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[STOCK] tinyreef


tinyreef

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after adding a bunch of frags (yellow polyps, sinularia, blastomussa, and a couple of zoos) i began noticing the clavularia "reaching" and browning up even more. i finally caved in and upgraded to the other side of the house.

 

the new location of the tank is on southern facing window and should get significantly more sunlight than before. but i really won't get a good gauge of it until the weekend, as i work during the day and don't get back until it's dark. d'oh!

 

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just another shot of the top. a fair amount of condensate is still constantly building up, even though i dropped the temps back down to about 78F.

 

the little opening where the wires and air hose enter still allows a fair amount of evaporation. i topped off about 10 oz. tonight. that's probably for 3~4 days worth of evaporation though.

 

i also started dosing b-ionic. about 4-drops of each part per day. i saw the #1 linger a bit longer than i'd like tonite so i may back off of that amount.

 

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back view in the new location. i think it should be better with the direct sunlight. the family room was prone to too much possible interference and oopsies anyways (kids, mine and others :angry: ).

 

more concerned about possible high temps from the additional/stronger sunlight though. we'll see how it goes.

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finally able to take a "lighted" pic of the new location (i.e. living room). the lighting is much more intense/direct and longer duration.

 

i had to add another level to my stand. (you like it, adin?) btw the top shelf on the stand is purposedly upside down to better support the tank. the stand is still on casters so i can maneuver the setup to view and maintainance.

 

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front view with 10AM sunlight. it's getting the full brunt of the morning sun so the pic's a little exposed. the temp is holding its own tho (~77F) but then again my wife keeps the house chilly. :scarry: <- also serves as a cold emoticon

 

probably be doing some waterchange stuff this weekend. i pruned some algae i had hitched in from my other tanks. :blush:

 

i had the salinity decently high since startup (1.029) and just moved it down the other day to 1.027. i'll probably push it further down to nsw level (1.026).

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Another neat idea. I wish you all the best with this set-up. I doubt whether it'd work where I live, we have waaaayyy too many cloudy days.

 

Best regards

 

Ann

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Ok. if nobody else is going to be honest with you, I will. Your tank looks like crap. Get some corals growing in there. The Snoopy lid is ridiculous as well. Sorry for being brutally honest, but its the truth.

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Ok. if nobody else is going to be honest with you, I will. Your tank looks like crap. Get some corals growing in there. The Snoopy lid is ridiculous as well. Sorry for being brutally honest, but its the truth.
heh, honesty is the best policy, dweak.

 

the tank's just starting out. if it looked good at this early of a stage it'd be a cheating tank imho.

 

there are corals growing in there. i'm sorry if my pics look like crap but there's: clavularia, 4-types of zoanthids, green sinularia, blastomussa, gsp, stoloniferan (generic), capnella, blue shroom, and yellow polyps. all of which are propped from my other tanks. in fact, the gsp and yellow polyps are from 8-yr-old and 9-yr-old colonies, respectively.

 

i did not want to put in ready-made frags/colonies because a big part of this setup is to test growth rates with sunlight. so most of the frags are micosmall (i.e. single polyps) or just smallish (e.g. capnella).

 

as for the snoopy lid, i never thought of it like that. good point and observation. :lol: but it's not a question of ridiculousness. it's a question of functionality. your comment is similar to saying a protein skimmer or calcium reactor looks ludicrous. they look funky but they serve very real purposes.

 

the lid/canopy is shaped like it is so that it self-cleans itself with the condensation that builds up. my exp with picos/reefs is that salt creep becomes a serious issue in certain cases (this being one due to the bubbles). the clarity of the lid obviously serves to allow light thru and the overall shape and look is just due to my inability to really fabricate with acrylic. sowwy.

 

thanks for your honesty though. i'd much rather have brutal honesty than polite lies. if i comment on someone/thing, i mean it. i don't sugarcoat it either. :flower:

 

hopefully, in a coupleof months the tank will have "grown in". then i'll be able to add cleaners or fish (yeah, you heard me :P ). actually, i need the corals to grow in to attach themselves. they're all loose, which is typical of how i frag and "mount". if it don't grow, it dies. a bit harsh but that's just how i reef.

 

thanks for the comments, come again!

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Jez, tiny he's right .....get it together man, I mean it's been what two weeks? You should be fraging stuff outa there already. You are working like this contest is gonna go on for six months or somthin. ;)

 

IME, this is the most interesting tank in the stock catagory I've seen yet.

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I think you are grossly misunderstanding Tiny's intentions, dweak. the pitched tank lid is not a "snoopy lid" as you so idiotically called it, but in fact, it is designed to reclaim evaporation, minimizing the need for top off. Oh, and there are some frags in there, you just didn't read back in the thread far enough to see that he had added them. Unlike so many people (myself included) tiny is thinking outside the reef box, and trying something novel. Sure, his tank might not be glowing with color right yet, but it he is starting with all small frags and seeing kind of growth he can achieve in his unique system.

 

So, sorry for being brutally honest right back at you dweak, but I think your a short sited trendy jerk, without the respect to look at a person's whole thread before making a comment. Wow... I didn't know I could be so harsh!

 

Jared

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thanks, ice.

 

i'm not sure if he was kidding or not but i have been getting some unusual comments here and there so i figured to take him at face-value and answer his q's.

 

i guess it's just so antithetical to what has always been preached about aquariums in general that some people don't grasp it yet. (feels like 2001~2002 again :rolleyes:

 

btw ann, Tropicorium (romulus, michigan) does a greenhouse setup (albeit on a commercial scale) but he's about 42-latitude. london's about 51-latitude. you could always supplement with a pc light. sun should be strong enough, it's the temp you have to watch. thanks for your comments too!

 

edit: thanks jared!

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btw ann, Tropicorium (romulus, michigan) does a greenhouse setup (albeit on a commercial scale) but he's about 42-latitude. london's about 51-latitude. you could always supplement with a pc light. sun should be strong enough, it's the temp you have to watch.

 

That's interesting. I do have a nano running at the moment with a refugium that is lit by natural sunlight alone. It was a bit of an experiment and I fully expected to have to add on some artificial lighting after it was set up but the algae in there (Chaetomorpha) grows better than it does in the T5 lit sump of my big tank. :lol: Mind you that's probably because the nano runs skimmerless.

 

I would never have considered trying corals without some form of artificial lighting before so your thread is particularly interesting to me.

 

Best regards

 

Ann

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im intrested in the lighting......... but i think i read somwhere that it wouldent get enough light, but that might have been wrong........... might have said its knot enough lighting for a one sided aquarium to be lighted buy the sun...

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Updates (you get more on the weekends! :lol: )

 

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view from the "end" of the tank. shows a typical (for me) brownish shroom just beyond the cap frag. fugly little guy, huh?

 

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but, once you turn the corner and view it front the "front" it turns into a pretty blue shroom. it's the same phenomena that occurs from viewing clams top/down versus from the side due to the light source reflection/refraction(?).

 

it's because in this case, the light source is toward the front (sunlight) so the viewer can see the coloration from the front pane of glass versus needing to view it top/down in a typical tank setting (also avoids those specialized clam tanks).

 

maybe you can tell already that i've been pondering on adding a baby clam to the system. concerned about ca/alk depletion tho (ime they suck it out like candy) and the feeding baby clams -> more maintenance work issue. bleah.

 

btw, the checkered effect (seen on the sandbed) in this pic is from the window screen, which has since been removed for additional light.

 

but to address Open's comment, i don't think it will suffer insufficient light here in front of the southern window. (i hope) it's pretty intense imo. it's also only on a side window with a beam blocking part of the light.

 

one of the benefits of the setup is that i can continually upgrade the lights. e.g. move from a northern window to a southern window, remove window screen (kinda like the eggcrate-effect method for light acclimation), move higher into more direct sunlight, over to the larger middle window, etc.

 

perrin's setup (more northernly of me, see latitude comment in the other post to ann) does nicely with muted greenhouse windows, i.e. not 100% clear. he does run mh supps but i think the majority of the light needs comes from the sunlight.

 

mary at seacrop runs a greenhouse too but she's in socal so you can't count her because she's cheating with that more southernly latitude. :P

 

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this kinda shows the intense shimmer-effect of the sunlight. i've been thinking about a larger scale tank as this one has shown decent promise so far. i'll have to take over some windows, i.e. home construction, but it shouldn't be too bad.

 

i'm figuring divorce court ain't as expensive as the new tank could be. and think of all the lighting money i'll be saving. it should come out a wash imo. :bling:

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no pics today, sorry for the bandwidth stress.

 

waterchanged 17 oz. again (it's the size of the cup). i noticed the water was a bit tinted green. i thought it was off before for the last couple of days but i figured it was the lighting and the glass. but in the white background of the dixie cup it was definitely greenish.

 

so i added a big bag of carbon into the tank. i gotta get a couple of those lee's carbon cartridges or those tiny refilleable ones. i'm a carbon user usually anyways so it's not out of my usual weapons of choice.

 

i'm actually not too surprised at the appearance of the greenish tint. that's always been one of the bugaboos with using sunlight, greenwater.

 

but i think it's more because i've been adding a fair amount of frags (14) and some of the rocks they've been on still carried nuisance algae form my other tanks. while i scrubbed most of them clean, they're still leaching (bleeding) into the tiny system. i think it should clear up by next weekend.

 

i've seen some good reactions from the corals already. good expansion/growth versus "stretching growth/expansion" (i.e. insufficient light).

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Update time

 

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to combat the greenwater issue beginning to develop (noted in the post above) i've added some carbon.

 

ok, ok, a lotta carbon. :blush:

 

it was the only size packet i had on-hand. i'll be getting some (much) smaller lee's carbon cartridges later.

 

so far though, the carbon has cleared up the water immensely. i compared it tonite and the tint was barely noticeable.

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yah, i just saw it. :huh:

 

 

well, at least now i can hook up my remora to the tank. :lol:

 

or maybe i'll upgrade to a super-duper air pump and diy a combo protein skimmer/uplift. hmmm... :wizard:

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Weekend Update

 

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switched out my bag o'carbon with a smallish lee's cartridge. altho it's not as small as i thought.

 

oh yeah, i also switched stands. happy, adin? actually, there's pro's and con's to the switch. while the new stand is much more stable because it's much heavier, now i'm much more limited in viewing the tank because the old stand was much more mobile (being on wheels). being limited on my light source angle, my front shots are now significantly crappier. (see next pic)

 

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front view taken from an awkward angle, hence the reflection from the window. sorry.

 

added a couple of corals. not very visible as they're still p-o'ed. a single tubipora (fragged) and a very bright green palythoa colony, both of which i got from seacrop. :thumbsup:

 

both looked awesome in their transport bags, opening up before i even took them out. but then they hit my toxic tank water and shrivelled like a sac in icewater. :eek: btw i just check salinity on my systems and they were a tad off, 1.030. d'oh!

 

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better overall view of the new stand. matches the furniture now. :happydance:

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Update

 

i upgraded the "lighting" again. i moved the tank to the middle window.

 

i noticed that the midday sun is blocked by the house. the tank's basically in shadow for half the day (indirect sunlight). i had noticed the corals weren't growing as fast as i'd thought they should (guestimate anyways), then i noticed the sunlight/shadow.

 

maybe i'll post a pic later. i'm feeling sick. bleah.

 

but i still went to the lfs! :P

 

snagged 5-astrae and a zoanthid-rubble frag from their main display. more for the LR biodiversity injection than the zoos to tell you the truth though. i also got a brittlestar hitchhiker out of it. woo hoo!

 

btw, for local nj reefers, it was hanover pet that i went to. the gal there is looking smoking cute! woo hoo!

 

belly shirt. very cool. :naughtydance: woo hoo!

 

side note: first time i've seen the "Live Water" stuff. poor noobs.

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Temperature issues

 

"upgraded" to the middle window and i check this morning (zonked out yesterday with a virus) and the tank was reading 84F at 8AM! dang. :o up goes the fan to cool.

 

happened to be in the neighborhood for lunch and check in at 12PM. tank's at 88F! double-dang! :blink:

 

shift the fan closer and crank it up to "HI". yikes!

 

actually, the corals seem pretty good. only the gsp and tubipora look bad. the snails bulldozed a couple of rocks and frags tho (as i feared). <_< but even those seemed pretty good after being righted. i'm getting a little concerned on coloration though but they may look different under artificial lighting.

 

the coral growth seems ok. the mushroom was almost double its size since start (which is unusual for me as i'm a shroom-killer).

 

the gsp and clavularia aren't growing as my other tanks' colonies though. the zoanthids seem to be growing faster though, small buds already beginning to show. the capnella seems to have recovered from its illness too (finally).

 

i'll probably pull a couple of the snails after a couple of days. they've already mowed down some of the algae. probably end up with 2~3 snails in the tank just to keep it at bay.

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Blind Tree Frog

Perhaps cooling the air pump would help. I mean, if it is pumping in cold air, that should cool the water some right? Why not try packing the air pump in a cooler packed with ice for a bit.

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i go there often my self and she is hot that place use to be alot better

 

were do u live im in parsippany

 

Update

 

i upgraded the "lighting" again. i moved the tank to the middle window.

 

i noticed that the midday sun is blocked by the house. the tank's basically in shadow for half the day (indirect sunlight). i had noticed the corals weren't growing as fast as i'd thought they should (guestimate anyways), then i noticed the sunlight/shadow.

 

maybe i'll post a pic later. i'm feeling sick. bleah.

 

but i still went to the lfs! :P

 

snagged 5-astrae and a zoanthid-rubble frag from their main display. more for the LR biodiversity injection than the zoos to tell you the truth though. i also got a brittlestar hitchhiker out of it. woo hoo!

 

btw, for local nj reefers, it was hanover pet that i went to. the gal there is looking smoking cute! woo hoo!

 

belly shirt. very cool. :naughtydance: woo hoo!

 

side note: first time i've seen the "Live Water" stuff. poor noobs.

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Perhaps cooling the air pump would help. I mean, if it is pumping in cold air, that should cool the water some right? Why not try packing the air pump in a cooler packed with ice for a bit.
hmm, i might try that. the pump doesn't feel hot but you're right, that could be an issue too.

 

i'll check that tonight.

 

i go there often my self and she is hot that place use to be alot better

 

were do u live im in parsippany

i'm in livingston.

 

she's a real cutie. i think she's even slimmed down a bit.

 

fish-chicks are cool. altho she calls astrae "turbos", i can forgive that. :naughtydance:

 

yeah, i think they've dropped a notch too. jeff's not involved anymore so it's a side biz for a couple of other guys now. the kid in there is basically the manager now. i tell him it's good work experience at least.

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