24 gallon Aquapod (lots of pics)

[califreefnut]

Very nice, Ice! I finally bit the bullet, yesterday I took my daughter to the store to get water for our Amazon when I saw a vision from heaven...the 24g pods on sale this weekend only for $199! I decided to think about it and when we returned to get some fish, there were only 2 left! I saw this as a message from God and went for it. When on the way home I asked my daughter if she saw this as a heavenly sign, she replied, 'maybe Mom will but that one!' Well, anyway, I have now joined the ranks of 'pod owners! YEY!!! Your tank Ice is definately an inspiration. I thought though that I would fill the right rear chamber with live branch rock chards for some natural filtration. I like the mods you did with the pump and returns, would you do anything different now that you've had it up & running?

Anyway, great job, keep us up to date with pics. Mary, how's yours doing anyway?

 

[MaryBebo]

Mine is doing great. I am so glad that I had read about Ice's Extra return with pump. His is what lead me to do mine that way. I have some really good flow. You can just reposition them from time to time and hit different areas, and I like that.

Good luck on yours too Good deal too!

 

[RevJDA]

I have been ordering Aquapods from F&S since the end of Decemer. First they were B/O (understandable). Then, I received two--one for me and one for my son. Mine was fine, but my son's tank was shattered (FEDEX). F&S were very helpful and agreed to send out a replacement ASAP. It, too, came smashed. I second replacement was sent and it was shattered, even with the extra pacakaging they added. In the meantime the fan on my tank quit working and I was instructed to take the lid off of one of the return tanks. I did and it stopped working after 48 hours. They agreed to send me a replacement fan which I received. However, I took the top off of the second returned tank and its fan is working fine.

Finally, I just asked to have my money refunded and F&S was fine with that. Besides that they instructed me to toss out the damaged tanks.

I reorded a NanoCube 24 gallon for my son. It came and it was broken (Pet Solutions this time and UPS).

We've just given up and we ordered a NanoCube from a LFS for a few dollars more than the online price. So far, however, it hasn't arrived.

 

[basicsafty]

I just got one from a local LFS and did the loc-line mod exactly as it was done in this thread, using maxijet 900 &1200 pumps in the back. Thanks for the complete instructions. Additionally I will be replacing the stock fan, which already broke, with two quieter fans controlled by a temp sensor (from some other thread on here). The stock fans and pump are trash to begin with.

Your tank looks fantastic, I can't wait to stock mine.

 

[icenine2005]

Thanks for the comments everyone... glad to hear my post gave a few people some ideas, looking forward to seeing the new set ups (and getting some ideas from them). Sorry to hear about your troubles RevJDA, but I know how you feel.. lol. So if I read that right you still have the one 'pod right? If so it sounds like you have a bunch of extra bulbs and ballasts then (they made me send mine back).
I've had no trouble with the stock fan... at least yet... it's been running for almost a month now (mostly leak testing and the whole what's making this so hot? investigation)

 

[Biotope7]

Nice pic's! Your tank looks awesome! You might want to add a second fan in the hood since it is already molded for one. My pod stays @ 78-80 all of the time.

 

[califreefnut]

What do you think about the second pump going in the tank through a spraypipe? I had a whole system designed for my 100g but thought I could do a small one for the pod. Maybe come out the wall, then down at a 90 to the bottom, 90, then toward the front of the tank with holes drilled throughout for some extra circulation. The pipe would be hidden in the rockwork and provide water movement through the rockwork. What do you think? Too much movement for a softie tank? What size pump do you think?...thanks

 

[icenine2005]

New frags, I've added a bunch of LPS to the 'pod:

Enchinos, a few 2" frags some interesting color mixes reds, greens, pinks and blues. I've planted a few of these on the upper rock work where a majority of the zoas used to be and various other outcroppings in the scape. Nice colors on these and I'm looking forward to how they develop.

Pics:

Favia, green and red jobbers with green eyes and a red with green eye favia variety.

A couple of varieties of acan. Since the whole acan craze is over I can actually afford them now. They are both towards the bottom of the tank but still color up very nicely.

There is now quite a bit of LPS in this tank. Who needs sps when you have long polyped stonies and gorgs.

All these frags came from sharkeysreef.com. Dennis and Anita there are really nice with a great selection of stock.
I must say, they did something I really appreciated as well. One of the corals I wanted to purchase had taken a turn for the worse just before I was about to take possession of it. Anita at Sharky's was forthright enough to tell me that She had her doubts about it's condition and suggested I take something else instead. There are a few retailers that might have just boxed that coral and sent it out the door asap just to rack up the sale. It's nice to find retailers that are looking out for their customers. Sharkeysreef.com has now made my short list of top online sources for livestock along with seacrop.com and sealifeflorida.com.

Ok... NOW I think the tank is full. .....but ya know, I could always squeeze a few more zoas in. This tank is a frag menagerie that would make Anthony Calfo cringe. lol. I can stare at it for hours though. At least I can look forward to lots of practice fraging things. I've got my exacto knife, bonecutters and dremmil tool at the ready. Always learning.

 

[icenine2005]

LPS rescue:
The green and red eye favia had been fragged just before I acquired it (at my request, I only bough half of the piece originally offered). One one of the recently severed corners of the coral had started to deteriorate with the flesh of one corallites turning into a brown jelly and melting away. I left it sit for a another day and the brown jelly had spread to another corallite. It's a really nice piece and I didn't want to lose it. ..to complicate matters I was going out of town for a week just a few days after I acquired it so if I wasn't able to do something quick it would rot away the week I was gone. I really did not want to return to a favia skeleton or worse seeing something spread to my other LPS.

I set up a small hospital tank for it out of my 2.5 gallon pico system. I popped out a bulb out so it was only using 18w of PC. I left it bare bottom with the an AC20 hob for circulation (set as low as it would go). Before I placed the favia in there scrapped off the infected flesh and I dipped it in some kent Marine Tech D. The dip was a qt of SW along with a few cap fulls of Tech D solution for 8 minutes. The amount of tech D I used was twice what is recommended on the bottle, but if this was a protazoan infection I needed it dead, fast. So I took the risk of potentially damaging the coral with an overdose. I then placed the favia into the hospital tank (with low light and low flow) crossed my fingers and headed out of town. Well, it worked. The tissue recession stopped with no loss or brown jelly appearing for over a week now. I thinkI'm out of the woods and I placed the coral back in the aquapod. I only lost three corallites from the colony, the the damage was minimal.

Saved favia:

I got a huge batch of home made reef food from another reefer in CMAS. Awesome stuff. It's a variation of Borneman's recipe, with additions. It's nori, squid, cyclopseese, cod rowe, few types of fish, shrimp... bunch of other stuff. For the most part it's a bit of everything you could think to feed your tank. I've got a frozen block of it that will likely last me a year or two (lol). Pretty much everything in the reef goes berserk over it. Fish and coral. Zoanthoids even grab hold of bits. Previously the only time I ever got anything that looked like a feeding response from zoas was dt's oyster eggs. I drop a 1/4" cube in and that pretty much creates a snow storm in the reef. I should try and get some video of the tank wide frenzy it creates.
I only feed this stuff the day before a water change, till I figure out a skimmer here. (Which I've spent no time on at all) With the silversides, krill and other stuff I have on hand I'm really overstocked on food for the foreseeable future. Making your own food is a really great idea. I had been kicking around the thought of doing it for a while. When I finally run out of this stuff I'll try my hand at it for sure. ...I think the thing to do would be to get together with a few other people to make a batch, with everyone brining a few ingredients to the mix.

The flower anemone. Just FYI, because I get a few questions about it. To clarify, it's not a "host" anemone for clowns. Not that my clown hosts in anything, unless you consider the front display glass a host. It is however neat. It's a very animated eater and grabs at anything that it thinks might be food. It's rather large, larger than I had expected it to get. I feed it quite a bit and it's grown to a little over six inches in diameter it was around three when I got it back in October. I have tried to get pics with a tape measure, but it either tries to grab the tape measure or retracts up when it's near, so that's been difficult. It does not bother fish, crabs or shrimp and never walks around or bothers any neighboring corals, some of which are rather close. It's not reproduced.

As for other anemone notes.... the mini carpet anemones split... both of them, just a few days apart. There are four now. The anemones got to about the size of a half dollar before splitting.

 

[icenine2005]

Some new pics...

Enchino coloring up... purpleish eyes popping out on this one:

The mini carpets have done some splitting, there are five now.
One of the new babies found a bit of an odd perch:

Here is another new one:

Toad stool, polyps retracted:

Open and awake:

Two of the crabs:

I've got a wierd macro pop up next to this colony of zoas... slow growing and kinda spikey:

 

[Gooli]

i have been going nuts trying to do a loc-line spray bar for my 24g aquapod..i'm trying to do it without drilling - were u able to get any locline to fit over the original flow nozzle - nothing seems to fit!

 

[d1hotblaze]

will your clown host the rock flower anemone i have hear problems with this combination

 

[icenine2005]

I don't have the loc line over the original outlet... I have the hydor flo there. I have the loc line on the outlet I drilled.

The clown does not go anywhere near the anemone. They are not known as host anemones. Aside from an failed attempt at hosting in the toadstool the clown hosts in nothing.

 

[d1hotblaze]

it's cool my clown hosts in a 4" torch coral...lol silly clown

 

[schristi69]

How did you get your Hydor to fit on the original nozzle? Did you cut the "bulb" on the end off? The bulb holds the deflector on.

 

[icenine2005]

The adapter for the hydor fits inside the stock outlet hole. No modification was required... It's been ther for a few months and not fallen off yet.

 

[icenine2005]

A couple of bummers to report.


The feather duster has bitten the dust. It dropped it’s crown. While a new crown started to appear it bailed out of its tube all together.

While I’ve had it in the tank since about June of last year and it survived more than a few trials and tribulations I don’t know that I’ll be replacing it with another duster. I’m not sure what the lifespan of these particular worms was expected to be in captivity.

Here is a pic of the duster with the “second” crown before it bailed.

The other big loss has been the midas blenny. It just plain disappeared a few weeks ago. It was there in the morning when I left for work and gone when I returned home that evening. The prevailing theory is that the lid was left open and the fish went carpet surfing which would have culminated with the cat snacking on it. I tore the tank up looking for a carcass with not a trace found in the display or overflow. I saw no rise in ammonia afterwards either. Other possibilities might be the orange serpent star or the hitchhiker xanthid crab…. But I would have expected to find some trace of it still. It was a constant swimmer during the daylight hours, so the chances of one of those two catching it during the day would have been really slim.

I had thought of not replacing it, with another midas or any other fish for that matter… however I came across one specimen (not another midas blenny) that was just too hard to pass up.

 

[icenine2005]

Here is the new guy:
“Indigo” Dottyback

I first saw this fish a few weeks ago at IMAC. It’s a new hybrid from the ORA breeding program. ORA have been producing tank bred dottybacks for some time but this is the first “hybrid” dottyback I have seen from them.

The fish is a cross between Pseudochromis fridmani and Pseudochromis sankeyi. What you wind up with is a distinctive, striking blue fish that has the black eye markings of the “orchid” fridmani and some of the body striping of the “striped dottyback” sankeyi. The stripes are not overly pronounced and are darker/lighter gradient shades of blue.

I would say the jury is still out on temperament of the fish. Pseudochromis have the potential of being tank terrors, but so far the specimen I have shows no sign of becoming that. I’ve read often that tank raised dottys are far less likely to become overly aggressive with other fish and inverts in a tank. In addition this hybrid is a cross of two of the “more peaceful” dottys, with the sankeyi known as the least territorial sp. …so on paper they should not be overly aggressive. While only having the fish for a week, it has blended well into our system. This was the last fish into this system with the current denizens being a Centropyge argi (pygmy angel) and perc.

At this point only a handful of these fish have been released to the trade. They were on display at IMAC in April 06. It just so happened that a dealer local to me, darklordcoral.com acquired a few and I managed to snag one of those. I’ve not seen them anywhere else yet, but that should change in the coming weeks and months.

Here is a stock photo from ORA, followed by some pics of the fish in my tank.

My pics are awful... I can never get a good shot of a constantly swimming fish, but these will at least give an idea of what it looks like.

Flash:

No Flash:

It’s a stunning fish. The pictures really don’t do it justice. I’ve seen “bluish”
Orchids and I know they look blue at lower depths in the red sea or under some lighting in aquaria but trust me, this guy is true blue under 10ks.

More new stuff, a blasto rock. There are actually four differnent morphs on this rock.. I'm sure I'll have better pictures over time.

Here is yet another crappy top down shot:

The tank is still kind of a mess. I have frags scattered all over the bottom. My father is setting up a 12gal nano cube, so I have fragged a bunch of zoas, xenia and gorgs for his set up. I'm still proping a few other things in here too. What I really need to do is set up the pico again as a prop tank.

 

[ezcompany]

hopefully my AP will look as good as yours soon

 

[zulu_principle]

Anyone done a chiller mod ?

Looks great and thanks


Wendell