PJPS Posted December 9, 2022 Share Posted December 9, 2022 Tank IM 20 Outside DIMS: Length 23.62” Width: 15” Height: 13” Display DIMS: Length 23.16” Width: 11.38” Height: 13” Sand & Rock Ocean Direct Sand (10lbs) CaribSea Liferock Shapes (15lbs) Equipment Lights Radion XR15 Pro G6 Reefbrite KHO 15 Powerheads 2 MP10s set to alternating pulses switching every 4h. I play with flow constantly, so this is unlikely to stay this way longer than a few weeks. Nero 3 in the saltwater container. Skimmer Eshopps nano (foam removed from skimmer & pump) Simple BRS style CO2 scrubber attached (non recirculating) HVAC Cobalt NeoTherm 75w Honeywell Fan mounted to the wall beside above the tank. Controller Neptune apex circa 2019 Dosing 1 Versa (Kalk) 4 Head ReefDose Testers Trident 4x per day Hanna Low Range PO4 weekly Hanna HR NO3 weekly RO/DI Aquatic Life 4 stage ATO/AWC Auto Aqua Smart AWC 3 White 5G Buckets (ATO reservoir, Saltwater reservoir, Exported tank water) backlit so water level is visible. Salt Aquaforest Reef Salt (Mixed to 1.025) Livestock SPS RR Red Dragon RRC Holy Grail CC Purple Haze FG Gila Monster FG Mother Pucker FG Grape Soda DV Bonsai Cali Tort Limeade Nasuta Teal Echinata ND Red Montipora Digitata ND Rainbow Montipora LPS Goniopora Aussie Blastomusa ND Neon Trumpets FCC Bling Bling Cyphastrea Micromussa Lords FCC Jack-O-Lantern Leptoseris Soft Long Tentacle Japanese Deepwater Toadstool 2 Varieties of GSP Photosynthetic Gorgonian Ricordea Red Discos - Discosoma That 70s Shroom - Discosoma Crock Skins - Rhodactis Persian rugs - Rhodactis Money Shot - Rhodactis Bullseye - Rhodactis FCC Hairy Green - Rhodactis Fish 2 Clownfish 1 Royal Gramma 1 watchman goby Inverts 2 Peppermint shrimp 1 Pistol shrimp 5 Dwarf hermits 3 African hermits 1 Polkadot hermit 9 Nasarius 2 Strawberry conchs 4 Trochus 3 Astrea 2 Star astrea 3 Turbos A thriving pod population Food Frozen Reef Frenzy big seaweed removed. Get the nano to skip this. Our LFS isn’t super consistent keeping nano stocked. Hikari Mysis Alternated Randomly daily. 1 cube mysis or 1 1” square of Reef Frenzy. Powdered Benepets Coral Frenzy Alternated randomly 1/16 tsp mixed daily with frozen. We’ll substitute Reef Roids every now and then (twice a month roughly) to bump PO4 Frozen and powdered food is put in 20mls tank water, thawed, mixed, and fed in 3-4 feedings. Frozen is not rinsed. Liquid Oyster Feast - 4 drops into a powerhead a few times a week after lights out. Live Phyto - 5ml every 2-3 days Dry Vitalis flakes and pellets - only used if no frozen is available, and used sparingly even then Feeding regimen inspired by Reinaldo of Pirate’s Reef. Maintenance Daily 1-2L water changes Change floss every 2 days Empty skimmer cup every 2-3 days Change carbon weekly Change RowaPhos monthly Clean skimmer pump and body every 2-3 months Clean return pump every 2-3 months Clean media caddies every 2-3 months This is the ideal, bits and pieces slide around. Filtration Filter floss Marine Pure gems RowaPhos 3 Tbsp in a bag changed monthly Carbon (ROX or ReefSpec) 3 Tbsp in a bag changed weekly Eshopps nano skimmer 1.3ml daily NO3PO4X We run an inTank IM caddy in each side of the IM 20. Biological media on one side, carbon and Rowa on the other. Filter floss top layer on both sides. Parameters Alk 6.8 - 7.5 Ca 400 - 430 Mg 1400 - 1440 NO3 10 - 20 PO4 0.03 - 0.1 PH 7.9 - 8.3 Dosing Daily 425ml full strength kalk (Seachem) dripped 24/7 with Versa 1.8ml Foundation B (Liquid) 1.4ml Foundation A (Liquid) 1ml Foundation C (Liquid) 1.3ml NOPOX We live in a high-rise condo, and this particular combination gets us to a pH We can live with in the cold Canadian winter, and a great pH the rest of the year when we can open the windows. The dosing is all spread out over 24h. Live Phyto - 5ml every 2-3 days 10ml Eco Balance every 3-4 weeks The Story So Far This tank was started November 2021. It was started with Stax rocks, but was rescaped by my wife with LifeRock in May. That rock was run in a bucket of heated saltwater for 5 weeks, with 1tsp Aquaforest Life Source dosed weekly. The lid was loosely on to keep light to a minimum. We’ve had 0 algae/cyano/dino issues doing it this way. The rocks were replaced 50% at a time, 4 weeks apart. Live stock was added in the following order, after cycling for 4 weeks, and testing 0 Ammonia and 0 Nitrite. Clowns Mushrooms 6 each, hermits, nasarius snails, trochus snails Various LPS (some we kept, some didn’t make it) Royal Gramma Toadstool Goby Pistol Pair More mixed hermits and snails Montipora Acropora More mixed hermits and snails This was spread evenly across 12 months. Our philosophy is largely influenced by Nicholas Marion @Aqua Splendor. Build a full ecosystem, from phyto, to micro and macro grazers. Create habitats for the animals, adjust what you do in response to the animals in your care. For instance, we feed many foods that everything can eat. Pretty much everything eats the powdered food, phyto, oyster feast, and tiny bits of LRS. The goby is well fed now.The fish eat anything large enough to see. We like a nice diversity of invertebrates, and the microscopic food keeps them thriving. As we notice fewer inverts, we replenish. As there aren’t any massively useful nano fish, we think a healthy and thriving crew of inverts is a necessity in a nano tank That said, in the first year here are the bummers & battles. Cyano (Best Fix: just go straight to a chemiclean treatment, dose bacteria weekly for a month afterward) LCA Dinos (Best Fix: Sponge Excel 3 drops every 4 days, 5ml live phyto every other day, Tisbe or other pods, 10ml Ecobalance weekly. Don’t clean your glass. You are trying to outcompete it with anything - cyano, diatoms, GHA are all easy by comparison. Skip the blackouts and higher temps, they do nothing towards the solution and add stress to the already stressed system. Run nutrients 100:1 eg Nitrates 30 Phosphates 0.3, neither should be 0. Identifying strain of ydinoflagellates is critical to solving the problem. I highly recommend Mack’s Dino support group on Facebook. They are THE dino solvers, just follow the advice, it’s literally the best around.) Diatoms (Best Fix: Pods & Live phyto.) GHA (Best Fix: get nutrients in line, 100:1 N:P eg 30:0.3. Manual removal, increase snail and crab numbers by diversity and amount.) 3 Fancy mushrooms disappeared An Australian and an Indonesian torch coral started to fight, and the Indonesian lost. The Australian one died six weeks later. Several micromusa never got comfy and eventually died. A chalice and cyphastrea frag didn’t make it. Several Montipora frags were tossed after Montipora Nudibranch eggs were spotted on the frag rack (why you should monitor frags on a rack for a few weeks before placement). Several acros stripped as the chemistry wasn’t yet stable enough. Larger (maybe double the price) encrusted Acropora frags improve success approximately 90%. 20G is too small to nurse tiny frags until you get some SPS in there and your dosing is dialed in. What Would We Do Differently Start with Life rock and dose 1 teaspoon of LifeSource mud for the first 10 weeks that the tank is wet with rock in it, including during the cycle. Add two bottles of pods and dose a couple of mls of live phyto every few days and get them reproducing after adding the first fish. Start dripping Kalk much earlier on, even if it’s a very mild solution. Upping the saturation as the demand from LPS slowly climbs. Do this slowly, go by Alk tests. Get a Hanna checker, you’ll be testing Alk weekly if not daily. Run high alk & calcium while only softies to encourage coralline. Our Reefing Story We got into reeefing shortly after my diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2006. Prior to that I was a software engineer, my disability was enough to take me out of the workforce however. We were immediately addicted. A weekly LFS trip minimum. That first tank was taken down within a year. Although largely a success, we hadn’t anticipated how much of a roller coaster MS would be. Fast forward to 2019, I am now in a wheelchair and have plenty of time to dedicate to something. We started a FOWLR in a BioCube 16. It eventually got overrun with algae, and with the pandemic keeping us home… We had never lost our love of reef tanks and had contemplated numerous times starting another reef. So last fall we started up the Innovative Marine Nuvo 20. We agreed to split the duties. I’d handle all the research, the chemistry, monitoring, dosing, anything that didn’t need fine motor skill. She’d handle all the stuff that did, and all the heavy lifting, and we’d automate as much as we could as budget allowed. So while there is a great deal of automation, you can think of it as accessibility. It started with an AI Prime HD, but that got switched for a Radion XR15 pro when we started to go for SPS. Then we added the Reefbrite strips. We tried a small refugium in one of the back chambers, that turned out to largely be useless. After the rescape we decided to put everything on inch and a quarter frag discs and plugs, Securing them to the rock with a glue - epoxy - glue sandwich. This makes them easy to remove with bone cutters. Eventually you have a series of flat platforms of epoxy that you can just move the Frag discs between as you learn what corals like it where. This is mostly for the SPS so we can easily move them around without drilling the rock. Our set up is pretty dialled in at the moment. Input matches export, The ecosystem is stable to a large degree. Photos These are iPhone 14 Pro Max photos. We can’t find an orange filter that fits so any tips are gladly appreciated. These are largely from late October. Long View FG Grape Soda Limeade Nasuta Teal Echinata RRC Holy Grail RR Red Dragon (Daylight, before lights come on) More photos coming soon, questions welcome 😊. I use voice typing, so ignore anything too crazy, just point it out and I'll re-answer 😉 6 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 10, 2022 Author Share Posted December 10, 2022 Is there a spectrum we can flip the lights to? That’s PHX14 to the iphone. Is 12k a better spectrum for photos with no filter? Please advise 📷 Quote Link to comment
Gsepanik Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 Wow will be following along. I hope to have an SPS dominated nano one day. Until then I will be soaking up the information and experience here! 1 Quote Link to comment
ninjamyst Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 What a great write up! 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 13, 2022 Author Share Posted December 13, 2022 We found a 67mm clip for the iphone, good photos coming soon. The tank runs heavy blues, even at it's peak running PHX14 the blues blow out the sensor, hell even at 12k it's all blue in the photos. I wrote the write up as if speaking to myself, so "you" is me, please nobody think I'm saying how YOU should do stuff, it's just how we do it 🙂 Getting some stuff placed today, so there may be a very blue FTS later today/tomorrow. Amazon isn't "next day" this close to the holidays 😞 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 13, 2022 Author Share Posted December 13, 2022 Also all lineage corals, RR or FG or whatever, the lineage is VERY likely the real deal. No chop shop look-a-likes, those have trade names with no lineage. My vendor for these pieces is Adam from Frag Garage (watch his Reef Bum or Reef Dudes appearances), he knows the providence of essentially all his pieces, or they are purchased from the source. Personally, I could care less about the snobby side, but these tank hardened specimens are 1000x easier in a 20G nano. I have lost 0% of stuff from Adam, his system is also crazy clean. I've yet to find more than pods in the dip water (I still dippem). For my Canadian reefing brethren, here's where we shop: Livestock Corals: Frag Garage (expensive but entirely worth it), New Dawn Aquaculture, Candy Corals/Fragbox Fish & Inverts: Fragbox (exceptional hermit crab variety) / Candy Corals (good aptasia eating peppermint shrimp, consistently has the right species) Dry Goods: Aquriumdepot.ca, reefsupplies.ca, jlaquatics.ca. Those are listed preferentially. Quote Link to comment
Reefkid88 Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 Great looking tank. For pics,order a 52mm brown filter off of Amazon or Ebay for like $8,and order a cheap amazon phone case and use a few small drops of super glue to make the filter stick and just swap cases during your photoshoot. Brown filters are 1000000x better than orange when shooting under full blue. https://youtu.be/Bb0jio-Pfck 2 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 13, 2022 Author Share Posted December 13, 2022 1 minute ago, Reefkid88 said: Great looking tank. For pics,order a 52mm brown filter off of Amazon or Ebay for like $8,and order a cheap amazon phone case and use a few small drops of super glue to make the filter stick and just swap cases during your photoshoot. Brown filters are 1000000x better than orange when shooting under full blue. https://youtu.be/Bb0jio-Pfck Thank you! We got the 67mm so our existing orange Tiffen filter could be used. This isn't the first time I've heard brown > orange. I'll start saving for a 67mm brown, unfortunately we're far from well off, so it'll likely be after xmas. I massively appreciate the tip! We'd been trying to get the new phone to play nice with the tank, as the latest iphone camera is nicer than our Rebel T5 DSLR so far for easy macro shots. 1 Quote Link to comment
joshthebox Posted December 13, 2022 Share Posted December 13, 2022 Nice to see some classic Canadian strains! Agreed, Adam at FragGarage is great. Be careful if you buy Acros from Fragbox. 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 13, 2022 Author Share Posted December 13, 2022 4 hours ago, joshthebox said: Nice to see some classic Canadian strains! Agreed, Adam at FragGarage is great. Be careful if you buy Acros from Fragbox. I've never bought acros from FB, all wild acros to my knowledge. They're great for inverts, like a say. and they get the occasional crazy mushroom or LPS. Both have super friendly and helpful staff :). Toronto pricing, is what it is (too expensive for a person on disability). Your TOTM looks amazing! Also, our tank setups are ridiculously similar 😂 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 14, 2022 Author Share Posted December 14, 2022 It’s maintenance day, and someone very kindly took some photos with her new phone. The Radion is set to 14k, no filter, straight from the phone. Most of the setup Rainbow Montipora Counterclockwise Toadstool, GSP, Scarlet Hermit, Money Shot, Green Hairy, Bullseye, Peppermint Shrimp Croc Skins, Polka dot hermit, Assorted Ricordea DV Bonsai 3 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 15, 2022 Author Share Posted December 15, 2022 Teal Echinata 3 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 16, 2022 Author Share Posted December 16, 2022 FG Grape Soda Quote Link to comment
mitten_reef Posted December 16, 2022 Share Posted December 16, 2022 On 12/13/2022 at 9:38 PM, PJPS said: The Radion is set to 14k, no filter, straight from the phone. If you can turn off the Reefbrite bars, the 14000K spectrum should be pretty friendly to phone camera. At least, it is on my Hydra32HDs when I use about 13500. Worth a shot Here's a link to my post that was shot at 13500K 1 Quote Link to comment
joshthebox Posted December 16, 2022 Share Posted December 16, 2022 On 12/13/2022 at 9:38 PM, PJPS said: It’s maintenance day, and someone very kindly took some photos with her new phone. The Radion is set to 14k, no filter, straight from the phone. Most of the setup Rainbow Montipora Counterclockwise Toadstool, GSP, Scarlet Hermit, Money Shot, Green Hairy, Bullseye, Peppermint Shrimp Croc Skins, Polka dot hermit, Assorted Ricordea DV Bonsai Just thought I'd give you a little back history on your DV bonsai strain if you didn't already know. It originated from this tank: https://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/128-tank-of-the-month 1 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 16, 2022 Author Share Posted December 16, 2022 1 hour ago, joshthebox said: Just thought I'd give you a little back history on your DV bonsai strain if you didn't already know. It originated from this tank: https://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/128-tank-of-the-month That's awesome! Thanks, I had no idea 🙂 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 18, 2022 Author Share Posted December 18, 2022 Interstellar Ricordea Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 21, 2022 Author Share Posted December 21, 2022 Limeade Nasuta Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted December 26, 2022 Author Share Posted December 26, 2022 Latest nutrients NO3 = 4.7 PO4 = 0.05 Currently feeding heavy, but the nutrients are low. Params Alk = 7.5 Ca = 405 Mg = 1405 Things are looking great. Just waiting for the new case to hold the camera filter. I can't get anything remotely colour accurate on the iphone 14 pro yet. 2 Quote Link to comment
mitten_reef Posted January 19 Share Posted January 19 how is it that there were more photos of your acros on @Variant's thread than on here. came here to check out the rest of your tank, hoping to see more acros. Post em up! 😁 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted January 21 Author Share Posted January 21 On 1/19/2023 at 9:34 AM, mitten_reef said: how is it that there were more photos of your acros on @Variant's thread than on here. came here to check out the rest of your tank, hoping to see more acros. Post em up! 😁 Well, you’re in luck 🐒 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted January 21 Author Share Posted January 21 Btw, if you want to follow my tank, I use AquaticLog to keep track of my tank. https://www.aquaticlog.com/aquariums/shieldspj/2 It’ll always have the latest data and livestock pictures. Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted January 22 Author Share Posted January 22 PJ’s Nano Gumbo V2 HEAVY (currently not used) 15ml live phytoplankton 1” square complete frozen 1/8 tsp probiotic powder food 1/8 tsp different probiotic powder food LIGHT (every day) 10ml tankwater 5ml live phytoplankton 1/8 probiotic powdered food (I alternate between two different ones) 1” square complete frozen 9 drops of amino acids dosed daily - basically a bit under the daily dose for the water volume. Start slow and add a drop every 5 days. I dose these straight to the tank, they don’t go in the gumbo. I just mix everything, let the frozen thaw in the rest, then feed in pipette sized servings across the day. It’s more time spent feeding, which may or may not be appealing. The ocean is a steady flow of various foods. Phytoplankton, pods, bacteria, seafood, are constantly floating by. This “gumbo” tries to replicate the ocean’s food chain requirements and feed the whole reef. This is Shaun Acro-Man Russell’s famous “soup” tank conditioning recipe, incorporated into daily feeding. All credit to him for creating a recipe for problem free marine tanks. My 20G Nuvo has been on autopilot and problem free since adopting a full biological approach. I must credit @Aqua Splendor for all his painstaking work. His nano series made me completely rethink the way I manage my tank. A complete food chain, properly maintained, is the best reefing philosophy I’ve tried. Run your saltwater aquarium like the ocean, sounds obvious. Endless thanks Nicholas. This will absolutely grow algae, it’s on purpose. It’ll feed all your herbivores. You should have plenty for every surface. If you see algae growing, add herbivores (pods, snails, hermits, fish), or add less gumbo per day. One thing I’d like to get dialed in is a liquid food for the SPS, but they thrive regardless. 1 Quote Link to comment
PJPS Posted January 22 Author Share Posted January 22 Softie Corner (refuge for the inverts, sometimes the flow is hard on the peppermint shrimp) 3 Quote Link to comment
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