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That's fair enough, if its doesn't bring you joy, what is the point of doing it? I hope that you next build will be much more successful!

I would lean more towards Frogspawn based on the video. Torches will have longer polyps and longer sweepers.

30 pounds of freshly spread Fiji Pink sand! I originally planned for a 3" sand bed but after review, I felt that 2.5 was a much better look...Can't really tell given the dirty, smudgy glass, but saltwater is currently mixing and should be added to the tank tomorrow. Then the real fun begins. 💪

This is coming along nicely! You will enjoy the Spectral Controller! It is more of a set it and forget it, but you will be able to dial in a dawn/dusk setting, as well as some other fun effects (lighting storm, cloud cover, rainbow etc.)

Hello! Been following along, reading and researching and finally time to take the plunge, but I have a couple questions. First, I'm a high school chemistry (upstate NY). I've had a few freshwater tanks in the past, and just setup a 20-gallon freshwater tank in my classroom this year. I've always been attracted to the hobby, but there are so many connections to the subject, and the vibe in the room is definitely better with something living. I want to start a reef tank next Fall. So here's the criteria: 1. We have brand new science classrooms. I was planning a 20-long reef tank. The plan was to leave the tank at school over the summer (I live close enough) but I found out the next two summers are off-limits (asbestos abatement). After that, they can leave my room air-conditioned over the summer and I can have access to my room. 2. Our district offers grants up to $1500 for innovative ideas. I also see this as a hobby and interest for me, so I don't mind spending a some money on the project also, but that's sort of the soft cap for the first 12 months. So Question 1: If I keep a nano tank (10-20 gallons) with 2-3 fish and some softies/LPS can I move it home and back for a couple of summers? It seems possible, but not recommended long-term. Question 2: What is the best tank option if it's moving? Keep the 20-long concept, or go to something smaller like the IM 15 cube, Fluval 13.5 or smaller? I'm leaning towards the 15 Cube. Question 3: What should I expect for monthIy costs (food, chemicals, medicines). I have a decent idea on the cost for the equipment (tank, powerhead, heater, lights -ok, that's still up in the air). Again, 2-4 fish, softies/LPS/zoas (slow and patient) and a CUC. I've got a $$ for salt, but since it's a living tank, I know monthly food and chemicals can't be known with any certainty. I'm just hoping to have a soft range here. Thanks!

That shimmer is stunning!!!

Also, be careful about using additives, like microbacter7, when your parameters are out of wack. This usually causes problems where the bad guys end up with more food to grow and outpace the good guys which typically need more stable parameters.

Looks sweet, seems like you are changing things a lot, but glad you’re approaching stability. Just a heads up, if you are increasing your calcium with all for reef or kalk, keep an eye on your alkalinity, these products are typically are used to maintain roughly balanced levels. For adjusting calcium on its own, I’d recommend using a calcium source without alkalinity or magnesium. Most of the time, the bottles have directions for how much to add to increase your levels by 5 or 10ppm at a time, just be sure you don’t change it too quickly, the recommended daily limit is usually on the label too! Seems like an awesome system and look forward to seeing it grow!

Interested to see this!

Love the scape, I played around with the 2 island idea in mine but just didn’t have enough space.

Kessil is officially mounted over the tank. I also purchased the Spectral Controller X but haven’t wired it up due to me not using the lights quite yet. Photo is using my phone so color rendition is what it is.

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I shut down my 75g and moved all the corals that didn't sell to this tank, which ended up being all the acans, bowerbanki and some GSP. So that works out in keeping with my acan dominant tank. The acans need some TLC from being in the 75g. I did a hydrogen peroxide dip before putting them in the tank. That killed of some of the algae, but not all. I might have to do another dip to get the rest. I traded some rocks in the 75g for a big berghia, hopefully that will start eating the aptasia! I'm still dealing with lots of green cyano and the Coraline on the rocks seems to get white spots then colour back up then get white spots again. I haven't tested my water in awhile so I wonder if calcium is fluctuating a bit too much. I added a tiny peppermint shrimp a few weeks ago. I haven't seen it since adding it to the tank so I can only assume it's died, which is a real bummer, but it was very small.

Wow. People gave you alot of interesting answers. Generally fish do not require stringent water parameters. If your salinity, heat, flow and such are stable you can add fish anytime. But is a freshly cycled tank ready for coral? The answer is no. Not yet. First take the time to check and balance your water chemistry based on the coral you intend to keep. Even without coral a healthy reef will consume Calc, Alk, Nitrates, Phos and Mg. Determine the levels you have now. Determine a dosing plan to reach your desired levels, based on your upcoming corals. Testing regularly. Dose daily. Until you reach those levels and can hold them steady for a couple weeks. Then stock with coral! After stocking keep water testing regularly. Your reef will consume more of those elements and your dosing will have to keep up. Eventually intake will slow and become more of a slow linear increase. But the first 2 or 3 months will be a dosing rollercoaster after stocking corals. The key to a healthy reef, is a tight dosing game. Thats the deal with stocking fish and coral. Hope that helps.

Well... I did a quick calcium test yesterday. Still around 100-150. Shockingly low. The reef is probably starving for calcium and quickly consuming it as its dosed. I started Mg dosing as well, now that the line is fully fixed. Unfortunately last night the app crashed while i was priming the Mg line and it dosed 5ml or more. Probably no biggie given that i was at like 1200 and im shooting for 1500. Dosing Schedule Update: Calc: 40ml/day Mg: 2ml/day MB7: 5ml/day. No change. I also received an order of 5 fire shrimp. That restores my shrimp colony for a total of 6. They got a 45min acclimation and seem to be doing well. Once my water chemistry is settled, my online shopping finger will be iching to get some corals lol.

Black airline tube or insulate the jar and block light... can't grow algae if there is no light. ❤️ make life easy on yourself.

I'm resurrecting this thread after 5yrs.. Fingers crossed that some of you folks are still around. I'm hoping to see how things turned out with these new systems, and how well you followed your plan. I'm starting to stock my new tank very soon.. ammonia 0 nitrites 0 nitrates 3 ppm. Thanks for all the great input to read!

So, hi, long time no see. This thread is probably not going to be anywhere near as well structured as my last one... 'cause i'm on a mobile and have a beer in hand right now... Some of you may remember my last tank that had some endlers and pandaka lidwilli in a little 30cm cube with a bunch of 3d printed bits... expect to see more of the same tbh... just on a tighter budget and larger scale. So, as you can see in this picture: I've got myself a pair of 59 litre, 900mm long tanks. (15.4gal, 3ft for... well i assume most of you are american.) The stand is one i found op shopping and had to modify, reinforce and lengthen... but it's come up pretty good in my humble opinion. I picked up the tanks that i had special ordered in by my mate at Nicks Pets Needs in Bundamba, QLD Australia, highly recommend him if anybody is local... he doesn't carry anything marine YET. As i said, had to reinforce the cabinet to take more weight. I am REALLY not a woodworker and, well, it shows. But hey, at the end of the day everything is now super sturdy, square and nobody is ever going to see the underside of things ever anyway... Annnnyyyyywwwaaaayyyyyyy I bought the cabinet and, according to my google search history, was originally going to put 2x 2.5ft tanks on it. But, apparently at some point i forgot the stand was 1500mm long and not 1800mm long and decided to buy 1800mm worth of tank and deal with the details later. Plans: One tank is going to be freshwater with... plants, endlers, shrimp, co2 (for plants that don't need it), enough light to blind cyclops and plants growing out the top of the tank. The other tank is going to be saltwater with... plants, possibly endlers, possibly shrimp, plants and macros if i can find any, enough light to notice it on my power bills and mangroves growing out the top... if i can get mangroves... There is going to be rockwork that joins the two tanks together, going up and over the middle glass. Sereyu(spelling?) stone on the freshwater side and transitioning to granite with oyster shells on it on the saltwater side - it's what they use to shore up a lot of the mud banks around mangroves around here and i want to kind of replicate a fresh to marine transition across the whole thing.... time will tell if i accomplish it or completely change direction 'cause it looks dumb. That's, uh, all i've got for now.

Happy to hear that it helped you!! reef Casa has been an excellent tank. I am very pleased with it and I have zero regrets. The smaller tank size worked out perfect for me. I have considered a larger tank as well a few times over the past year. I almost purchased an IM AIO and a Waterbox AIO in the 50-60 gallon range. truth be told, I have top products in this smaller tank and it is providing me the enjoyment without all of the work and maintenance demands of a larger tank. I am doing 20% water changes every two weeks now and I add fresh top off water for the ATO once a week to 10 days. Chemicals are cheap for the smaller size. I read somewhere that the average tank setup is around 2 years. So my opinion for you is to start out with a smaller tank and see how it goes. Less cost and commitment. If you take to the hobby you can always upgrade down the road. I got the clowns from a different shop than Fragbox. Trial and error has been the key. My storm clowns have been incredible and peaceful. I currently have 5 fish with a cleaner shrimp and a bunch of snails. My coraline algae has exploded finally amd the tank is well seeded with copepods. My algae and Dino issue is resolved and I am getting ready to start adding corals in the next little bit. I could have added them sooner but I’m in no hurry. I have had massive tanks before and I must say that I am really pleased with this tank size. I think reef Casa has a new shallow 25 tank that looks really cool. My Villa 24 fits the dimensions of an ikea cabinet and I think that the size is perfect for me. Pricate message me if you want and I’ll give you my cell if you ever have any questions. Good luck!!

Great looking tank. It’s inspired me to get my IM Nano 10 out of the garage and give it another go. I didn’t realise they made a UV for it, I got fed up of battling algae in it last time and just put all the livestock back in my big reef.

Love the tank. scape is cool. love the cove and channel flow, draws the eyes in. what’s your thoughts on things growing towards the glass quickly on the outside of the rock structure. assuming you are looking to grow Stoney coral. following along…

Here are my light settings. YES, they are very high but I have NO nuisance algae and everything loves it!

One more thing. I had issues with firefish jumping up through the screen. I bought mesh screen on Amazon and taped another section onto the bottom of the lid so that it was alternating basically making it finer. And yes, there is a Maxima clam in there that is growing fast and doing great.

So, a few months back I decided to build this nano reef using an Innovative Marine Nuvo Fusion 10g. I started with the AIO tank, AI Prime HD16 light, skimmer, Nature's Ocean Bio-Activ Live Aragonite Reef Substrate, Real Reef Premium Live Rock for Saltwater Aquariums, Instant Ocean Reef Crystals Reef Salt, DrTim's Aquatics Reef One & Only Nitrifying Bacteria, and an Amazon RO under sink kit. My goal was to have a beautiful nano reef tank with fish and corals. I researched all the AIO nanos in the 10g range and I settled on the Innovative Marine Nuvo Fusion 10g. I am glad that I did because it has been amazing. I have learned a lot in the past couple of months building this system and I am at a great place with this tank now. It is healthy and I want you to see what I have gone through so you don’t make the same mistakes and you can learn what is working for me and has made this a success. I wish I had documented all of this from the start and had pictures from the beginning, but I don’t, and I will try to describe everything in detail. Please PM me if you have questions or please, let me know if you see something I am doing wrong. So the first pictures I am going to show you are of it’s current status. Healthy, vibrant, great water parameters, full of life, the fish and shrimp are basically trained like a dog, and the corals are growing faster than I can keep up with. So, starting out I had a bit of trouble getting the cycle done. After a couple of weeks things were good and I added Barry who is my Clownfish. He is doing great and is like a little puppy. I was using the Innovative Marine skimmer for this tank off and on for a month or two. It flat out sucks. The only adjustment is moving the collection container up and down which adjust the water level. It works on a thin line of, ‘it blows micro bubbles everywhere’, ‘it fills up in an hour’, or ‘it works (3% of the time)’. Waste of money. SO, I bought the Innovative Marine UV sterilizer. I installed it and went to bed. The next day I about pooped myself when I saw my tank. Not ONE spec of algae, white sand, crystal clear water, and a happy tank. I definitely recommend this. So, at this point I know I have three fish. A clown, a firefish, and a diamond watchman goby. All are happy. I decided to add on to my cleaning crew because my sand is looking a bit neglected, and I want some nassarius snails. I bought an online order from saltwateraquarium.com. The 10 Gallon Standard NANO Reef Cleanup Crew for $49.99 + shipping. Great. I got these two nice big nassarius snails. Three days later my firefish disappeared. The next day I see half its body on the sand bed. Ok, it died, and the cleaners started eating it. Then my diamond watchman suffers the same fate. I deal with it and add a new firefish and the same dang thing happens. I then put my light on with a moonlight and a camera on the aquarium and I filmed the supposed nassarius snail hunting at night. I catch him kill the newest firefish while it is sleeping in the rocks. I then lure the snail out the next night with a piece of fresh mackerel and catch it. I take detailed pics and post on different forums and email different places to find out what it is because nassarius snails don’t do this. It comes back that it is NOT a nassarius snail and is in fact a whelk. I contact salwateraquarium.com and they say that it is a nassarius snail and deny anything. I lost the video I took or I would have sent that to them as well. I will never do business with them ever again. Stay far far away. Looking back I now know that the whelk hunted and killed most of the entire cleanup crew they sent me. There is a pile of shells in the corner that my twin spot goby seems to like to move around to prove it. Yes, I have a twin spot and he is awesome. More on him later and how I get him to eat anything. So, the whelk is gone and I am telling you the truth, my fish came out in celebration. They almost immediately became social. I thought I was having issues with the type of fish I was buying because they were hiding a lot. It wasn’t that at all. It’s because that predatory snail was in there and they knew it was after them. Everything is awesome now and I am so much more careful about where I buy things and what I put in there. I keep adding on corals and they grow like crazy. I adjust my lighting a little here and there to get the AI light just right. It’s now perfect, for today anyway. OH, and I turned off the moonlight after the whelk fiasco. I now have four happy and healthy fish. The clownfish, a purple firefish, a Bengai Cardinal, and a twin spot goby. I also have two shrimp. A peppermint shrimp to keep aiptasia out of my tank and a skunk cleaner shrimp. Fish first. I feed them once daily. I alternate foods. Frozen mysis shrimp, a frozen cubed variety mix with 100 different things in it, and then pellets and flakes. I do the pellets and flakes so that if I am out of town for a few days I can turn on my auto feeder. I have trained all my fish to eat all these things, so they don’t starve. So, you know now that I have twin spot goby which are notoriously hard to keep because they only eat copepods. Well, I trained mine to eat mysis shrimp from the get-go. When I brought him home, he dug out his home under a rock and stayed in there for a while acclimating. I basically took a cuvette and put 1/8th of a block of mysis in it and a few mls of salt water to defrost it. Then I sucked that concentrated mixture into a pipette. Then I stealthily put my hand in the water with the pipette and maneuver it just outside of his cave being careful not to cast a shadow into the cave. Then I squeezed the mysis into the cave and pulled my hand out. He wouldn’t come out. After three days he started coming out to say “Hi”. I would then pipette food straight to him so he didn’t have to compete with the other fish, and he would gobble it up. Then I started sprinkling pellets in front of his cave. He would come out and eat them. Then I would mix up flakes in the cuvette and suck it into the pipette and feed it to him and he would eat it. Now I just feed the tank with the pump on for a couple of seconds to stir everything up and then put it on feed mode and he eats with the group normally no matter what I put in there. NOW he actually swims in the water column and will follow my finger through the aquarium. That’s why I say these fish act like trained dogs. When I feed them at 5 PM I gently tap my index finger on the glass and everything in the aquarium comes BOLTING out ready to be fed! Now for the shrimp. These two guys are awesome. They love attention. When I put my hand in there to do anything they are all over my hand cleaning me and wanting to play. It’s so much fun. Amazingly smart little creatures. They just seem to want to please you just like a dog does. I have had trouble with them being like that during water changes. I used to have to be very careful not to suck them up when I was pumping water out. I used to use a water pump that I had to submerge in the tank and I had to goalie the water pump intake to keep them from getting sucked up because they want to be on my hand. I use a big water pump now to do 35% water changes weekly and it sucks that 3.5 gallons of water out in less than a minute but now the pump is external and has an in and an out line so the in line can be covered by my hand to prevent them from being sucked in. Dosing. I dose daily. I dose 2.5 mls of Red Sea Reef Energy Plus Coral Nurtition and 2.5 mls of Algae Barn Oceanmagik. I used to use ReefSnow instead of the Oceanmagik but the Oceanmagik is alive and I get better results. Testing. I currently use Hannah Testers. They are a pain but better than liquids. I am going to buy a Hydros Mavern when they are available. All my test results are great all the time. Refugium. Yep, you heard me right. In that back area of the Innovative Marine tank there are three chambers. I have a UV sterilizer in the left most chamber which is where the water drops in. Then the middle chamber is my micro refugium. I have two Marinepure cubes in the bottom of the factory Innovative filter drop in and on top of that I have a bunch of Sea Lettuce from Algae Barn. I seeded all of that with a jar of Poseidon’s Feast copepods from Algae Barn. The lettuce and cubes are after the UV sterilizer so as not to sterilize everything completely. The light from my AI is enough to keep the lettuc happy. NOTE, this refugium was not in place for 5 weeks after I taught the twin spot to eat other foods. I am posting pics of the micro refugium as well. That was long but I hope it has been insightful. Once again, please feel free to ask me anything. AND here are the pics:

Super excited to be using a metal halide. I have a 5 gallon reservoir so hopefully that’s enough! I had to move the tank down to the main floor because my office gets about 80f in the afternoon with the A/C running (very poor insulation) with a halide I think the tank would overheat 😵‍