canar
Addicted to bright lights
So some of you know me some of you don't.
About 6 years ago I decided to build my dream tank. Rod Buehler had been helping me and I had slowly worked from a 90 to a 180 to a 210. This addicting hobby would not allow me to be happy with a measly 210. I contracted with Miracles in Canada to build me a peninsula tank for my front living room. 10' long 3' wide and 30" high made of Starfire glass. A really cool reefer from here that goes by The Grog built my stand by hand. he built Moon jelly's stand too. Someplace on here there are threads for the stand build moving my tank in etc. I had to reinforce the floor from my basement with two posts and an I beam. My sump room is in the basement and I use a 100 Gallon Rubbermaid for a sump. Three 65 gallon drums for fresh, salt, and Kalk water. I have hundreds of pounds of Marco rock and I must give credit to Beefy for doing my amazing aquascaping. The guy is definitely an artist. Everything went great. I was predominately SPS and my slimmer's trunk was as thick as my wrist. I was running ten 400W halides with actinic supplements.
The next set of threads you will find on here was my flatworm breakout. Not the ones that eat acros just the ones that are like roaches in the tank. On the advice of a few trusted people I tried to attack it the natural way. I threw multiple different fish in the tank and arrow crabs to try and combat the flatworms. They continued to multiply until it looked crazy terrible. I had no choice but to use flatworm exit. I had tons of carbon ready but it was too late. Nothing mattered anymore. The toxin they released turned my water bright yellow. You could see shrimp and starfish and everything dying. I ran 5 gallon buckets of carbon for the next few days but it was not enough. All my coral and most of my fish died. Thousands and thousands of dollars of rare SPS gone. I can't even explain how depressing it was.
Up until about 6 months ago I was basically fish only with live rock. The tank went this way for a couple years. I slacked some on water changes and the crappy economy made it hard to afford ten new halide bulbs every six months. No real point with minimal coral anyway. As you can imagine the tank did not look the best. I did have some SPS growing but it was just brown sticks lol.
In the last 6 months I made a couple changes in technology. I added a bio pellet reactor and switched over to LED's from Reef LED dot com. All I can say is the turnaround in my tank is amazing. I am back. The bug has consumed me again. Add to this my friend JGlakin. The guy with the infamous moon view thread on here. Jim took the tank down and I moved his SPS over to my tank. The SPS he had is starting to color up under the LED's as well. I will share some pictures below of my new LED setup and how my tank is coming back. I do have a crazy Vlamingi tang fish called Freckles. he was given to me by Newschool. he used to be 4-5 inches but now he is 15-18 inches. This is by far the most personable fish I ever owned. hard to get a picture without him in it. I just added another 10 LE frags today. At the rate things are growing I will have a lot of frags soon. I do have to put a thank you in here to Tiki Reefer too. Without his help I doubt I would have made it back like this to the hobby I love so much.
To everyone I know I am back. To everyone I don't know nice to meet you. Enjoy the pictures. I will add to them from time to time to document the progress.
About 6 years ago I decided to build my dream tank. Rod Buehler had been helping me and I had slowly worked from a 90 to a 180 to a 210. This addicting hobby would not allow me to be happy with a measly 210. I contracted with Miracles in Canada to build me a peninsula tank for my front living room. 10' long 3' wide and 30" high made of Starfire glass. A really cool reefer from here that goes by The Grog built my stand by hand. he built Moon jelly's stand too. Someplace on here there are threads for the stand build moving my tank in etc. I had to reinforce the floor from my basement with two posts and an I beam. My sump room is in the basement and I use a 100 Gallon Rubbermaid for a sump. Three 65 gallon drums for fresh, salt, and Kalk water. I have hundreds of pounds of Marco rock and I must give credit to Beefy for doing my amazing aquascaping. The guy is definitely an artist. Everything went great. I was predominately SPS and my slimmer's trunk was as thick as my wrist. I was running ten 400W halides with actinic supplements.
The next set of threads you will find on here was my flatworm breakout. Not the ones that eat acros just the ones that are like roaches in the tank. On the advice of a few trusted people I tried to attack it the natural way. I threw multiple different fish in the tank and arrow crabs to try and combat the flatworms. They continued to multiply until it looked crazy terrible. I had no choice but to use flatworm exit. I had tons of carbon ready but it was too late. Nothing mattered anymore. The toxin they released turned my water bright yellow. You could see shrimp and starfish and everything dying. I ran 5 gallon buckets of carbon for the next few days but it was not enough. All my coral and most of my fish died. Thousands and thousands of dollars of rare SPS gone. I can't even explain how depressing it was.
Up until about 6 months ago I was basically fish only with live rock. The tank went this way for a couple years. I slacked some on water changes and the crappy economy made it hard to afford ten new halide bulbs every six months. No real point with minimal coral anyway. As you can imagine the tank did not look the best. I did have some SPS growing but it was just brown sticks lol.
In the last 6 months I made a couple changes in technology. I added a bio pellet reactor and switched over to LED's from Reef LED dot com. All I can say is the turnaround in my tank is amazing. I am back. The bug has consumed me again. Add to this my friend JGlakin. The guy with the infamous moon view thread on here. Jim took the tank down and I moved his SPS over to my tank. The SPS he had is starting to color up under the LED's as well. I will share some pictures below of my new LED setup and how my tank is coming back. I do have a crazy Vlamingi tang fish called Freckles. he was given to me by Newschool. he used to be 4-5 inches but now he is 15-18 inches. This is by far the most personable fish I ever owned. hard to get a picture without him in it. I just added another 10 LE frags today. At the rate things are growing I will have a lot of frags soon. I do have to put a thank you in here to Tiki Reefer too. Without his help I doubt I would have made it back like this to the hobby I love so much.
To everyone I know I am back. To everyone I don't know nice to meet you. Enjoy the pictures. I will add to them from time to time to document the progress.
