Diary of my 5g nano

[Samper]

Well my parents had this acrylic 5 gallon aquarium laying around so I'm bringing it into my aquarium family. Water is circulated with a MJ 400, heat with some extra heater I had laying around..I think it's between 55-75 watts. Lighting is via a 65w LOA settled in a well ventilated hood. Rocky, the airline broke the old bulb when they searched my bag but I found another at Home Depot for 14 bucks. Thanks for the hood, it's a perfect fit. I have a 4-5 inch deep medium particle aragonite sand bed and have purchased about 20 lbs of rubble/small chunks of marshall islands/fiji rock. I may wrap electrical tape around the sides where the sandbed is exposed to light in an attempt to keep infauna populations up near the edges of the system. The rock will be added tomorrow after things clear up a bit. I'll have to experiment with this for a while to get a balance going and I think heat may be an issue. I've situated this small aquarium so that half the day it gets some good natural sunlight. After adding rock I estimate the total water volume to be around 3.5 gallons. 2 or so of these gallons will be changed out weekly. I plan to keep Xenia, Zoo's, Ricordia and various polyps in this system as well as a small goby/shrimp pair down the road. Here are some pics for now but you can bet I'll keep it updated.
Thanks for looking.

[Reefland]

Not a bad looking little tank, be sure to keep us updated!

[Elmo18]

Oooh this will be a nice 'on the desk' type of tank

- Elmo

[almostdiva]

Oooh this will be a nice 'on the desk' type of tank

- Elmo

I would KILL to have a 5g seahorse tank (or clown gobies!!) on my office desk!!

[Samper]

Well things have cleared up a bit....except for some film that I couldn't scrub out from when it was previously setup. Hopefully the saltwater will either soften it so I can get it off or just eat it off...doubtful..;) . Anyway here's day 2 with my rockwork. I kept it to a minimum because I'll be moving some coral pieces/rocks from my display over when the time is right.

[scubadude]

Dewd,
I totally missed this thread when you first posted it sorry.....Sweet little nano, your on a roll arentcha....Hehe...keep it up bro! Love the rocks. I cant remember if that LOA had holes drilled in the enclosure or not. If you do get some heat problems then you might want to drill some in there to vent the light a bit more. I have pics somewhere if you need them. I also think I remember somewhere seeing some lights online for different kelvin rated bulbs for that fixture...Would be nice if there was a 10k or higher bulb for that fixture.

[Samper]

Thanks for the words of encouragement. I thought the bulb in it was pretty close to 65k...if not and it doesn't do the job I'll start searching for an alternative. The fixture has a ton of holes drilled in it and so far I've maintained 81-83 degrees. Not bad for 3.5 gallons of water with a pretty hot light directly above it.

Besides some aiptasia and some hair algae that came on my rockwork things look alright. I've thrown a few hermits and Cerith snails in as well as one polyp of some old brown Ricordia. After seeing the kind of water the ricordia and zoo's come from I'm almost willing to bet that they can make it through a cycle process of a tank. I'm not willing to put anything nice in there until I know it's ready but I think it'll be interesting to see if I'm right or not.

[Samper]

I thought I'd update this.

I never ever....ever have changed the water in this tank. I scrape whatever saltcreep I can find and add it back when I top off the water.
I keep 3 20oz water bottles on hand. I keep a cycle of these going. I use tap water to fill them. Every day I use half of a bottle. After two days that bottle is empty I turn on the tap...let it run for 30 seconds or so then fill and cap the bottle off. It goes to the back of the line and I start on the next bottle. I have no nuisance algae.none..not from the tap water which reads a 65 tds and not from the sunlight and not from the lack of water changes. There is some brown diatom looking stuff growing but I just scrape it off with a credit card whenever I feel like it other than that I just leave it ALONE!
I never ever....ever feed this tank either. I haven't added one drop of food since I started it.
I have two different anemones living in here. One for sure is Aiptasia but it lives in peace among the Xenia. The other anemone is very interesting to look at and is different from aiptasia but still might be considered a nuisance in a real reef. Neither of these anemones have spread anywhere and don't harm anything. I actually saw my unknown anemone eat an amphipod one day that accidentally touched a tentacle. It happened so fast I wasn't even sure I saw what I saw but the anemone retracted and opened back up later. I didn't see any waste. There is a somewhat decent pic of the anemone in the fourth picture I think. Speaking of pods I have hundreds of amphipods running around. Some I swear are the size of small dogs. I have at any given time five or so batches of mysis shrimp swimming in little clumps all over the tank. I have bristle worms running around everywhere some of which come in the 6" range. I have a reproducing population of stomatella varia also. I don't know where some of these critters are getting their food but I can only assume that the ecosystem is taking care of itself and food is being supplied.

This tank gets indirect sunlight most of the day but also has a 65w Lights of America bulb above it. I really think all the indirect sunlight it gets would be more than enough to take the fixture off the top but it helps me see in it better so I leave it up. It comes on at 9am and goes off at 9pm. It's interesting because my Xenia are slowly growing around toward the back side of the tank...toward the sunlight. In my other systems they grow up toward the only light source available but here they are growing sideways. I have a couple of mushrooms in the tank and instead of reaching up toward the light one of them actually reaches around the corner of a rock during the day toward the window. At night it comes back to it's corner. Neat stuff IMO.

The sandbed isn't really functioning or anything and I never really wanted one until I noticed how the corraline grew in my 75g with a SB. Corraline also grows without any additives in this 5g and I give all the credit to the sand so from now on even if I have a BB system I will have a sandbed somewhere seperate. This conclusion that I came up with is the entire reason I just upgraded my 20g.

For circulation I have one MJ 400 and have a small heater maintaining temp. I keep 2 stick on temp indicator strips on the tank and a small floating thermometer just to be sure.

The only filtration I guess I have would be the small amount of LR and the ball of chaeto I put in there. It was golf ball size at first but since May it has grown to take up the right 1/3 of the tank. Anyway I know it's not that interesting to most of you to talk about a 5g but I'm loving the simplicity of keeping it and would hope that some others who might not want to spend oodles of money would enjoy something this small yet so diverse and interesting. Thanks for looking

[Samper]

I was just reading my last post and was thinking that I might be giving a bad example to someone trying to get into the hobby. For anyone reading this who doesn't know me I do take care of my systems and don't advocate doing what I'm doing to this one. It's just an experiment. And that's my disclamer.
Peace

[yankeebobo]

I was just reading my last post and was thinking that I might be giving a bad example to someone trying to get into the hobby. For anyone reading this who doesn't know me I do take care of my systems and don't advocate doing what I'm doing to this one. It's just an experiment. And that's my disclamer.
Peace

Glad to see that part clarified. Point - start the system right, after some time, experiment whatever you want. And with the Xeniz, try different bullets to kill them.

[CSeaSee]

So how's this tank doing, anyways?

[Samper]

I'm gonna do a little maintenance on it today. My golfball size ball of chaeto has grown to take up half the tank so I'm gonna take it back down to golfball size again. I'm also gonna clean the powerhead and heater off and scrape the acrylic with a credit card. The Xenia in it are more brown than they were in my other tanks and they don't pulse except in early evening. They are just existing not really growing. I've given up trying to figure out the pulsing cause it's different in every system I have.