Jadette's 140g Rimless Build Thread

[jadette]

You Shirley are a perfectionist. I empathize and admire it. I as well agree that your tank is gorgeous. I think it's totm quality and I believe one day, it will be

I don't think I'm necessarily a perfectionist. A perfectionist would not:
1) let their CO2 tank go empty for months
2) ignore bad solder joints on their LED setup - causing entire rows of LEDs to not work
3) keep a broken sea swirl in the set up for 2 years.

You would also be appalled at the state of my sump. Heh. But I admit that I am PARTICULAR with certain things in my tank.
But thank you for your vote of confidence. I do work hard to get my tank to look a certain way, and for the most part, I am happy with how it has progressed through the years - mainly that I have not given up on it. Every tank has a point of no return when neglected, and I am glad that I have never reached that point - even during crazy busy periods for me.

If you want polyps extension send the regal this way[emoji12]

It is actually my multibar that has caused most of my SPS woes! I saw it go to town on my greem milli and setosa. HUGE chunks literally ripped off the coral by its tiny little mouth. Amazing how something that small can cause so much damage!

Looks amazing Shirley!

Thank you! How are all your newly acquired corals doing?

looks good a nice problem to have.

Yes, a nice problem to have, but I wish I can pick and choose the corals that grow like weeds. The ones I really like don't really grow nearly as fast as the others.

beautiful set up.

Thank you!

time to trim some stuff for me to kill again

I hear the third time's a charm.

Great tank Shirley. Love your fish selection.

Thank you! It's Lawrence's fault. He got me hooked on angels. I find them to be a lot more disease resistant than butterflies. My multibar and venustus are probably the two fastest growing fish in my tank right now.

Beautiful!

Thank you!

Your tank is beautiful Shirley. It's difficult to keep a mature tank open, clean and organized after time. Corals are always growing together, filling areas that made it look open and clean the first few years. You can only trim so much. Corals also encrust and grow together... what can you do other than keep trimming or worse case remove the entire encrusted rock? I see you attempted to move the entire right island over. Good idea but at some point it will just fill in again and now you have less room on the glass side.

But I totally get your attempts at trying to maintain the look you (and all of us) enjoy about your tank.

Thank you! Yes, it is a struggle to keep things organized. I will need to make a decision soon on what corals I should keep, and what corals I should thin out. I had a handful of corals that really never took off in my tank. I never really had the heart to remove them, but after some time, they just deteriorated around the faster growing corals. I recently threw them out (mostly dead anyway), and the other corals around them just look so much happier now.
Imagine the look of a large tank with just a handful of large, mature colonies! I think that's the look I want to achieve. This would make it easier to trim and aquascape. On the flip side, if I suddenly lose one of the colonies for some reason or another, my tank would suddenly not look quite right anymore.

Lost in translation. So beautiful .

Thank you!

That's one of the best aquascaped reef tanks I've seen; it reminded of that famous picture you posted of that soft coral tank. Though I agree it looked picture perfect in that 2 year old video. Negative space really makes the corals and hardscape stand out.

TOTM for sure.

Thank you! I am actually in the process of re-aquascaping my tank again. Just a little bit. Just to make the two mounds in my tank more angular. Hoping that will add more depth. I am also going to move some of the softies more to the front to generate more visible movement. I reduced the flow in my tank (not on purpose - one of my MP40s died last week) and the response from my gonioporas was quite amazing. They practically doubled in size. I am also going to see if I can move my lemondrop anemones to the front. They seem to like hanging out in the back of the tank. Anemones and OCD aquascapers do not go well together.

Uncanny

Thank you! It's not every day that my tank gets compared to the X-men.

Yeah really beautiful.

Are you dosing 3 part or do you have a calcium reactor?

Thanks! Actually this is an interesting question for me. The first 2 years of this tank, I dosed 3 part. The past year (up until last October), I used a calcium reactor. I would say I liked the latter of the two as far as noticing results in growth and convenience. However, I ran out of CO2 last October and got too lazy to get it refilled. With Halloween, and then Thanksgiving and then Christmas (we're big with celebrating holidays in my family. REALLY BIG), I just didn't have the energy to do anything about it. I was still doing weekly water changes with IO spiked with Magnesium and Calcium. This was keeping my parameters a little on the low side (ALK ~6-7), but still tolerable. I admit that my tank did suffer from this lack of consistent supplementation. My deepwater SPS all STN'd, but surprisingly, my millis and torts did not seem to mind the weekly ALK swings. And of course, the digitatas, birdsnests, stylos, and montiporas were unphased. This may not be a smart thing to do, but I actually plan on not using a Ca reactor or three-part dosing going forward.

It's my new 2015 KISS method. I took down all of my reactors and am running carbon/GFO passively in bags. I also turned off my UV. The only pieces of equipment I have in my sump right now is a heater and my skimmer. Not having pumps for all the reactors I was running in my tank dropped the temp about 4-5 degrees (I guess the fact that it's WINTER might be contributing to that drop as well. But I'm trying to make a point here!).

I might want to start a refugium in my sump again for 2015.

Hope to finish my aquascaping next week. I'll post pics then.

 

[ChefZilla]

Shirley....thank you for coming last night. I feel sooo bad I wasn't able to talk to you except a hi... as you saw I was just running around. Grrrr please let me buy you a coffee one day so we can sit down and conversate

 

[pciscott]

Beautiful tank and I wish I could keep it simple with my tank I won the blue and red millie you donated to the club. Beautiful piece! Was wondering if it is a named piece or what you call it. Thank you, Scott

 

[bullitr]

I dont trust dwarf angel and SPS but you can always throw some unwanted sps this way :wave::wave::wave::wave:
i am trying to cut back on fish if you believe that, since my emperor kills my moorish idol i want to replace it with less aggressive fish that i have to gave away because he constantly bully them maybe try to concentrate on SPS on my main tank and get more softies on my rhinopias tank.

 

[MrSandman]

Hey Shirley. Corals doing great! Thanks again for generous the hookup!!!
I'm still trying to figure out what that white polyped acro piece is. Never seen it before.
Do you have a picture of it in your tank?

 

[jadette]

Shirley....thank you for coming last night. I feel sooo bad I wasn't able to talk to you except a hi... as you saw I was just running around. Grrrr please let me buy you a coffee one day so we can sit down and conversate

I actually couldn't stay long, so I felt bad that I wasn't able to really sit down and talk to anyone for an extended period of time. It was good to see familiar faces. We certainly do need to catch up one of these days. I don't even know how your tank is fairing of late!

Beautiful tank and I wish I could keep it simple with my tank I won the blue and red millie you donated to the club. Beautiful piece! Was wondering if it is a named piece or what you call it. Thank you, Scott

Hmm. I have donated blue and pink/red milli frags to the club before, but not last Saturday. I don't want to take credit for someone else's generosity! My blue-tipped pink/red milli came from someone who got his piece from gcarroll. I did distribute this to a few other SFVR members in the past, but it would be highly unlikely that the piece you won last weekend had lineage from my piece. Hope you find out who donated the piece!

I dont trust dwarf angel and SPS but you can always throw some unwanted sps this way :wave::wave::wave::wave:
i am trying to cut back on fish if you believe that, since my emperor kills my moorish idol i want to replace it with less aggressive fish that i have to gave away because he constantly bully them maybe try to concentrate on SPS on my main tank and get more softies on my rhinopias tank.

I think you probably already have all of my SPS pieces.
Getting more into corals than fish? I guess you and I are trading places!

Hey Shirley. Corals doing great! Thanks again for generous the hookup!!!
I'm still trying to figure out what that white polyped acro piece is. Never seen it before.
Do you have a picture of it in your tank?

I don't have a close-up of it, but here it is behind my cali tort:



If I had to guess, I would say it's an acropora microphthalma. Definitely a staghorn. Predominantly tan body, with hints of blue-green at the tips and base. The biggest, bushiest polyps I've seen... before I put angels in my tank of course. Now, it just looks like a tree branch in my tank. I hope it really takes off to its former glory in your reef-safe tank!

 

[dodgerblew]

That regal is stunning Shirley

 

[billyzbear]

How about some update on tank...pics pics pics

 

[michael.lemke]

I noticed earlier in the thread you were considering changing from two 400 watt halides to three 250s. Did you make the change? What's your lighting schedule? I have a 60x30x22 that I am running 2 mogul 250's on. I am upgrading to there HQI in a few days. Would love to hear your thoughts.

This is the current set up. Keeping the led and t5

 

[jadette]

That regal is stunning Shirley

Thank you! He has eaten over 5,000 polyps of purple, blue, and red hornets, rastas, purple deaths, blue tubbs, and other colorful zoas to date. I tell myself every day that he's worth it so I don't cry at night.

How about some update on tank...pics pics pics

Short update, my multibar, venustus, and to a lesser extent, my tinkeri hybrid butterfly developed a taste for SPS, and over a course of a year, slowly took out 90% of my corals. Interestingly enough, the digitatas and the stylos were the first to go, then the torts, and the deepwaters were the last to go. Oh, and I had this HUGE war coral colony - like 5,000 eyes big - that had been pecked out completely blind. Little sad about that one since I had it since 2007. Surprisingly, they had no interest in one of my tenuis colonies. So weird to see everything chewed down to little nubs and just have a single colony - smack in the middle of the tank - unscathed.

Honestly, since it happened so slowly, I didn't really take notice... Until this latest thread bump forced me to look at before pictures of my tank. Dang, I actually had a good thing going. HA!

Then hubby's tank sprung a leak a couple of weeks ago, we moved all of his livestock into my tank and now we have a couple's tank full of random softies and LPS.

Tank is in a transition phase now. We'll clean it up a bit. Re-aquascape here and there, maybe pick up some coral that will somehow survive in a hostile environment (hubby's fish are not exactly reef safe either), and learn a few more slow cooker recipes along the way.

No photos yet. But soon!

I noticed earlier in the thread you were considering changing from two 400 watt halides to three 250s. Did you make the change? What's your lighting schedule? I have a 60x30x22 that I am running 2 mogul 250's on. I am upgrading to there HQI in a few days. Would love to hear your thoughts.

This is the current set up. Keeping the led and t5

I didn't make the transition. But if I did, I would only drive them with an HQI ballast. If you haven't checked it out already, I would strongly recommend Sanjay's lighting guide here:
http://www.manhattanreefs.com/lighting
I have used this guide to choose the proper ballast/bulb combination.

Are you getting enough coverage with your 2x250W? It was a little too dark for me on the edges with only 2 bulbs.

I had my LEDs on from 1p-12a, and my MHs from 5p-11p.

Now that I don't have to worry about my nonexistent SPS corals anymore, I'm actually going to change out my lighting to Hydra 52s and see how that goes.

 

[Goober06]

loving the DIY stuff, im following

 

[billyzbear]

What?
I can't believe you let the fish eat your reef. Sad...It was looking so good too.

Did the invader make it?

 

[michael.lemke]

Sucks about your coral! And no I was just not quite getting the coverage with the two halides. My corals are growing towards the light and the sides were suffering a bit. Good luck with the hydras as I hear great things. Time will tell.

 

[jadette]

I guess it's time for me to update my thread.

Long story short, my tank crashed and I lost pretty much everything - coral and fish. It started with the corals first. As my angels got bigger, they nipped more and more. The rate at which they were decimating my corals was exponential. Once it reached a point when the coral growth could not keep up with the amount of nipping they were doing, it was game over.

Then came the fish. My tank looked like a bloody mess with the dead coral skeletons. It was disheartening. I was still feeding my fish, but I stopped doing water changes and the water quality just plummeted. The fish showed obvious signs of stress from this and my black tang got ich. It died a week later and started a chain reaction. Lost all of the 40+ fish in my tank within a month period. Well - ALMOST all. My pink streaked wrasse was the lone survivor.

There's more to it that caused this downward spiral. Personal distractions played a major part of it. For the past 6 months,I spent every waking moment at home working on my new drought tolerant landscaping. Won't go into details, but in a nutshell, I have no one to blame for the demise except myself.

And I am so okay with it.

So my tank pretty much looked super crappy after that. I was able to fish out the large dead fish, but the anthias and cardinals basically died in my rocks and I was not able to fish them out. You can imagine how nasty my tank got. It was a sea of green hair and bubble algae and all sorts of random green funk. At this point - this was around early November - I was still so into fiddling with the rain barrels in my yard and watching my lavender plants grow that I didn't really care about my fish tank... Until the awful smell from my tank started spreading around the house.

I had to do something.

Do I empty the tank and start over with clean rocks? And what would I do with my wrasse and some leftover random corals that managed to survive? (my GSP, goniopora, clove polyps, hammers and leathers looked near death, but were somehow still alive). I didn't want to set up a temporary tank. Was just too much work for so little to save.

So then I decided to keep everything, and just brute force the algae away by buying a crazy clean up crew.

I picked up:

35 Emerald Crabs, 160 Turbo Snails, 100 Small Golden Astrae Snails, 6 Star Snails, 175 Small Blue leg Hermit crabs, 36 Cerith Snails, 24 Nerite Snails, 6 peppermint shrimp, and 4 lettuce nudibranchs.

Two weeks later, my rocks look like I had dipped them in bleach. They look so pristine!

And then my clove polyps and GSP started coming back (note that these were the soft corals that I had inherited from my hubby when his tank sprung a leak).

Grabbed some easy test SPS corals from Crystal and Toan (you guys are awesome!), and everything is doing great. Getting really good polyp extension - something I sorely missed once I started stocking angels.

So I'm basically ready to start over now. Definitely want to go back to my pre-Angels period, meaning I want clams and zoas again. Also, mainly SPS... Which probably means I have to get rid of my GSP (somewhat emotionally attached to it now though since it was such a trooper to survive the crash!).

I am excited.

Maybe I needed this crash to get back into the hobby. I was getting bored.

This post is way too long-winded. I will update later with a few tank tweaks that I have done since the crash.

 

[dodgerblew]

Sorry to hear but glad you're back in Shirley. So what're you going to do with all the cleanup crew now?

 

[CoralsAddiction]

I picked up:

35 Emerald Crabs, 160 Turbo Snails, 100 Small Golden Astrae Snails, 6 Star Snails, 175 Small Blue leg Hermit crabs, 36 Cerith Snails, 24 Nerite Snails, 6 peppermint shrimp, and 4 lettuce nudibranchs.

Two weeks later, my rocks look like I had dipped them in bleach. They look so pristine!

Pretty much what I do now but on a smaller scale. Glad things are looking up for you.

 

[s2k]

Time to buy some new fish - text me when you planning on going!

 

[billyzbear]

I have some frags for you. Most of the one we have traded for are doing well. Text me the next time you go to SPS store.

 

[MrSandman]

I've got some stuff too Shirley. Let me know when you're ready. I'll tag along with you and Toan. [emoji16]

 

[elvis142]

I don't understand. You lost all of your fish and coral. Except for the wrasse, and your ok with that?