Waterbox Peninsula Mini 15G Renaissance - Photo heavy

[rimga123]

Backstory

 

I kept fish or had some sort of aquarium for as long as I can remember, but my first saltwater setup happened somewhere in 2009 or so, I was only 13years old and my funds-knowledge were very limited. but I successfully managed to keep some coral and fish alive. After digging up a photo of it, well lets just say that I remember it being a bit nicer..

 

 

anyhow! I moved countries at age of 17 and ended up in an emerald island called Ireland.

An itch for a new tank kept getting worse and I ended up finding a cheap 20gallon long on the craigslist and my new journey started.

This time things were different, wellll... Funds were still tight as I was only in school, but from what I had saved up I got myself two Tunze nanos Streems and a tunze 9002 skimmer and some cheapo Ebay LED light. things were going well for couple of years until I ended up with a massive aiptasia and bubble algae invasion that I was not able to beat. Spent coupled hundred quit on peppermint shrimp and they did nothing, had decent success with Red sea aiptasia-x in a sense that it killed aiptasia, but I had way too many to eradicate them with it. Went through 3 different aiptasia eating filefish till I finally got one that ate them. and I thought that my fish tank is getting back on track, but after it eradicated 90% of population it decided to not live anymore. So I gave up.. kept the tank ruining with plans to upgrade for three years. have not done a water change, only topped up with R/O once couple of days or once week. I am not sure if word neglect would be right, more of a straight up abandonment, it also did not help that I kept the tank in a living room where i barely spent any time.

A video from the good old days, cannot find any photos of it at this given time, so will update this post later.

 

 

 

And we ended up at this point.

Aquarium was looking the worst it had in years. I was toying with an idea of getting a second hand AquaOne AquaNano 40 or 60 (very popular option here, so there is usually quite a few for sale at all times), but never pulled the trigger. But my wonderful girlfriend has surprised me with an early Christmas gift, the Waterbox peninsual mini 15G. and I instantly became extremely motivated to get everything in motion. Literally the next day I got some premixed saltwater (local aquarium shop sells both RO and saltwater) started tearing apart my old fish tank and to my surprise I found quite a few corals alive, 25ish heads of green torch coral, a large purple gorgonia, red and lime green zoas ( I cannot recall how they are called exactly), big colony of cabbage leather, green nepthea leather, one head of a candy cane, but in a poor state and many of green, blue-purple mushrooms. also a pink spotted goby. keep in mind that I have not done any water changes to this tank in over 3 years. my mother also kept massively overfeeding it apparently (only found out the day that I was tearing the tank down)

It went from this.

 

 

 

 

To This.

 

 

 

 

 

I have decided that I do not need that many heads of torch, so I have swapped a few for some zoas-palys, xenia (my girlfriend loves them) and lime green candy cane.

 

 

Getting a few more corals, so will rearrange everything over the upcoming weekend.

 

 

Equipment

Tank:

Waterbox Peninusal mini 15G

 

Stand:

-Ikea

 

Light:

-cannot recall witch one exactly, but one of them cheap Ebay 165w dimmable LED job. has been working great for close to 5 years now.

 

Filtration:

-Marine Color RDC 150 skimmer

-5kg of live sand from old setup

-mostly dry rock ~5kg, couple pieces of live rock from old setup.

-Chamber 1: filter sock, looking to get something else instead.

-Chamber 2: Marine Color RDC 150, activated carbon and rowaphos.

-Chamber 3: Heater JBL Pro Temp 100w and stock waterbox return pump, but waiting for a tunze silent to be delivered.

 

Flow:

-Stock Waterbox return pump, waiting for the tunze silent to be delivered. Delivered

-Tunze - 6045 nanostream  Jebao Slw-10

 

ATO:

-amazon gravity fed with a bottle mount.

 

Parameters

 

Salinity: ~1.025
temp 24-25c

have not checked anything else yet.

 

 

Stock

 

Fish:

-Pink spotted goby Rehomed

- 5x Mollies, 2 reguar and 3 Baloon.

- 1x Yellow clown goby

- 1x Engineer goby

 

Inverts:

- 1x Red legged hermit

- 2x Fighting Conch

- 5x Top shell

- 2x Trochus snails

 -1x Yellow banded coral shrimp

 -1x Cleaner shrimp

 -1x porcelain crab

 -1 Common prawn

 

 

Coral:

-Green Star Polyps

-Various Mushrooms, red, green, blue, ricordea, rhodactis.

-Various Zoanthids

-Torch coral green

-Torch coral purple

-Cabbage leather

-Pulsing Xenia

-trumpet coral

- Toxic green trumpet coral

-Gorgonia

- Purple gorgonia

-Green nepthea leather

- 5 different acans

- Purple stylophora 

-

 

 

Current Status

Still dialing in the equipment and keeping my eye on the live stock.

 

Goal

 

To have a simple system with biweekly-monthly 50% water changes, with more of interesting invertebrates and only a few fish if any at all.

pink spotted goby will be looking for new home, because he is a bit too big for this setup IMO.

 

 

 

this is it for now, will upload more photos next week, after finding more space for all the coral.

Not the more cohesive first post, but I hope that you get the idea to how this tank came to be.

all the criticism or advice are welcome.

Really interested to hear from people whom have mini peninsulas, to what DIY mods they have done to make their life better.

Will have to get my DSLR out for the next photosesion.

 

03/12/2021.

 

 

 

[rimga123]

A third week of this tanks life.

 

I have added a bit of a grape caulerpa into to the back of the display tank to help fight the a tiny excess nutrient problem. I have not tested, but cyano is present, but seems like reseeding slowly. I have also added a bit more rowaphos (from half a recommended amount to a full) . other than that, no new additions to the tank.

So far I have done a 50% water change and a 20% water change. Corals seemed more happy after a 50%, so I will continue doing that.

Was hoping to swap some of the existing torch coral, for other corals but it has not happened yet. I must have over 40 heads at this given time, I am not complaining, I really like the single species torch coral garden, but would love to add some purple in it.  The hermit crab and the conch decided that they live on the skeleton of the torch coral. torch does not seem to mind, so I will let them be.

Two heads of torch coral did not make it past first week of being transferred in a new tank, I am not quite sure why. but eh, you win-loose some.

One small head also bleached, but I moved it into lower flow ant dimmer light area and it seems like its bouncing back (The one on the left from the red zoas)

other than that I have not had any losses and the new frags are doing quite well. Cannot find a low enough flow area for the Xenia to see it pulsing but that is not a bad problem to have I guess.

the right side of the tank gets a bit of sunlight every morning for an hour or so before the lights turn on and corals seem to enjoy it a lot. (did not get to take a photo in time before the blues went on)

 

from the technical side of things I am really happy with the skimmer performance, it have pulled a lot of dark skimmate (maybe a bit watery, but very dark non the less). I have seen people saying that its hard to adjust and that it does not work very well, but I have found for it to be the opposite. Took only a few minutes to adjust after installing, even gave me a dark tea colored skimmate within the first day. and it it is quite quiet. Even though I could not fall asleep while its on (not because of the pump, but more of the noise from the bubbles), so its only running during the day, which is not ideal but better than nothing.

While I am still waiting for the Tunze Silent to show up, I have swapped the original return pump for a siccee micro because the original pump made worse and worse noise everyday. a week into the tanks life it sounded like a bag of rocks really. micro is more silent, but it is not silent by any means.

Also had a mishap with the ATO system. while I was at work it seems like the filter sock got clogged a bit and the water level has dropped in the return chamber, but has increased in the display, which made nearly a liter of fresh water to be dumped, but luckily my girlfriend noticed that the display is nearly overflowing, so she took off the ATO. 

It seems like the fauna did not get affected too much if at all by it. to combat this I plant to stay on top of cleaning the filter sock and the sicce micro is a bit les powerful (600l/h instead of stock 1000l/h) which seems to help the filter stock to stay untouched for a bit longer.

I am still happy with the lights and the tunze nanostream is performing well and it is very quiet. Would love to upgrade in the future for something of a smaller footprint and broader adjustability, but for now it suffice.

One of the mistakes I made was, placing the aquarium too close to the the wall and now I cannot clean the rear glass from water droplets, I said to myself that I will move the tank forward next time I do the water change, but I didn't, so maybe next time.. I also give myself -2points for cable management behind the aquarium.

 

The only more pressing issue that I am dealing with at the moment is aiptasia. I really want to eradicate them, but it seems like tiny ones pop out once couple of days. I am not sure if I am loosing or wining the battle.

I am using RS Aiptasia-X with good results, but I am sure that I always miss loads that i cannot find. Also I think that I killed one of the red zoas heads with aiptasia-x, but oh well, it died for a good cause. Not sure what I am going to do with it long term. Nudi's are not really an options, because they are hard-impossible to get here, I have never had any luck with peppermit shrimp eating aiptasia, they also look like a cockroaches to me and do not want to risk of them harming other coral. And I think that the aquarium is too small for any fish that eat them. It seems liek Aiptasia-x is my only option for now.

 

Other than that, everything is just coasting along.

 

Photos in the next post.

 

[rimga123]

Taking photos is hard.

12/12/2021.

 

[DNR88]

I like the style of the tank. Looks a bit old-skool, but nice to see. 🙂

[rimga123]

Food for thought.

 

I feel like I am very indecisive about what I want to see in this aquarium, but also I am staying firm on what I want in it. If that make sense.

 

Fish -

I do not want it filled with fish, maybe a couple at the maximum. But what to get? I have pink spotted goby, but it is looking for a new home, reason being that it is just too big I feel. It will be replaced with a pair of some sort of smaller goby probably.

I want an open swimming fish, but dont want clowns, because from my past experience I find them to be very aggressive and adult clows are quite big, too big for a 15g.

Chromis viridis sounds like a good option on paper, could fit a couple. But don't want to risk with their disease. Also they are also kind of meh..

Would love a pair of bagai cardinals, but i would not keep any shrimp with them from what I've read, which is a problem (explanation at the invertebrates section).

Will most likely adapt a couple of mollies to saltwater just to keep bioload up till I decide what to get.

 

Invertebrates  -

I want 1-2 cleaner shrimps, 1-2 anemone porcelain crabs, we often get some feeder ghost shrimp at the local lfs, so would love to add some of those and one fire shrimp. And a red serpent star fish, had one for 3 years and I really enjoyed seeing it. And maybe something else interestinf that I may find at the local lfs.

I am quite firm to what I want there. Easy to say that it will be an invert dominant tank. So I have to choose my fish carefully.

 

Coral - would love a couple more types of zoas, especially yellow, blue and maybe some rasta. Some palys that i have right now i wont be keeping and a small frag of green start polyp that i am not too fond of.

 

I want at least one more color variant of torch, some hammers and both ricordea yuma and florida, a little garden of different types would look good I think.

If i won't see any sps in it, I wont be heartbroken about it.

 

The tank is small and I believe that it is important to only put what you love in it instead of what you can get, just to fill in the space.

 

Equipment - 

I am happy with the light, skimmer and the powerhead. But from the three I would want to upgrade the powerhead within the upcoming year. I have looked into Nero, Jeabo and Hydor.

I have read that Nero often dies withing couple of years, so i will try to avoid them, Seen very few people happy with jebao wavemamers, reliability and noise issues. But the hydor aqamai kps has my attentjon for now. Have not seen too many bad thing about it, but I will keep reading.

My fish tank is my bedroom, so I have to consider how noisy the equipment is.

Which bring me to the next point.

The return pump. I have a tunze silent on order  and hopefully it will be here within next week, I am getting really tired with return pumps noise at this stage, currently running sicce micro.

 

Sump -

Biggest issue i have right now is the intake side. If i switch the sock for a media rack. I could save some space in other chambers. So i am lurking for options, may just create something out if egg crate really, seem like it would easy enough.

But since I have very little of rock in my display, I want to get the best bio media that I can. I can easily get maxspect nano-tech bio spheres or blocks at my local LFS. But after seeing them in person they dont look porous at all and just heavy really, adds for them look good, but have not seen too much of a good feed back on them (please change my mind). 

So i am still looking for something good, worst come to worst i will just add some live rock into one of the chambers.

 

Dosing -

Not dosing anything now, just some reef roids.

And do not really plan onto it. Hoping that waterchanges will suffice.

I do however have some tune kalkwaser and red sea foundation B that I got a while ago for free with some other thing that i bought. But no plans on using them for now.

 

So anyhow. Loads to consider, luckily tank is doing quite well i think, so i am in no rush to get any of the above done. Hopefully I will get some valuable feedback here or lurking through other journals and forum in general.

[rimga123]

7 minutes ago, DNR88 said:

I like the style of the tank. Looks a bit old-skool, but nice to see. 🙂

Thank you! I do feel like i am a bit old school, old car, back pain and so on 😅

[eaa]

Hi @rimga123 I do have skimmer just like that and having trouble configure it properly. Do you do wet or dry skimming?

Nice tank you got there, cheers.

[rimga123]

7 hours ago, eaa said:

Hi @rimga123 I do have skimmer just like that and having trouble configure it properly. Do you do wet or dry skimming?

Nice tank you got there, cheers.

Hi Eaa!

It helps if you have it in a chamber where water level does not fluctuate. I pushed the skimmer down as much as I could (just a person preference) and then did micro adjustments to the air feed every minute or so till it looked ok. 

As you can see in the photo above, the skimmate is very dark in color, it is quite "thin", but i think that i could make it a lot drier if i raised the skimmer a bit and opened up the air a bit more. But I do not think that it is needed, at the moment at least.

 

[eaa]

16 hours ago, rimga123 said:

Hi Eaa!

It helps if you have it in a chamber where water level does not fluctuate. I pushed the skimmer down as much as I could (just a person preference) and then did micro adjustments to the air feed every minute or so till it looked ok. 

As you can see in the photo above, the skimmate is very dark in color, it is quite "thin", but i think that i could make it a lot drier if i raised the skimmer a bit and opened up the air a bit more. But I do not think that it is needed, at the moment at least.

 

I will try your suggestion, it means if I want to make it dry, it needs to be put the skimmer not deep enough or just below the water line. Water line in my back sump relatively stable, I have an ATO. Thank you.

[rimga123]

What I meant was, that if you rise the skimmer up, you can make more air flow through it while keeping the water line lower. It should help with getting a dryer skimmate.

More air is always more better

[Ratvan]

On 12/12/2021 at 9:23 PM, rimga123 said:

Food for thought.

 

I feel like I am very indecisive about what I want to see in this aquarium, but also I am staying firm on what I want in it. If that make sense.

 

Fish -

I do not want it filled with fish, maybe a couple at the maximum. But what to get? I have pink spotted goby, but it is looking for a new home, reason being that it is just too big I feel. It will be replaced with a pair of some sort of smaller goby probably.

I want an open swimming fish, but dont want clowns, because from my past experience I find them to be very aggressive and adult clows are quite big, too big for a 15g.

Chromis viridis sounds like a good option on paper, could fit a couple. But don't want to risk with their disease. Also they are also kind of meh..

Would love a pair of bagai cardinals, but i would not keep any shrimp with them from what I've read, which is a problem (explanation at the invertebrates section).

Will most likely adapt a couple of mollies to saltwater just to keep bioload up till I decide what to get.

 

Invertebrates  -

I want 1-2 cleaner shrimps, 1-2 anemone porcelain crabs, we often get some feeder ghost shrimp at the local lfs, so would love to add some of those and one fire shrimp. And a red serpent star fish, had one for 3 years and I really enjoyed seeing it. And maybe something else interestinf that I may find at the local lfs.

I am quite firm to what I want there. Easy to say that it will be an invert dominant tank. So I have to choose my fish carefully.

 

Coral - would love a couple more types of zoas, especially yellow, blue and maybe some rasta. Some palys that i have right now i wont be keeping and a small frag of green start polyp that i am not too fond of.

 

I want at least one more color variant of torch, some hammers and both ricordea yuma and florida, a little garden of different types would look good I think.

If i won't see any sps in it, I wont be heartbroken about it.

 

The tank is small and I believe that it is important to only put what you love in it instead of what you can get, just to fill in the space.

 

Equipment - 

I am happy with the light, skimmer and the powerhead. But from the three I would want to upgrade the powerhead within the upcoming year. I have looked into Nero, Jeabo and Hydor.

I have read that Nero often dies withing couple of years, so i will try to avoid them, Seen very few people happy with jebao wavemamers, reliability and noise issues. But the hydor aqamai kps has my attentjon for now. Have not seen too many bad thing about it, but I will keep reading.

My fish tank is my bedroom, so I have to consider how noisy the equipment is.

Which bring me to the next point.

The return pump. I have a tunze silent on order  and hopefully it will be here within next week, I am getting really tired with return pumps noise at this stage, currently running sicce micro.

 

Sump -

Biggest issue i have right now is the intake side. If i switch the sock for a media rack. I could save some space in other chambers. So i am lurking for options, may just create something out if egg crate really, seem like it would easy enough.

But since I have very little of rock in my display, I want to get the best bio media that I can. I can easily get maxspect nano-tech bio spheres or blocks at my local LFS. But after seeing them in person they dont look porous at all and just heavy really, adds for them look good, but have not seen too much of a good feed back on them (please change my mind). 

So i am still looking for something good, worst come to worst i will just add some live rock into one of the chambers.

 

Dosing -

Not dosing anything now, just some reef roids.

And do not really plan onto it. Hoping that waterchanges will suffice.

I do however have some tune kalkwaser and red sea foundation B that I got a while ago for free with some other thing that i bought. But no plans on using them for now.

 

So anyhow. Loads to consider, luckily tank is doing quite well i think, so i am in no rush to get any of the above done. Hopefully I will get some valuable feedback here or lurking through other journals and forum in general.

Loving this restart and that Torch is looking good. 

 

Open swimming Fish? Hmmm maybe a Royal Gramma, Pair of Possum Wrasse? Will tend to be on the small and shy side of things. 

 

I've not tried the Aqamai kps or teh Nero 3, i have had a couple of the Jebao pumps and nit had any issues with them at all but I do love the Tunze powerheads for simplicity and ease of use. 

 

Regarding the sump, a DIY option is always good even if it is to see how much room you could save, plus if it doesnt work you're not sat with an expensive piece of kit that you have to return or sell on if you dont like who it works 

 

Be careful with the Reef Roids but i'm sure you know that 

[rimga123]

8 hours ago, Ratvan said:

Loving this restart and that Torch is looking good. 

 

Open swimming Fish? Hmmm maybe a Royal Gramma, Pair of Possum Wrasse? Will tend to be on the small and shy side of things. 

 

I've not tried the Aqamai kps or teh Nero 3, i have had a couple of the Jebao pumps and nit had any issues with them at all but I do love the Tunze powerheads for simplicity and ease of use. 

 

Regarding the sump, a DIY option is always good even if it is to see how much room you could save, plus if it doesnt work you're not sat with an expensive piece of kit that you have to return or sell on if you dont like who it works 

 

Be careful with the Reef Roids but i'm sure you know that 

Thank you! I am very lucky that the torch has survived the neglect, it will be funding my future purchases.

If i could find any open swimming fish the size of a guppy, I'd be very happy

But that is not very common in reefs.

Tunze is so good, the nanostreams have served me now over 8years and still going. So i am really happy with it. I have a tunze 9002 skimmer as well with a dead pump, might fix it up and use that instead, form factor is nice, but I am really happy with RDC 150 performance.

I also got the tunze silence return pump yesterday.

And i have to say that it was a great success (imagine Borat gif here).

 

 

 

[rimga123]

Howdy ye all.

 

I have not posted in a while, but quite a few things has happened, new corals, fish, equipment and so on. I find it quite difficult to find the time to get the photos edited and sit down and put everything into words here. But "luckily" I contracted Covid and now I am working from home for a while, I do have more time to get sh*t done. Prepare for a photo dump, a mix between my phone and DSLR.

 

so lets start with a current (well almost) tank shot

 

I have sold a lot of corals that I did not really like or had too much of (cough cough torch coral), which has funded some new addition.

I have also found a new home for my pink spotted goby, it was a great fish, but my tank is just too small for him.

 

before goby left my care, I tried to acclimate 6 mollies, but only 4 made it. obviously the one that I liked the most, did not..

One was killed by a goby, the other just did not make the transition. I spent over 48hours drip acclimating them.

i left them in a breeder box for the first couple of days, so I could monitor them closely and take them out ASAP if any of them don't make it. but they were all fine the first couple of days. Half black and half orange was my favorite, unfortunately it passed away, i got 3 regular mollies, all different colors. White, bright orange and then half n half. two of them survived. I also got 3 balloon mollies just to see if they would make the transition and all of them did very well. Although goby did try to eat one alive and he did rip off a sailfin and a side fin. I kept wounded molly separated in a breeder box for a week or so, i did not expect for it to make it but molly is still doing fine, healing quite quickly.

All of them, even the balloon mollies are an impressive swimmers.

The reason why I got different types and colors of mollies was that I read that some do better than others, but i should have just bought a bunch of one type because right now its just not very aesthetically pleasing. might swap them in the future if I decide to keep mollies. they do an ok job with hair algae, although I expected for them to be a bit better at picking it from what I read on the interwebs. They much more prefer a bacterial film.

 

I think that all of them are males, so it is very unlikely that i will get any babies out of them.

 

I did not plan onto getting some more fish so soon but I also bought a yellow clown goby and an engineer goby the size of a yellow clown goby. I know that it will outgrow this tank and i do not plan on upgrading to a larger tank. i will just rehome him when I'll think that he has grew too big. I always wanted one and I do love his personality. My plan is to fill the tank with small fish, but bigpersonalityies, so far yellow clown goby has not impressed me. i have also a gold streak blenny on an order which should arrive withingnetxt week or to i hope.

I should probably mention that I got mollies because I wanted to keep the bio load up in the tank while the pink spotted goby was gone. i did not expect to get more fish so soon.

 

Photo limit has been reached, so i will continue in the following post.

 

[rimga123]

another couple additions to the tank.

 

A Cleaner shrimp. so far he has bean a grade A assholes. I do love how interactive he is, but he makes it nearly impossible to feed the coral directly.

 

I also got a yellow banded coral shrimp, in my defense I thought that the yellow one is the one that is not aggressive but I recently read that they are quite aggressive and i should have been been looking for the blue one, but so far he has been a model citizen. He hides most of the time.

 

I also caught a common prawn in the local rock pools at the Irish seas. he is tiny and doing great. I only drip acclimated him for couple of hours and then temp matched, so far he is eating and active. very interesting addition, absolutely love him.

 

 

fourth crustacean that I added was a porcelain crab. Wanted one for ages and now got a chance to owe one. He is super adorable and has hosted my shrooms, hammer coral and now leather cabbage coral. I don't have any anemones right now, but would love to get one or two rock flower anemones, they are super expensive here in Ireland though.

 

 

I have also added some snails, 2 whatever they are called and 5 Astraea phoebia. the latter ones. I have no idea how do they survive in the wild, I constantly have to flip them upright. also my red legged hermit keeps terrorizing them and flipping them over, he might have to go..

Photos in the next post.

 

 

[rimga123]

A photo of one of the snails, he-she is kinda cute.

I would love to add a turbo mexican snail and a Annular-ring Cowrie to the mix.

 

and that is about all the fish-inverts that I have added.

 

now onto the corals!

 

I was and still am trying to sell-swap some corals that I don't like that much, they were taking too much space down on the sand in front of the tank, so I copied someone here from nano reef and made myself a DIY quick frag rack from egg crate, sorry for not @'ing the person, I cannot recall at the moment but if you are reading and recognize your own idea, please let me know!

 

By selling some of the torch coral heads that I had, I have earned some decent pocket change to spend on corals. and the new additions as follows.

 

a Purple torch

 

2 different hammer corals, one i bought from a person and one from the LFS. the one that I bought from a person got crushed, so out of 2 heads i was left with 5 tiny ones. I glued the pieces to the rock and hoped for the best. luckily it has recovered very quickly. Quite chuffed about it.

 

LFS torch

 

And the other one, as you can see from a photo above it has recovered very well (just on the left of the other hammer)

 

I also got some zoas, i traded the others and I am not sure on the timeline when happened what, but i am quite happy with the selection of zoas that i have right now. I don't know the names of all of them, but i will do my best.

 

rastas

 utter chaos

pink diamonds

Sunny-d's or mega rainbow zoas? Hard to say but i do think that they are mega's because from what i gathered online they seem to have shorter "tentacles"

something something red

white zombie zoas maybe?

 

radioactive dragon eye zoas?

 

 

 

[rimga123]

and i have no idea what are the following called, please lemme know!

 

I consider my zoa list done, don't have any that i would really want to get, but if something interesting pops up i might snag it. the plan is to just let them grow for now.

 

 

onto the shrooms!

I swapped a head of a torch coral for green and red rhodactis mushroom and i have been enjoying them quite a bit, would love to add a couple more to the "collection"

 

and at some stage I bought a frag of orange ricordea florida with three small heads on it. one of my favorite corals and i hope to get many more in the future.

I have booked a blue one and will hopefully have it in couple of weeks. i will most likely transfer them onto the rock with gorgonians.

the other two did not make into the frame, quite at an awkward angle to photograph. they are quite small but have a huge appetite for pellets and mysis shrimps.

and a bonus very bright red mushroom.

i have also got myself a purple gorgonian and 5 different acans. all tiny frags but they will grow! i hope...

acans are gold, green, red and whatever else. i feel like they are the zoas of LPS corals

colors are still quite poor, but hopefully they will develop better as they grow. I do enjoy feeding them.

 

i still have not found their forever home in the tank, some are quite small and at an awkward angle to photograp. will try to improve that in the future.

 

At some stage i also got Lobo, but traded it soon after, it just didin't really grew on me for some reason, cool coral though.

 

[rimga123]

And i believe that the last addition was this toxic green candy cane coral. also you can see that my old trumpet coral is bouncing back.

 

 

I have also attended my very first frag swap and scored a free SPS, it was not in the best of shape but I got it from a gentleman who purchased a torch coral from me before and was quite happy with it. its a purple stylophora  if am not wrong. as you can see it has some white patches, they seem to have polyps and from what i gather it was one of the branches that wasn't getting much light nor flow so I am hoping for a quick recovery to a formal glory. It has gotten better already withing couple of weeks.

 

and I think that is all, hopefully I did not forget about anything. if I have I will update the list in the future posts.

 

Now that I look back, it has been quite a few new additions and it seems that i have added many inverts, i do not see them too often.

I think that I will let everything grow in for now and just monitor the situation, but i would love to get a dragon soul torch, couple more ricordeas and maybe another hammer.

 

onto the "dry goods" side of things.

I have purchased myself a DD refractometer and I am absolutely loving it, I should have invested in one sooner. Before I used to use a hydrometer (the one that looks like a thermometer, not the plasticy one, but i do have one of them as well, from the "back in the day") and it has consistently been showing very similar results as the refractomere , but refractometer is so much easier use.

 

I have also upgraded (well maybe not upgraded, just changed) the powerhead.

Tunze nanostream 6045 is gone and it has been replaced by a Jebao Swl-10. I know that I have said in the previous post that I wont be getting a Jebao pump, but I have talked with a couple local reefers and they convinced me to got for it, so i ordered one from Aliexpress and had it in my hands withing 3 weeks.

So far I am not too impressed. I went for the slw-10 instead of a slw-20 because Slw-10 was rated at max 4000liter - per hour, with an option to go as low as 30% with the controller and i thought that it would be plenty, but even at the highest output its not making the water move as much as my tunze did at the lowest setting (max 4500liter per hour -min 1500liter per hour) and i felt that tunze was too strong for me at the lowest power setting. Which is super weird to me, but anyway, maybe i should have gotten a SLW20 or maybe i will get another SLW 10 in the future. although SLW did increase my tank temperature. Onto the next part.

 

I have also bought myself a DD temperature controller, I opted for the DD instead of the InkBird because of how compact and nice the display unit was. InkBird is just massive.

I have preset the temperature to 24.5C and it has been keeping it at that very stable.

But when i got my Jebao pump, during the day the temp increases to 25.5c now, sometimes even to nearly 26 and goes back down to 24.5c at night, i presume because the pump goes into the night mode, I run it at 50% during the day on W2 setting. I would run it at 100% but I am afraid that pump would not last too long. I do love how the torch corals swing in the waves instead of a constant stream of water.

photo attached of the DD display.

 

I also purchased Salifert Calcium and kh/alk tests, but have not used them yet. I will do a water change this weekend and will monitor both for 7 days and see if i need to dose anything or can i rely on the waterchanges alone. I really do not want to dose..

 

Another thing that I purchased is Red Sea reef energy AB+ and have been dosing it for a week, about 1.5ml per day.

I have not seen much improvement in coral health or polyp extension yet, but maybe thats just because I just keep looking at them daily and don't notice minor improvements.

 

and that concludes everything I spend my hard earned money on so far. I don't think that i left anything out in the dry good department.

 

so onto the other things.

Some issue that I have encountered.

I scraped the front glass panel somehow and that is super annoying. I have no idea how it happened. I actually managed that withing first week of owning the tank, but I forgot to mention in the previous post.

The scrape is on the outside glass and that makes it even weirder to me.

 

 

I also think that I had a case of brown jelly disease.

 

as you can see, the head is retracted and being gulfed by this brown mass and it seems that one head bellow has died recently too. I Did not notice it because it was the other side of the colony. outside my normal field of view. I did not try to save it. I just broke the branch off with the infected head and disposed it, the rest of the colony seem to be fine.

 

and that is about as serious of an issue that i had.

I am still battling some Aiptasia. Aiptasia - X seems to work to an extent, but small aiptasias always appear where the treated aiptasias were and now they scattered throughout the tank and I dont really know how to proceed now. I dont want pepermit shrimp and I cannot really put any kind of fish that would eat them. any suggestions on that?

little pesky things.

 

My Gorgonia that came from my previous (very neglected) tank is still full of hair algae, but it seems like it is bouncing back to life, i can see some polyp extension and I hope that the goldstreak blenny will make a short work of the green hair algae on it.

 

I do have bits of green hair algae scatered throughout the tank, but it does not bother me at all. Tank has only been setup recently and I am sure that it will go away with time.

 

I keep forgetting to push the tank forward while I perform the water change, so as you can see I have not yet cleaned the salt creep of the rear glass panel.

 

that is it I think. I will do a Photo dump in the next post of a photos that i have not got to use within the write up,

[rimga123]

The photo dump

 

extreme water change

 

 

I absolutely love this little piece of an ocean in the morning when it gets a bit of a direct sunlight.

[rimga123]

So a quick update!

Finally remembered to push the tank forward during waterchange so I could clean the back wall from the water droplets. And I did a bit of a cable "management" too

 

Before

 

and after

 

Now it looks 100 timer better.

So i tested alk and ca before water change with salifert kit and it was as followed

Kh ~6.7 and Ca ~390

it has gone down quite a bit in a week

I am looking to start dosing all for reef solution, but may not get it till next week. I do however have red sea reef foundation B that i may start dosing before i get all for reef.

I also tested my new water from LFS and it came in at

Kh ~8.7 and Ca ~465.

 

I did a 50% water change

And the test results after the water change were (maybe 40mins after the WC)

Kh ~8.5 and Ca ~430

A day later at 7pm, roughly 24hours after the WC and the alk and calcium is the exactly the same

Kh ~8.5 and ca ~430

I did expect a bit of a drop, but i will keep testing daily. 

 

I also cannot wait till i can get rid of that frag rack. I am slowly setting up a 10litre pest tank and i think that most of the frags from the rack will go into it.

[rimga123]

Small update on what has happened to the tank in the past couple of weeks.

I scored a free clownfish, name is Peter. Super aggresive.

And my tail spot blenny order finally came in. He was hiding for couple of days so i thought that he jumped. Because after I let him in the tank he was hanging out at the surface and the lid was off because I was acclimating other new i habitants.

But after couple of days his came out and he is always out and about now. Hopefully he will help with the hair algae.

I rehomed the mollies into a pest tank temporarily, giving them away to a new reefer. So they are just waiting to be collected. I am still unsure if should create a journal for the pest tank.

I also have added the following

1x red bubble tip anemone.

3x turbo snails

1x Nassarius Snail

1x dragon soul torch.

1x spotted anemone shrimp that is currently hosting a Stylophora

Will add photos when i get a chance to sit down in front of a tank with a dslr.

Also my purple torch coral spawned, i wonder if anything will come out of it.

 

I have also removed the frag rack, so I will have to take another full tank shot.

 

 

[rimga123]

I forgot to mention that I have added 250g of seachem matrix into the second chamber under the skimmer.

And all the fish got names now
Clownfish is Peter
Tailspot blenny is Benny
Clown Goby is Wan kenobi
Engineer goby is now a Doctor

And the additions that i forgot to mention
I got a frag of red jawbreaker mushroom, that has gone completely gold in the persons tank that bought them originally, so i wonder if it will ever get its red color back, but gold mushroom is very cool as well IMO  and I also got a frag of some sort of kenya tree.
Red bubble tip anemone is situated in one of those glass vase things with suction cups that are often used in freshwater tanks, anemone has not tried to get out of it yet and i hope that it will stay that way. I am thinking of glueing some xenia on the glass vase so it would get hidden a bit and with a hope that if anemone ever wants to walk away it would not try to climb through co

[A.m.P]

That clown goby may kill your milka stylo, they're unfortunately known to be quite aggressive eaters of sps polyps, it also looks as if the salt and pepper colored molly may be a female. It's worth noting some people have trouble keeping cleaners and coral banded shrimp with mollies, apparently their finnage or something is softer and the shrimp can and will shred their fins, gills, eyes etc. if they're large enough/get the opportunity.

 

Quite enjoy the way your reboot has come along and thank you for sharing.

[rimga123]

Thank you!

Mollies seemed to do pretty well with both shrimps, i have not seen any of the shrimp to even attempt to clean any of the mollies. Although the most dominant molly did some damage to the other ones. It has been a fun experiment with them and they did cope with Salinity and strong current much better than i expected. They all will be rehomed this week and i am thinking of rehoming the clownfish as well, he is just insanely aggresive.

[rimga123]

A more official update.

 

New additions like per my last post, plus more.

 

1x clownfish

1x gold streak blenny

1x red bubble tip anemone.

3x turbo snails

1x Nassarius Snail

1x dragon soul torch.

1x spotted anemone shrimp

1x feather duster

1x jawbreaker mushroom

2x ricordea florida. green and lime

1x firework clove polyp, not doing well and I do not have a photo of it at the moment.

 

New equipment ( to me)
 1x ATI 6 channel dosing unit. Got it a good price and I am hoping to get my hands on All For Reef soon. also it is nice to have an option to dose more if I need to.

 

Photo of a tank to start everything off

 

Clownfish - Peter is frankly an asshole... super aggressive. He keep terrorizing me whenever I have to get anything done in the tank and also he keeps bullying other fish. Only the Golds streak blenny - Benny takes no shit and fights back instead of ruining away, so he mostly stays unharmed. Clown goby on the other hand looks super stressed out and can never leave his corner. I have to spot feed him so he could get any foods.

Peter also started hosting BTA immediately, which was a welcome surprise. 

 

Originally I planned to keep the anemone in a glass vase thing with suction cups. but it was too much of an eye sore so i situated it in a plastic cup with a small rock in it. and it has never tried to climb off. I have also glued some Xenia on the plastic cup to hide it and it worked quite well, hoping for Xenia to fully cover it soon and hopefully anemone wont try to climb through Xenia if he ever decides to wonder around. Now that i look back at it, I wish that I would have thought of using a small clay pot, it would have looked much better fro the get go and I bet that it would be much easier to make coral stick onto it. Overall I am quite please how it turned out.

 

 

Gold streak blenny - Benny is one of the best purchases so far IMO. such a character and he even comes to nib onto my hand whenever I'm doing anything in the tank. He also has helped with the green hair algae a lot. I have not done any manual removal from the rock or left side glass. I doesn't really bother me that much and I figured that it will help a bit with the excess nutrients in the water and provide some food for the inhabitants. Benny is also super Photogenic.

 

 

Spotted anemone shrimp is also quite an interesting invert to observe. he keeps everyone away from his stylophora. I originally got the bubble tip anemone for shrimp but has not shown any interest in it whatsoever.  Photos in the next post.

 

 

[rimga123]

 

 

I have not had any losses so far except for some snails that became the victims of a red legged hermit and corals are mostly doing well. just the firework cloves are not extending fully yet, they may need another week or so to recover I would think. They came to me from a very low nutrient setup where they were not doing great either.  All coral are growing, not super quick, but an acceptable rate. I try to feed coral like acans, ricordeas and torches every couples of days and it seems to help with the grow rates. I even seen Jawbreaker discosoma and red discosoma mushrooms eating frozen Mysis, I though that their mouths are useless. they use to never respond to pellets for which acans go crazy.

The onyly consequences of heavy feeding that I have notice is some brown diatoms that appear the day after the feeding on the sandbed but they dispensary withing couples of days now which I don't mind at all. I am sure that I have forgotten a lot that I meant to type out, but cannot think of anything right now, so just enjoy the photos!

 

Rastas

 

 

stylophora

 

 

 

Dragon soul torch + torch garden