Reid's 120g Oceanic Tech Build

I also have some rust colored zoos that I got cheap and have been growing out onto a bunch of small rocks. Dropped one of the rocks in there, and no one has touched it.

good to hear they're both eating. Are the zoas your test piece for introducing other corals, or just a matter of curiosity?
 
good to hear they're both eating. Are the zoas your test piece for introducing other corals, or just a matter of curiosity?

It was supposed to be an emergency food, or even a treat, because I've not heard of any of either of these types of angels passing on zoos.
 
Got a couple of pics of the two angels today. Not the greatest lighting situation, but I did the best with what I had to work with.

The Regal, which my wife has named 'Appa'
regal1.JPG


regal2.JPG


And the Majestic, who my wife has named 'Peanut'
majestic1.JPG


majestic2.JPG


It doesn't come across that well in the pics, but the Majestic is starting to change, just a little bit :)
 
I'm going to try to be a bit more regular with my updates from this point on. I've got a little bit of cash coming in and hopefully will be able to do more with the tank now... Fingers crossed. Ive been interviewing for a really good job with Stryker, for medical device sales, so say a little prayer for me or something!

To start, here are a couple of full tank shots. Not much has changed. You may have seen in earlier posts that I had a rock island in the middle where that RBTA lived. Well, I was doing some cleaning of the tank, and moved that rock to one side, near the right side rock formation. I left it there for about an hour while I was screwing with stuff in the fish room. When I came back out, the S.O.B. had made a mad dash and was on the main rock formation. That'll learn me.

fts1.jpg


Now, I've got some rocks strategically placed to shade him and coax him onto a rock that I can move back to the island.

fts2.jpg


I've also suffered the great snail holocaust of 2010. I had a little bit of bryopsis showing itself in my frag tank, so I raised my Mg to 1750, and left it there for a few weeks. Unfortunately, that killed all of my snails but one cerith and my old long spine urchin. Surprisingly, my red thorny star has remained unaffected... as has the bryopsis.

The last survivor. The tales he will tell to future generations...
snail-survivor.jpg


Over the past few weeks, I've brought the Mg back down to 1400. On Saturday, I went to Premium Aquatics, and picked up 12 Astrea snails, a new diadema urchin and a sea hare (who will hopefully munch on bryopsis. If he does, He will be for sale once his job is done!).
snails.jpg


Urchin in the tank! We named him Reggie.
urchin.jpg


urchin2.jpg


Snail... You have work cut out for you...
snail-urchin.jpg


Hopefully Reggie will tank are of the Lobophora that has made some inroads in the tank.
 
Fish Pics

Fish Pics

All of the fist are doing well, and even my Randall's Shrimp Goby (Lt. Wong) stayed in one place long enough for me to get a pic...

ltwong1.jpg


Female clown. She's developed a really cool black horizontal stripe above her shoulders. She also finally began to host in the RBTA after about four months of getting about half an inch from it and staring at it, but never making contact.
clown1.jpg


clown2.jpg


clown3.jpg


clown4.jpg


Penelope the Purple Tang:
penelope1.jpg


penelope2.jpg


Unfortunately, there is a bunch of crap flying around the tank in these pics, because I just before I took them, I cleaned some things. Also no tripod. Sorry!

The angelfish will hopefully be moved over in the next couple of weeks. I am trying to decide if I want to remove Penelope and put her in the QT for a few weeks while they establish themselves in the DT, or just put in a drilled acrylic sheet. Hmmm...
 
Reid, Can you please repost some pics of your fishroom. Im looking for some ideas and i remember you had a nice setup. Also i started a thread that has pics of just fishrooms and good sumps id like to post your setup in that thread as well
Thanks
Rob
 
Reid, Can you please repost some pics of your fishroom. Im looking for some ideas and i remember you had a nice setup. Also i started a thread that has pics of just fishrooms and good sumps id like to post your setup in that thread as well
Thanks
Rob

Sure thing. Can you link your other thread?
 
Reid, Can you please repost some pics of your fishroom. Im looking for some ideas and i remember you had a nice setup. Also i started a thread that has pics of just fishrooms and good sumps id like to post your setup in that thread as well
Thanks
Rob
 
Hey Rob, I'm going to have to get some new fish room pics together. The ones that I have now are not lit very well, and everything was very early on and messy. I'll get some new ones and post asap.
 
Fish Room

Fish Room

As per Rob's request, here are some pics of my fish room. It's not the ideal space, but I am doing what I can with what I've got. It's basically in the furnace room in my basement, and completely separate from the tank, separated by stairway. It's still kind of a mess / work in progress, but we're getting there.

First, the basement layout:
basement_layout.jpg

This is my very first idea of how things would look, and it's very similar to the way that it turned out. The tank, sump and SW mix are all located where they are in this pic. The frag tank is where the ATO is above, and the ATO is hooked directly into the RO/DI system with a solenoid valve. The QT tank sits just under where the RO/DI hangs in the floor joists of the first floor. The sink is opposite the toilet, located in the furnace / fish room.

Here is the view from just inside the door of the basement, looking toward the frag tank, sump etc. Notice the frag tank, BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS:
fishroom2.jpg


And the view looking from the other side of the sump:
fishroom3.jpg


The tank drains underneath the stairway, and is split into two on the sump side. The split has two valves, one going to the skimmer portion of the sump, and one to the refugium:
drain.jpg


Above the drain, I have a manifold with five valves off of the return. Two from one pump and three from the other. The one with two on this end also feeds the frag tank. You can see that valve just behind the fuge light, which is just a standard clip on work light from Lowes with a 6500k daylight power compact flood bulb:
sump1.jpg


The fuge, which the frag tank drains back into via gravity. I have a little bag of carbon on that outlet at the moment to see if it helps reduce some of my organics. I've got a little algae in the frag tank, even though my phosphates test at 0 with a Hannah photometer. Go figure:
refugium.jpg


My wire mess. I don't have everything running through the Aquacontroller Apex yet... but will when I get the cash for another EB8:
wiremess.jpg


Here are the plastic shelves that I got at Home Depot. They hold all of my various alchemic potions and such. You can also see buckets of salt, magnesium, calcium and alk mix from Bulk Reef Supply. One day I will have dosing pumps for these, but today, it's all manual:
shelves.jpg


Here's my QT tank. You can see the Regal Angel, but the juvi Majestic is hiding. Behind it is a big Rubbermaid containter that I bought to cure my rock in. Now it's empty and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with it:
qt.jpg


Here's the all important de-humidifier:
dehumidifier.jpg


Like I said, still a mess and a work in progress. I am going to grab some hooks and baskets and whatnot for the pegboard to get the organization headed in the right direction here soon. Lighting still sucks too, but I bought some T8 fluorescents to hang recently. Not the best color, but at least it will be brighter.

Hope it helps!
 
Well what happened? Just found this thread and spent 2 days reading it, then it just stopped 2 months ago. Was enjoying it.
 
THERE WAS A DISASTER AND EVERYTHING WENT TO CRAP!

Actually, I've been really busy, and haven't had time to get many updates on here. I just put a new urchin and a few snails in this past week, and they seem to be doing fine. I am continuing to monitor them, so hopefully whatever was going on is not anymore. I ran carbon and Chemipure on it for the past month, so hopefully any toxins that were in there are now... not. It was weird that the only things affected were the urchins and astrea snails though. It really bothers me that I couldn't nail it down.

Now that I'm going to be in town for a stretch, I'm going to get the two angels released into the 'wild' of the main tank. Probably in about a week or so... Once I'm sure that I can keep a new urchin and snails alive.

Thanks for reading the thread, jwheeler! Welcome!
 
Update!

Update!

I've been working this week to get the angels transferred to the display tank. To start, I wanted to get a clear divider in there so that they could acclimate themselves without being harassed by the purple tang for a few weeks. I learned a valuable lesson...

This, 1/8 in acrylic
1-8inch.jpg


Plus this power tool
drill.jpg


Ends like this
crack.jpg


I wanted there to be holes in there so that some water can still flow through to the other side of the tank, so I regrouped, and purchased a piece of 1/4" acrylic, used my dad's drill press and ended up with this:
drilled-div.jpg


Unfortunately, I was a little bit impatient in drilling some of the holes. Most of them turned OK, but some look like this:
hole.jpg

Oh well. It still works.

Here she is in the tank:
div-in-tank.jpg


And during the process, I saw ANOTHER crab in the tank. Luckily, he was in a rock I could remove. I siphoned some water into a bucket, put some frozen mysis in the bottom, and put the rock in there, but raised up on a little plastic cup so that the crab couldn't run back into the rock. Took about five minutes:
crab-trap.jpg


Catch of the day:
crab.jpg
 
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