55g fowlr
55g fowlr
Hi Guys and Gals. I'm new to Marine Fish and the RC website, so I thought I would drop by and say hey.
My story, a guy from work had a 55G seemless front acrylic marine tank setup and running with stand, hood, overflow boxes, wet dry sump with built in skimmer prefilter, trickle plate, bio balls, and heater, pair of clowns, powder blue tang, and 60 pounds of live rock. His wife told him they could get a new big screen tv if they get rid of the tank, and they also needed new carpet which we all know is hard to do with a tank still in the room. He gave it to me for free.
I went over Thanks Giving weekend and we emptied it out and hauled it to my house. Its been two weeks and the tank has been running great. We dumped all the live sand out due to huge volume of dead materials so we just trashed it. I added 30lbs of crushed coral about a week after we got it home and seems to be doing well. The guy who had it before didn't have the light on a timer which I since have setup to have 15 hours on, plus the added light from my living room windows 1 on east and 1 on the west side of our place seems to be giving the live rock new life. It was kind of a dank dark dreary brown and black when we set it up due to lack of natural or artifcial light at his place. Now, it has lots of pink, blue, green, and even a dark purple velvet looking material growing out of it.
This weekend my mother and wife bought a few more fish as a Christmas gift. The tank now has a dwarf coral beauty angel, a blue/green chromis, a yellow tailed damsel, a cleaner shrimp, and a fire tail goby. The clowns took exception to their happy little home having any new guests as they were the only ones with the tang in the tank for nearly 4 years. Things have since settled. Everyone seems to have picked their hiding hole out and have for the most part stopped chasing each other around.
I've read a good many websites on keeping marine tanks, already read an entire book on feeding live foods (not sure that I will), I'm about done reading the Marine Aquarium Handbook, and still reading and learning lots from the RC website. I would eventually like to upgrade the single T8 light to get up to the range I could keep a few corals and an anemone for my clowns. But thus far, the tank is beautiful, the fish are colorful and have tons of personality, and I couldn't be happier with my free tank.
Things seem to have all settled out. I have no trace ammonia any more, no copper, PH is staying pretty steady 8.2-8.3, Nitrite has been 0 the entire time, nitrate was way up before I added the crushed coral substrate. I've done a 5G water change each week the last 2 weeks, which the other guy never changed, only added water. He also nuked the entire filter a few days before we moved it, which I believe gave way to the trace amonia and high nitrates when I started testing. Also extremely surprising, the fish made the move just fine even though I live in Indiana and it was only like 30 degrees outside when we did it. Lots of people have all kinds of trouble with the powder blue tang dieing. I'm not sure what to attribute his success to in this tank, but I'm guessing he was small when purchased and this is all he knows. He loves to pace the back of the tank and pull flips and figure 8's around and over the rocks. Their a great bunch to watch and I hope they stay healthy and happy.
