Starting over. New Reef

[streetjudge79]

About 3 months ago, disaster nearly struck. My custom 175 nearly came apart. The top braces became separated.. Tank was 10 years old. My service guy caught it in time, drained the tank and took all the livestock.
Well 3 months later, I have a newly rebuilt tank, upgraded to 3/4 inch glass from 1/2 inch. Did some tweaks, added a doser, changed up the return to a single return nozzel and got a new vortech mounted. Went with Fiji mud in the refugium instead of live sand. Going to give this stuff a try.
He set it up yesterday with all new live Florida keys aquacultured rock and I decided to go with black sand this time. Decided to do the rock work a bit different having a separate island of rock. Added the cleanup crew and chromis today too. Also a black back instead of blue. The downtime gave me an oppotunity to re stain the base and top as 10 years took it's toll on the finish. Here's the results.

 

[danny1496]

very nice

 

[tdhnry]

Look great with the black sand. What kind of lighting you go with?

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[ghstrider]

Good stuff steve!

 

[streetjudge79]

The chinese led's 165 watters. 3 fixtures.

 

[streetjudge79]

My first time ever using a doser . I have it set up to dose once a week, 20ML of 2 part alkalinity/calcium and magnesium. Do you guys think that is sufficient? I don't really test because I get lazy and those kits are like a freakin science experiment.

 

[Pmj]

Looks nice. Not sure why you'd be dosing without any coral yet though, just to feed the coraline?

 

[streetjudge79]

Yeah, I want to get the coraline going in this. I've never been able to grow any before.

 

[nismo_32]

Looking good

 

[Pmj]

About the tests, alk is probably the easiest test there is. Calc is not too bad either. I'm sure you could get a LFS to test it as well, just do it a week apart as see how much the levels drop to see what you need to dose. What size tank is it?

 

[streetjudge79]

it's about 175 gallon. Custom sized.

 

[Lacy]

So glad tank didn't come completely apart. That would have been terrible. New tank is looking great.

 

[jpkboca]

looking great

 

[Ludwigia73]

Looks like a great start to an amazing tank, sorry about your previous tank coming apart. We all hope beyond hope that never happens to us.

 

[jonnyu]

Very cool. I like the black sand makes the color of corals really stand out


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[lockdown52]

Nice aquascape.