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"Makenzie's mixed 20g"


GareBearXoXo

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Hello & welcome to my little girls mixed 20g reef tank!

- This whole journey was started after finding a local couple that built a shop right next to thier home and it was stacked with frag tanks.

I seen thier post online that he and his wife was just opening the place and that he was inviting people out to come take a look / shop.

So I decided to take my daughter and long story short was "O my" did she LOVE it!

So the hunt was on, with a slim budget and me not having basically any knowledge of maintaining a reef aquarium I was a bit hesitant

but after seeing the way she reacted to all the coral and the fish I knew I had to make it happen. 

With that in mind this was the conclusion I came to.

1. I wanted something small but nice.

2. I wanted it to be automated as possible (within budget).

3. I didn't want to fail.

 

*Tank overview*

 

- The tank was started on 05/05/20 and my goal was to have the best equipment I could afford but also to have a clean look.

I didn't want a bunch of ugly wires and equipment in the tank taking away from the live stock.

With that being said I painted the back glass black to help everything blend in and to help keep your eyes on what's important.

I also wanted to have alot of nutrient export because having a 3 year old all she wants to do is feed the tank and we do so 3-5 times a day in small doses.

Finding the right balance between import and export of nutrients has been something I have been adjusting since the tank cycled.

We mix up the food alot but mostly ATM we stick to Marine Flakes, I have been flirting with Polyp Lab amino acids and Reef Roids with ok sucess.

Being my first tank and still learning the only thing I am testing for is Salinity, Alkalinity and Phosphates as of right now with the Hannah checkers.

I will do a 20% water change if any of those numbers start to dip or go up. So far it seems to be the best way of achieving stability and low maintenance.

The Tank is the center piece of my kitchen, it fits perfect on the side of the bar countertop so anyone that sits there is able to enjoy it. Plus it's super easy to 

maintenance because the sink is right there and I also have my RO/DI unit hooked up underneath with the water top off/storage water.

 

*Equipment / Supplies*

 

  1. 20G standard
  2. Coralife 30G Skimmer and HOB filter (I chose this filter because I can hide the heater and even though it's cheap atleast it's able to produce ok skimmate with mechanical filtration).
  3. Marine magic ultra slim algae scrubber.
  4. XP Aqua Sumpless ATO.
  5. Orbit Marine pro led lighting with 2x wave pumps on the bluetooth loop system.
  6. DIY frag racks.
  7. 20 lbs of BRS dry rock drilled with rods and Coralline Purple Reef Apoxy.
  8. 10lbs of CaribSea Arag-Alive Hawaiian Black sand/gravel.
  9. 5 stage RO/DI unit with Instant Ocean Reef Crystals salt mix
  10. Black egg-crate from BRS DIY lid for top of the tank.

          

 

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More to come! I will be working on this a little everyday! Thanks for all the support and info. Feel free to share any advise 🙂

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Nitrates and phosphates should never be 0, once you have algae and corals. 0 of either will cause photosynthetic organisms, like algae and corals, to suffer and eventually die. You don't want them to go super high, it can encourage more algae growth than is ideal, but it's very important for them to never be 0. 

 

Don't scrub your rocks, it's not good for the life on them. 

 

Unless you use exclusively really good live rock, you'll have a stage of "the uglies", where you have a lot of algae on everything. It's normal and fine. Manual removal, snails, and keeping your nutrients reasonable will let it ease down in time. Once an assortment of non-pest algae species have grown into a mature community, it's hard for pest algae, like hair algae, to run rampant any more. You wind up with your rock a nice assortment of colors, from algae that won't bother your corals. That's part of why you shouldn't scrub your rocks, you want that to develop. Even if you have loads of algae. The only thing you should scrub at any point is your glass, which you are not trying to establish a mature layer of non-pest algae on. 

 

Don't start with dry rock. Get some good live rock, if at all possible. Good live rock should already be lots of colors from algae, not just one color (especially not solid purple, that's probably painted), and should have lots of visible stuff growing on it. It's not just rock that was in an aquarium for awhile, it's rock that was in the ocean for awhile. It is unfortunately not cheap, but getting just a couple pounds of it will really help your tank's maturity along, which helps stability. I highly suggest trying to get at least a little to seed everything with algae and helpful organisms. If you can't find any good live rock for sale in small amounts near you, see if any local reefers are willing to give you a handful or two of sand, empty shells, rock fragments, and that sort of thing, to help establish your tank. 

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