Here it goes
1. My tank has been setup for just over a year now. I don't use a skimmer, I run no chemical filtration (no carbon, no phosban, not anything). The display is a 34g which has a built in filtration compartment in the back. I use the chamber to house my heater, and the intake for my closed loop. That section drains into my 25g refugium, which holds about 20g's of water. The refugium is filled with cheato. There is right around 50 lbs of LR in the display and refugium. I run my flow at about 47x an hour turnover. Most of this comes from spray bars behind the rocks. IME water through the rocks is very important. I also have water coming in from the return from the refugium and from a koralia nano which replaced my Seio 620 (Seio was to big and bulky, koralia nano is sexier).
I dose for calcium, alk, mg, a few drops of iron, and yes a few trace element products.
2. No problem with any certain coral. Did have a acro that I had to move to my other system but that was due more to the seahorse bothering it then to any other reason from what I can gather. I could be wrong. Other corals I am keeping are all doing well, but with one exception were picked specifically for this type of system.
3. I did a water change in April when I moved my seahorse from QT into the display. I took 15g from the QT and put it in the display tank. I was doing 5g daily water changes on the QT tank so the water was pretty clean when it went in. That was the tanks first water change, was the last one as well.
4. I originally set the tank up as an experiment. I took the rock from another tank I upgraded and left in a few plants and corals as well as a pair of peppermint shrimp, a cerith snail, and dwarf hermit crab that just showed up. I wanted to see if I could produce enough food in my system without feeding the tank at all. After a few months of this I added a very small tail spot blenny, under an inch at purchase. Continued not to feed. Then I was offered a pair of seahorses that were in need of some TLC, always been a sucker for the seahorses so I took them in. One made it (they were quite ill) and that seahorse was then added to the tank. That is were the stock has been for about 4-5 months.
I did add a pair of small naussarius snails along the way, don't remember when exactly.
In terms of plants I have
ochotodes
red grape
green grape
dragon's tongue
codium
ulva
prolifera
mexicana
halmedia
sargassum
Corals
gorgonia
various zoa's close to 50 polyps
scroll coral
2 different ric morphs
purple mushrooms
green and red yuma's
sinularia
sacrophyton (both regular and green polyp)
finger leather
xenia
tubestrea
I feed a cube to two cubes (sometime I feed the tubestrea too) a day of PE mysis. I use the flat pack on occasion and then use about a cubes worth to my best guess.
5. Problems ya had a few :lol: At first I had a really bad hair algae outbreak. Which stumped me because i was not feeding anything and all my top off water came from RODI. That lasted for quite some time but the other macro is to the point where it is outcompeting the nuissance algae. In the recent pick you can see how little is left.
I also had a bloom of bristle worms but after a few months with no food in the system they died back and are now in not so scary number.
I had a very large population of mini feather dusters as well. They seemed to have died off a little bit as well.
I am currently having a large outbreak of flatworms. I am considering using Flatworm exit and will be doing the water changes that accompany that if the population does not dwindle soon, as the number of flatworms is starting to affect some of my corals.
Some pics
Here is a pic of the tank from yesterday. The color is a bit off but it is 100% non altered. That is how it looks straight out of the camera just so there is no confusion.
Here is a shot from a few months ago so you can see the growth of the macro and corals and some of the HA recession
Here is a farther away shot with the refugium at about the same time IIRC
An even earlier shot of the tank from somewhere in the may to june range IIRC.
