My wife and I have been in the hobby for 2.5 years. We started with a 28 gal JBJ Nano, but about 5 weeks ago we moved everything over to a 65 gallon oceanic with sump.
We have a ton of coral in our tank. Most are just frags that we hope to grow out, but a few are established colonies that we moved over from the nano.
Zoas:
Scrambled egg (established colony)
Rasta (established colony)
Ring of fire (established colony)
Blue tubbs (several large frags)
Gatorade (frag)
Bam bams (frag)
Gobstopper (frag)
Generic red (established colony)
Boobie trap (frag)
Acans:
Green/orange (established colony)
Purple/orange (established colony)
Red/blue (frag)
Iron Man (frag)
Acro:
Green (established but small)
Pink (frag)
Green/blue bird's nest (frag)
Lepto:
Neon green (frag)
Monti:
Rainbow (frag)
Sunset (frag)
Mystic sunset (established colony, regrowing after a down turn)
Superman (frag)
Green/blueish (frag)
Plate, green (frag)
Spongodes, green/brown (frag)
Mushrooms:
Ricordia orange (frag)
Ricordia blueish (frag)
Green striped (established colony, but thinned after the move)
Red (established colony, but thinned after the move)
Favia:
War (bicolor) (frag)
Red (frag)
Christmas (frag)
Other miscellaneous:
Black sun coral (established but small)
Cyphastria meteor shower (frag)
Duncan (frag)
Hammerhead bicolor (frag)
Photosynthetic gorgonia (pinkish) (established but small)
Pavona green (frag)
Plate coral (over 2" diameter & growing)
Pulsing Xenia (frag)
Green/brown paly (frag)
Green Star Polyp (established colony)
As for fish and other inhabitants, we have:
Spotcinctus clown pair bonded with rainbow bubble tip anemone
Oscillaris clown pair (one nuvinci, one black/orange, I forget the name)
5 blue green chromis
Long finned fairy wrasse
Ruby headed fairy wrasse
Tomini tang
Candi pistol shrimp bonded with High fin banded goby
A handful of cleanup crew (peppermint shrimp, cleaner shrimp, emerald crabs, turbo snails, nassarius snails)
Sand sifting starfish
Blue velvet tuxedo urchin
Rock flower anemone
With the coral, we plan to frag each frag as soon as it gets big enough, then grow out one frag as a mother colony for future fragging, and grow one in the main tank as a permanent inhabitant. We will need a bigger tank eventually
We built the stand ourselves. We are trying to keep everything contained to the single tank and a sump with partitions for a refugium and a frag grow-out section. We are getting ready to build a new sump for this plan.
We are very lucky to have had the chance to trade for a lot of the coral listed because the scrambled egg and Rasta colonies are so prolific, I can't even sell/trade them as fast as they grow in my tank. So, whether we traded one-for-one, or used sales to buy new frags, we have kept our costs to a minimum.
Other equipment includes: two strips of Orbit Current Loop, an Orbit Eflux powerhead, Jebao DCP-6500 sump pump, and another older powerhead. We use the ramp up and ramp down function on the lights, and the brightest daylight is set for about 6-7 hours. The eflux powerhead is on a quick surge of about 1.5 second power cycle. The fish and the anemone seem to love it. We also have a cheaper LED box above the sump for the grow out frags and the refugium.
In the refugium we have chaeto, dragon's breath, ceramic rings that we moved over from the nano, and a lot of live rock. We are trying to get a good copepod community going so that we can eventually add a dragonette goby. In the new sump that we are building, we will probably include some sand in the refugium.
We tend to go light on the water changes and heavy on monitoring parameters. We keep track of calcium, magnesium, and KH, as well as nitrates and our pH stays around 8.2. We keep the temperature at about 78-80, which I'm experimenting with since I read that corals tend to do better in 78-80 rather than getting up to 82+. Dosing includes Seachem vibrance and fuel, occasional balance, calcification, and/or ions. We were dosing nitrate for the coral because it was sitting at zero ppm, but now we just feed more often and that's doing the trick. Ammonia and nitrite stay at 0. We do use carbon filter media (Chemipure blue) in our sump with the combo of a filter sock, sponge block, and the biological stuff.
Picture is from a couple weeks ago before we added a bunch more of the frags listed. We are excited to join the forum and can't wait to learn more and share our experiences with y'all!
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