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Teejay's Reefer 250


teejay

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wow, impressive! glad things are going well.

 

Thanks! One minor hiccup would be that 2 of my corals have lost some color, both favias, while all the other lps, sps, and zoas are doing well. It might possibly be because the water is too clean. Every test measures 0 phosphates and 0 nitrates and my alk/cal/mg have been pretty consistent, and like I said, it's only 2 corals in the entire tank. They still show feeder tentacles even though they've lost some color so I've been keeping them well fed every other day. Should be a bit before their color returns though.

 

I've been culturing copepods and phytoplankton that I dose to the tank every day for the past month or so, so next week i'm adding a spotted Mandarin. I had a mandarin in my old 30 that did well for over a year before I gave him away to a friend. Hopefully this guy will stay well fed too.

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how do you culture copepods and phytoplankon?

 

Phyto is pretty easy, you need a starter culture of the algae you want to grow (I grow Nannochloropsis, Tetraselmsis, and Isochrysis), the food for the algae (I get mine from Florida aqua farms), some sort of culture bottle, a very basic light and an air stone.

Use saltwater around 1.020 to 1.026 depending on the algae, no heater required in my experience, dump in the starter culture and the appropriate amount of food. Keep it lit 16h a day and oxygenated 24/7. The culture gets darker over the course of a week and you remove about 90% of it, save 10% and refill with saltwater and add more food. That's the basics of it.

Copepods are just as easy. I use a 5 gallon pail, a starter culture that I've had well over a year now and salt water. It barely needs oxygen as well, and no light, but I find they grow faster with a small heater. I feed phyto every day or two to keep the water a light green, and watch as the pods explode.

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thanks! i need to try that one day instead of spending $40 on pods / phyto

 

Just got home and found a few pics of my setup and how simple it is, I'm using a random old ceiling light in the background to grow the cultures and I'm no longer using flexible air tubing, but something more rigid and straight these days just for ease.

 

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And this is basically what I keep as backups in case one ever crashes, I've had backups last up to almost 30 days in my fridge and be able to start a new culture when I give it away to local reefers around here that wanted to try their hand at it.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Update:
Things have been growing quite well over the last little while, and I added a few new frags during a sale. I had a chance to snap a quick few photos the other night during a water change. Thinking of adding a sand sifting goby if I can get my hands on one in the next little while. A small bit of cyano has started appearing on the sand in some spots, so I've ramped up the flow a little bit more, and I vacuumed it out during the WC, hoping it doesn't return, and it's been a few days since I last saw it.

Some of the photos I uploaded (Always clickable thumbnails):

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love the zoas

 

Thanks, I have a few more to mount from the frag rack to make it a bit more colorful and I really hope they grow together making a nice, non-awful looking zoa garden haha

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Are you running the pumps at full speed? Why do you feel the need for 3 pumps?

 

The pumps are run at various speeds throughout the day, usually anywhere from 10-90%. They cycle between reef crest, lagoon, nutrient transport, tidal swell modes which run off of a reeflink controller. Sometimes only the mp40 is going and sometimes only the mp10's are going. It creates a lot of different flow patterns in the tank at various times of the day. For me, it's to eliminate any real chance that a space in the tank doesn't get hit with some good flow at least for a few hours during the day, hopefully reducing the overall dead spots and detritus build up. So far, it has worked pretty well as there's very minimal vacuuming during water changes. Overnight everything dies down and just runs at 10%.

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Curious... how well do the MP10's attach on the 1/2" thick glass of your Reefer 250?

 

The side panels aren't 1/2". On the red sea website, it only gives the thickness specifically of the front panel. The sides and back panel are 10mm instead of 12mm so the mp10's hold perfectly fine :) no issues or pump disconnects.

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superbluetang

 

The pumps are run at various speeds throughout the day, usually anywhere from 10-90%. They cycle between reef crest, lagoon, nutrient transport, tidal swell modes which run off of a reeflink controller. Sometimes only the mp40 is going and sometimes only the mp10's are going. It creates a lot of different flow patterns in the tank at various times of the day. For me, it's to eliminate any real chance that a space in the tank doesn't get hit with some good flow at least for a few hours during the day, hopefully reducing the overall dead spots and detritus build up. So far, it has worked pretty well as there's very minimal vacuuming during water changes. Overnight everything dies down and just runs at 10%.

Ahhh sounds good. I like that idea.... if only I had a controller.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The cyano I mentioned in my last post actually got a decent hold shortly after and covered the sandbed. I did a water change and siphoned it all out and it hasn't really come back since. Other than that things are going well. My parameters have been staying quite solid and the favia that bleached during the transfer is finally getting some of its purple color back, very slowly but surely, I have it hiding slightly under a ledge on the left side of the tank. Here's a few pictures, still having trouble really showing how blue a few of the corals are, more practice with the camera and I'll figure it out.

 

New FTS:

 

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Some half tank shots and a few macros

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
For today I just have a small little photo dump of some frags that I'm gonna try to keep track of the growth of over the coming months and hopefully trade/sell them once they get around to covering their plugs. Some have already taken off a lot more than their friends around them. Pictures were taken with the kessils on 100% intensity and 0% color.


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  • 1 month later...

Fiddling around with the camera and ended up taking a few coral pics. Added 8 blue/green chromis and a tuxedo urchin this week as well that seem to be doing quite well so far.

 

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Great pics! How do you like the chromis?

 

They're really active. I have a royal dottyback that's been taking runs at them so they've mostly been sticking together whenever she's out and about but so far so good, really fun to watch, since the clowns spend a lot of time in around the anemone.

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A sad update today unfortunately.

2 days ago, I came home to see my female maroon not eating anything. Usually always at the top of the tank waiting for it when I walk in the room, she was just huddled inside the anemone watching the food go by. I was a little worried, so I took a video and some pictures for a guy who's very active on the international forums and is generally quite good at diagnosing fish diseases, since I looked and couldn't really see anything with regards to white dots on her skin or sliminess building up. He had a good look and couldn't see anything other than he mouth looked a little bigger than normal and she wasn't closing her mouth either, from this he deduced that she may have bitten some zoas near the anemone in an attempt to move them away, as that's decently common behavior, so I turned the lights out, and she stayed in the anemone as I went to sleep.

I woke up, and she was still in the anemone flapping away, still swimming strongly from all I could see, so I went to work that day. My girlfriend feeds the fish once she gets home from work earlier than me and called me to tell me she looked worse, no longer in the anemone and just swimming very lethargicly, sometimes with her fins no longer moving and very near the bottom of the tank. I posted some pics for the fellow again as well as video and he still could see nothing in terms of parasitic infection, but suggested I get her out into quarantine to start some antibiotic treatment. Unfortunately, she was gone when I got home. Within 24 hours, she went from a voracious eater to no longer in my tank, and his best guess was that she bit a zoa/paly and ingested a small amount of palytoxin that led to her rapid demise. Everyone else in the tank seems perfectly fine so far, with the smaller clown taking over the anemone for the time being, until I'm able to find a suitable mate for him, probably soon to be her.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Since the passing of my clownfish, everyone else is looking fine and no signs of any illness or stress, so perhaps it was her biting something that ended up leading to her death. Corals have been looking good and showing some good polyp extension, I glued a few tiny frags to some rocks a few weeks ago that have been showing some growth and making some nice bases for themselves. I fragged a lot of zoanthids for some local reefers so my FTS is completely cluttered on the sandbed as I don't have a frag tank set up. Now some photos.

 

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  • 2 months later...

Been a while since my last update. I've done a little bit of redoing the aquascape to be very minimal on the rock in the actual display and since I have both marinepure spheres and siporax in my sump, I haven't seen any negative effect from this change. There's been some good growth and coloration increase with a lot of corals and I saw a good recovery of a red planet frag that was given to me as a very pale sps frag a little over a month ago. I placed it on my frag rack and watched as it slowly regained color and polyp extension. Those pictures below to show the change.

 

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Another SPS I've seen some good growth was my pink lemonade acro, it turned a little green after I ripped it off it's frag plug and glued it onto a rock, but it didn't take very long before the color properly returned and growth took off. Again a couple comparison pics.

 

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A full tank shot with the pumps off, and I still need to tidy up a lot of frag plugs that are lying around, which I'll take of once I set up a frag tank I've been meaning to get running for a little while now.

 

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Finally, I'll end with just a few other pics that I ended up taking after coming home from vacation. And one of the frag rack that I'm hoping to get out of my display in the coming weeks.

 

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