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Kyle's Reef - ~150g combined system


Kyl

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A big thank you to all the people that have posted their tank stories on this forum, especially those I’ve gotten ideas from.

 

26947558418_479bd946dc_b.jpg

FTS_March_2018 by Kyl, on Flickr

 

 

Welcome to my 60 gallon shallow reef tank build. This tank is the result of a migration from my two year journey into the hobby with a nano tank. All of my pictures are stored on Flickr, so there's a bit of visual history with the ups and downs over time if you're so interested.

Hopefully someone can learn from some of the mistakes I've made along the way! 

 

Features:


Tank: 60g Custom - 48" x 18" x 16"
Sump: Custom - 44" x 18" x 16"
Stand: Custom 1-1/2" steel powder coated
Lighting: 3x Kessil A160WE
Heater: Finnex Titanium 300W
ATO: Tunze Osmolator 3155
Skimmer: Icecap K2-160
Return: Jebao DCP 8000
Reactor: BRS 5" Mini Reactor (.8 ROX Carbon), w/ Cobalt MJ-600
Powerheads: 2x Maxspect XF230 Gyre, 2x Jebao SW-4
Export: Refugium w/ Kessil H150 Magenta
Controller: Neptune Apex
Rock: Marco dry, Seachem Matrix in sump
Substrate: CaribSea Fiji Pink & Reef Select

 

Livestock:

Fish:

 

2x Ocellaris Clownfish
1x Pink-Streaked Wrasse
1x Tailspot Blenny
1x Gold Assessor Basslet
1x Midas Blenny
1x Social Wrasse

 

1x Blue Star Leopard Wrasse (QT)
1x Neon Cleaner Goby (QT)
1x Royal Gramma (QT)
1x Blue Flasher Wrasse (QT)
1x Yellowhead Jawfish (QT)
1x Springers Damsel (QT)

 

Inverts:

 

3x Red Bubble-tip Anemone
1x Blood Red Fire Shrimp
3x Sexy Shrimp
1x White Spot Anemone Shrimp
1x Pompom Crab
3x Scarlet Hermit crab
2x Blue-Legged Hermit Crab
2x Flame Lipped Conch
~20 mixed Nassarius, Trochus and Cerith snails

 

Corals:

SPS:

 

Pink Lemonade Acropora
Purple Valida Acropora
Green Birdsnest
Red Setosa Montipora
Rainbow Encrusting Montipora
Purple Pocillopora
Red Plating Montipora
Idaho Grape Plating Montipora
Forest Fire Digitata

 

LPS:

 

Mutant Branching Hammer
Gold Branching Hammer
Kryptonite Candy Cane
Purple-tipped Frogspawn
Pink/Purple Duncan
Mayan Sun Favia
Golden Eye Chalice
Orange Eye Chalice
Green Fungia Plate
Blue-tipped Red Goniopora

 

Softies:

 

Yellow Fiji leather
Tyree Green Polyp Toadstool
Purple Photosynthetic Gorgonian
Blue Discosoma Mushroom
Green Star Polyps
Tan Pulsing Xenia
Assorted Zoanthids

  • Like 6
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Ohhhh, he is beautiful, but looks like trouble! My cat could care less that the water tastes salty. I finally just had to move everything away from the tank so he had no way to get up there and drink the water. Now he resorts to licking the shower after I get out of it......

  • Like 1
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Ohhhh, he is beautiful, but looks like trouble! My cat could care less that the water tastes salty. I finally just had to move everything away from the tank so he had no way to get up there and drink the water. Now he resorts to licking the shower after I get out of it......

Put a running water fountain, your cat will love it. You can make one at home with a big enough container and the smallest foundtain pump you can find. They absolutely love running water.

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I have a water fountain water dish for the cats already. He likes it ok, but he prefers the toilet, the bathroom sink, the shower and the fish tanks. Lol

He's a special one, that's for sure! ?

  • Like 2
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Just a bit of a mini-update. Ammonia and nitrites have been zero for over a week, nitrates are hovering around 10ppm. Still waiting on my light to arrive, and for the LFS to get their small Ocellaris clowns restocked which has been delayed with the holidays. In the mean time for livestock I've added a couple of Trochus and Cerith snails, along with a scarlet leg hermit. Eventually it will be two Nassarius snails as well, but they're also out of stock. The four snails have cleaned up almost everything visible already, so to keep things going till the fish arrives in a couple weeks they're getting a couple of algae pellets every few days.

 

The only hardware update is Christmas came early and I picked up a MP10QD. One of the vendors said Ecotech isn't doing any MAP holiday sales this year, and in fact prices are set to increase in January because of the low Canadian dollar.

 

The Ttrochus snails on the glass are definitely giving my feline fisherman some entertainment. He's going to lose his mind when a fish is in there.

 

 

I have a water fountain water dish for the cats already. He likes it ok, but he prefers the toilet, the bathroom sink, the shower and the fish tanks. Lol
He's a special one, that's for sure!

I tried the fountain route with mine, he didn't care for it at all. Thankfully he either got freaked out with the return chamber water, or the salt taste, and hasn't been playing around with it at all since his initial romp.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Thought I had replied earlier, but he's a F5 Bengal and about 3.5 years old. A fair bit larger than a domestic short hair, taller and about 17lbs. Indoor only, but a really active breed so he has a giant 4ft hamster wheel to run on, which he does, constantly..
  • Like 2
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I think that breed is beautiful. If I remember they have some sort of wild cat in their lineage, don't they? I guess the implication is tiger but I am pretty sure that's not it.

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I think that breed is beautiful. If I remember they have some sort of wild cat in their lineage, don't they? I guess the implication is tiger but I am pretty sure that's not it.

They're a cross between an asian leopard cat and domestic shorthair, which produces an F1 offspring. F1 is bread with domestic shorthair, making F2, etc. Every F generation past the first brings more domestic traits, but they still retain a lot of wildness and are not just like a normal tabby.

 

 

MOAR CAT PICTURES!

 

Teaser

 

 

And the tank is pretty stagnant still. No fish, no light, just a skunk cleaner shrimp added.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Small update while I figure out how to take pictures of this new glowing tank. Tide Mini came in today, got it all hooked up and it looks pretty dam nice. The tank has some new residents, three sexy shrimp and two really small Ocellaris clowns. My hermit has killed every Cerith snail I've put in the tank for shells, even though he has larger ones available already..

 

We have some very nice coral available from local hobbyists so I'm just starting to get things lined up in that regard. I'll probably have a small piece of frogspawn, some acans and an encrusting monti this weekend. Every picture I take is all washed out so I'll have to do some more reading on what settings to use on this light for the photos.

  • Like 1
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They're a cross between an asian leopard cat and domestic shorthair, which produces an F1 offspring. F1 is bread with domestic shorthair, making F2, etc. Every F generation past the first brings more domestic traits, but they still retain a lot of wildness and are not just like a normal tabby.

 

Teaser

 

 

And the tank is pretty stagnant still. No fish, no light, just a skunk cleaner shrimp added.

 

LOL, WTH is he looking at on the inside of the wheel?

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New additions: Randal's Goby & Candy-cane Pistol Shrimp. They paired up after about 5 minutes of the shrimp being introduced, and have already proceeded to make a nice little cave at the very front of my tank :D . Also picked up a mutant hammer frag locally, so the tank finally has some coral.

 

Finally got the phone issue handled, will put something up tomorrow.

  • Like 2
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The livestock definately doesn't stand still for photos, but here are the recent additions:

 

The standard Randal's Goby & Pistol Shrimp - paired almost instantly and have tunneled under every single piece of rock in the tank in one day. Typical clown trying to photobomb

 

shrimpgoby_zpsholkckci.jpg

 

 

 

Pompom's, or should I say, pompom & pom as one has lost its left pincer in transit! The larger one on the bottom is about 3/4" of an inch, its anemones are as big as a grain of rice.

pompoms_zpsmfdyp8nw.jpg

 

 

 

 

And the chaeto hitch-hiker brittle star:

 

brittle_zps4k9kcpav.jpg

 

 

 

 

A zoa garden is going to get started on the front island, and some other things are coming this week. Livestock is pretty well set till this tank matures a lot more, but perams are nice and stable so far.

 

He's still watching..

the_fishercat2_zps3j8jujkx.jpg

 

 

 

  • Like 2
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The livestock definately doesn't stand still for photos, but here are the recent additions:

 

The standard Randal's Goby & Pistol Shrimp - paired almost instantly and have tunneled under every single piece of rock in the tank in one day. Typical clown trying to photobomb

 

shrimpgoby_zpsholkckci.jpg

 

 

 

Pompom's, or should I say, pompom & pom as one has lost its left pincer in transit! The larger one on the bottom is about 3/4" of an inch, its anemones are as big as a grain of rice.

pompoms_zpsmfdyp8nw.jpg

 

 

 

 

And the chaeto hitch-hiker brittle star:

 

brittle_zps4k9kcpav.jpg

 

 

 

 

A zoa garden is going to get started on the front island, and some other things are coming this week. Livestock is pretty well set till this tank matures a lot more, but perams are nice and stable so far.

 

He's still watching..

the_fishercat2_zps3j8jujkx.jpg

 

 

 

 

Very pretty pistol/goby combo! I am still waiting on my new goby to arrive :-(. All night long I hear my poor lonely candy cane pistol clicking away.

 

Also very pretty pom pom. I have tried a couple but they always seem to disappear on me.

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  • 5 weeks later...

So there's been some improvement, and some set-backs since the last update. Small Zoa gardens have been started on my front islands with quite a few different polyp varieties, and the tri-colour Acan has really been taking off with three new heads growing since it's introduction. I’m keeping the 'nuisance' coral off of my primary rock base for now, so there is a small bit of GSP on one fragment and no-longer pulsing Xenia on another. In the next couple of weeks, the only addition will be a nice frag of frogspawn to go with my hammer.

 

The one-armed pompom is now back two having two arms, and his buddy has split his anemone so they each have two now. The other inverts have mostly done well, and the fish are growing. Overall the livestock in the tank have been thriving, with zero water quality issues.

 

Now, the set-backs. My mini tide had a fan control issue that had an attempt at addressing, but now the fan doesn't function at all. Dave's been great and we're working on a hardware fix to the problem, but for the last two weeks it’s meant a large reduction on the lighting intensity with passive cooling. I've also got an issue with the now much-larger clown (sex change to female already?) endlessly harassing and nipping the fins of the much smaller male. I had to put the male in a small in-tank breeder box for a few days to give him a bit of a respite, and the larger clown has been much calmer since the re-introduction. During the reign of terror one of the porcelain crabs lost both his front claws, and four sexy shrimp in total were murdered.

 

The other noteworthy improvement has been the creation of a mini-fuge in the middle chamber. I picked up the IM fuge light, and had the fuge basket from my InTank order. Chaeto is growing like crazy, and I’m hoping the pod population will start to gain. There was a tiny piece of dragon’s breath that was in the donated chaeto, so I’m trying to grow that out and eventually throw it in the front.

 

Bad with pictures, will try and get something clear up later.

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  • 3 months later...

Going to be a bit of a post, but there has been a lot going on…

 

My 10-gallon story ended on a sour note, starting with eventually coming home to water so cloudy I couldn’t see anything and smelling foul. I wasn’t able to focus on my tank for a bit so it missed a good water change, and was most likely on the edge of stability prior to that from over-feeding. I now know how fast things can change in such a small water volume..

 

A nasty bacterial bloom had happened, and despite lots of water changes, new carbon and picking up a desktop skimmer locally things just continued down hill over the next couple weeks. My euphyllia all retracted for days, then the purple hammer started to wither out and jelly. That spread to both of my octo-spawns and golden hammer, on which I lost 7/10 heads before ultimately saving it. The three Florida rics I had for less than two weeks all started losing tissue until nothing was left, and the RFA from the same order hid in a dark crevice until finally staying inside-out and dying. The chaeto all died, my Randal’s goby went laminate floor surfing and the pistol shrimp ceased his nightly snapping.

 

That’s not to say things were perfect before the crash started. I had been having issues with my lighting for a few months which ultimately culminated in picking up a Kessil A160WE. I swear there is a curse with me and non-retail hardware, but Dave is a stand up guy and I have nothing but great things to say about him and how he runs his business.

 

Before all the madness started going on I had been slowly collecting things to setup a 65 gallon + 20g sump in the main room, intending to keep the 10 going as well. That’s the main reason I picked up an Apex, as the plan was to eventually run it on the 65-gallon tank and use a PM1/EB4 combo to keep tabs on the fusion10 which is in the bedroom. Near the end of April during the search for 65 equipment I got talking with a local guy and it came up that he had a BNIB fusion 20 that was just taking space.. and you can guess what happened after that!

 

Double the tank, double the stand and equipped to make things as stable as possible. The 65 is not going to be online anytime soon, so most of the attention has been on getting this reboot firing on all cylinders. Picked up some test kits for Alk/Calc and Mag, realized my tank was hovering after a couple weeks of water changes at ~6.3 alk, 300ppm calcium and less than 1100ppm magnesium. Since correcting those with 2-part and some mag dosing things are really starting to look happy. I’ve got an order in with the LFS for an ORA green banded gobie, and have debated adding a firefish or tailspot blenny as well. Feeding quantity has been cut way down and I’m focusing on a mysis / calanus / LRS reef frenzy rotation with some pellets every fourth or fifth day. I feel there has been much less water pollution and everything seems happier with the change ups instead of just pellets, pellets and more pellets.

 

Pictures have never been a strong suit of this build, but OP was updated with a FTS of the survivors. Things are mostly off the rocks while waiting for the RBTA to settle in, and since he has I need to get things re-mounted and off the sand bed/frag rack soon.

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