regularly, some of the benthic organisms are removed, but due to fast reproduction, the ones lost are replaced in short time.  So you end up with a cycle of the system's phosphate being 'sequestered/removed/replaced' over and over that amounts to having stable low PO4 readings in the water column in an established reef aquarium.

 

I am interested to see if enough bacteria can establish without the sand bed in your system to stabilize PO4 at a lower level (without massive water changes), or whether you will have to resort to using a phosphate remover on a regular basis.

I agree, it will be interesting. For what it's worth, my 30g sumped frag tank system is bare bottom, with just a skimmer and some live rock. And nitrates and phosphates are so low in that tank that I have to dose nittrates, even with a similar bioload to this tank. But, unlike this tank, I started that tank bare bottom, and it took about a year to stabilize.

 

The more I've thought about it, the more I think the tank is just acting like a tank in the first three to twelve months that still needs to mature and balance out. Given it's been about four months since it was in bad shape, and the sand bed was removed, that might make sense. 

[Porkpie5000]

On 3/15/2019 at 10:01 PM, teenyreef said:

Found it! @DaveFason might be able to do a custom mount if the one you have doesn't work. Here's what mine looks like:

 

 

 

That explains it. Mine is basically the opposite of this. I wonder if mine would work over the pump part of the skimmer. That would make it off center though.

 

 

[DaveFason]

15 hours ago, Porkpie5000 said:

 

That explains it. Mine is basically the opposite of this. I wonder if mine would work over the pump part of the skimmer. That would make it off center though.

 

 

He has the old mount. It is smaller but no adjustment. If you cut a piece of plastic instead of using the spacer on the back side it will work just like this. 

 

@teenyreef - Tank looks insane. Great work.

[teenyreef]

On 3/20/2019 at 8:41 AM, DaveFason said:

He has the old mount. It is smaller but no adjustment. If you cut a piece of plastic instead of using the spacer on the back side it will work just like this. 

 

@teenyreef - Tank looks insane. Great work.

Thanks, Dave 🙂