my 12g nano cube!

[Osteichthyes]

Hi guys! I just came back to the reef hobby a few months ago Nd decided to do a nano Reef this time! Here's a video of the tank in its current state. Ill post pictures of my progress soon! Any comments and advice would be appreciated greatly. Thanks!

Okay pictures are up of my progress! Since that last picture on the bottom I added 4 more strips of royal blue LED's (1.5W each) So a total of 26 Watts of LED's in my tank right now. Seems like the royal blue has balanced out the bright white LED's now since the coloring looks really good.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=F-rvmbdAdn4

 

[Osteichthyes]

First day getting the tank home! Getting it cleaned up and ready to go. No stand though so I decided to just use an old speaker.

Got all my live rock and sand ready to go! Got rock from a buddy of mine's curing tank which has been in there for about 3-4 weeks and some aragonite "live" substrate sand.
21lbs of LR(~11 LB's of "coralline covered" LR and 10 lbs of premium fiji LR.) and 15lbs LS.
Boy that thing is murky! I even pre-rinsed the sand about 15 times before putting it in.

 

[Osteichthyes]

So the tank finally cleared up and all the sand settled in 3-4 days. Time to add some goodies! Upgraded my tank with a Maxijet 900 return pump and a Hydor Rotating Deflector to try to stimulate more random flow.

A buddy of mine came by and gave me a 3 head frag of some eagle eye zoas(?) or watermelon zoas(?) I'm not sure.. but he told me since my tank was growing hair algae that most likely my cycle was done and to put in the zoas. They opened up nicely so at this point I'm thinking my cycle was done.

 

[Osteichthyes]

Even though I thought my cycle was done I decided to play it safe and let the tank go for another week before adding livestock. I ran my lights during my cycle because the LFS told me that it would be advantageous to me since the cycle might possibly run faster and that algae would grow for me when it was time for my CUC to be added.. Lo and behold.. I had this within less than a week.

After checking my water parameters... which were a bit weird (0 Amm, 0 Nitrite, 0 Nitrate) I decided to consult one of my old reefing friends. He explained to me that since I got rock that was cured for a long time I might have gotten stuff that was already cycled hence I didn't need to go through a cycle myself.
Me being my cautious self I decided to just go and get a bottle of Nutrafin Cycle and add it to my tank a day before I got any CUC in the tank.
I went to the LFS and got 2 turbo snails, an emerald crab, and 4 hermit crabs.
At this point I also decided to stop using the stock pump as a type of powerhead and get myself a Koralia Nano 240 for my tank (just enough flow I think). I also got a top skimmer which seems to be VERY effective in regulating the water levels in the sump but I don't know if it does anything else besides that..
Well the CUC cleaned up the tank pretty well and my buddy came around again and gave me some more frags of coral to put in!

 

[Osteichthyes]

My LFS had these cool looking zoanthids and I just couldn't resist getting them because when I was in the hobby about a 2 years ago all I had was green ones and the eagle eye zoanthids! Not really sure what these orange zoanthids are called but they sure are cool! Since then, these two polyps here have multiplied to 5!

So I got my pair of true percula clownfish from an old buddy of mine for a fairly cheap price ($35) considering that he had already had them for a while so I didn't have to worry about quarantining and marine diseases since he already did all that for me . I also went and got a frag of green zoanthids from the LFS and they threw in a little frag of GSP.. even though it wasn't really that green .
ALSO, as you can see in this picture that turbo-snail/emerald crab crew were like terminators! They got rid of that GHA and cyano so quick I couldn't even believe my own eyes

 

[Osteichthyes]

Okay, skip forward a few weeks. I decided that it was time that I upgraded to LED lighting after reading so many reviews on how much better they were than the PC lighting. A friend of mine owns a shop that sells LED lights so I went there and got an 18W fixture of bright white LED's and 2 strips of royal blue LEDs (1 watt each). My brother decided to break down his tank so he tossed over all of his coral over to mine.. man what a mess over here now. @_@
*Note that the LED is REALLY powerful and yellow, almost like sunlight. I guess the two strips of blue LED's weren't strong enough.

 

[Osteichthyes]

Here's just a glamour shot of the tank with just the blue LED's running later on at night.

 

[Osteichthyes]

I woke up one morning and I noticed that my clownfish was hosting my hammerhead! How cool! I didn't know that it could do that!

 

[Osteichthyes]

I got a HUGE colony of frogspawn ~5 heads to add to my tank. I decided to put it in the front near where the hammerhead was before to see if my clownfish would host it and they did! Really cool stuff.

 

[Osteichthyes]

Woke up today and saw my peppermint shrimp eating a mushroom coral.. Guess he has to go..