Featured Member Series - 03-05

[Reefland]

Beautiful! How's the new tank doing Eric?

[Rokie]

Wow this is just beautiful. An inspiration to beginners like me.

[ereefic]

We spent the day yesterday reworking our SPS tank. When we set this tank up, the rocks were sitting right on the bottom, while some were sitting on PVC racks. Well, with inadequate flow, let 's just say there was alot of accumulation of crap behind the rocks that were almost impossible to get to to remove. This time around we put all the rock on PVC racks so no rocks are touching the bottom.

I had some 1/4" HDPE on the bottom of the tank before, but this warped shortly after being put in the tank and there was a good amount of crap that got underneath. We removed this and just left the bottom bare. With some repositioned powerheads, flow is keeping the bottom pretty clean, with the exception of a pile that accumulates right up front, which is easily removable.

We were running an MR-1, but since our MR-2 was freeded up from a skimmer upgrade, we decided to put it on this tank. I built a new sump from a 30 breeder. The MR-2 wouldn't fit in the exsisting 30 gal. sump. One thing I did was to make all the water going from the 1st chamber, pass by the skimmer intake before moving on. After watching it this morning, it was a beautiful thing to watch all the crap go right to the skimmer.

We were running a single HOT overflow before, I added a second in hopes of getting more crap to the sump. So far they are working very well. I reworked the return to the tank as well. There was a Mag 9.5 piped with 3/4" and going to a SCWD. I could open that pump all the way up and the 1" drain would handle it no problem. I took out the 9.5 and put on a 12 piped with 1" and this seems to be quite an improvement.

We've been running the MH's about 5 hours a day and the actinics 12 hours, but got tired of all that actinic only. So we swapped out super actinic for a actinic white and makes it much nicer to look at when the MH's aren't on. (Pics below are with VHO only)

Finally, we re-aquascaped. Looks much better now I think, except for those darn seio cords!!

We also re-worked our fish in the tank. We got rid of the yellow tang, powder brown tang and the bluejaw trigger. The kole tang stayed along with the 6-line wrasse and we added 2 pink skunk clowns, a midas blenny and a royal gramma.

Here's the before and after shots.

[Reefland]

Looks great Eric!

[Poseidon]

I agree VERY NICE!

[queenangelRIP]

that tank is amazing ( if only i had the time money and space)

[PufferDad]

Beautiful pics! What kind of camera are you using? What film speed? Aperture? Digital?

[ereefic]

Thanks, all of those were taken with a Kodak ls443 camera. We've since went to a Canon Rebel XT after the kodak took a crap.

Unfortunately, that tank was pulled down several months ago do to some problems. Plans were to set it back up but we decided against it at this time.