otolith's blog

[otolith]

Well, I don't know if I'll ever get the time to do this, but it may be a good place for me to log stuff as time goes by...

My tank:
180g acrylic custom made tank by www.reefmania.net
sump, Ca reactor, skimmer, Kalk reactor all made by reefmania as well.
Predominantly an SPS tank, with a few cool LPS and softies...

40g breeder tank is supposed to be used for frags, but mainly is used for babysitting other's corals.
It'll be coming down soon as it has a major hair algae outbreak, and needs a good cleaning.

[otolith]

Here it is when I first set it up in July '04



And here it is around its one year anniversary.

[otolith]

Well, I think I'm going to do a major overhaul to the tank. I have dictyota algae growing all over, and although my blonde naso did a nice job keeping it in check, now that he had a run-in with an intake and no longer is around, it's coming back in no time at all.

As such, I'm going to buy a similar-sized setup, move all my rock/corals to this tank, and then temporarily take down my current tank. While it's down, I'm going to get the stand powder coated (it's starting to rust in some areas) and probably take off the closed loop, and set up the SeaSwirls that I've had for a good year. Then I'll probably buy all new rock, and resetup the tank, and then probably restart with fewer corals.

At least that's the plan for now.

[otolith]

I finally took some updated pics of corals in my tank. Instead of posting the pics here, I thought I would just add a link to the TCMAS forum where they're already posted.

[otolith]

Well, a sad update...the tank is pretty much done.

There is not enough time in the day for me to balance my work, family life, and a reef tank without making a sacrifice somewhere. You can tell by the pic below where the sacrifice hit the hardest.

I saw it going down the tubes, and decided I better act quick to try to save some of my corals...as such, I moved some to a friend's house to be babysat, I fragged a bunch of the others, and now the tank is pretty barren. It looks like an aptasia forest in there as well. It'll now be coming down, and I probably will not set this back up, but will probably downsize to a simpler tank that is a little less time-consuming and a little more manageable. Not sure what I'll do yet, but I'll figure something out. It's a good thing that I believe in giving frags away, as most, if not all, or the corals in there are spread around to other people.

[otolith]

Finally drained the tank today. I'm sure going to be curious how the electric bill is going to change. I think I'll clean it up and it may end up in storage for the time being. It'll be kinda nice to not have to worry about a tank for a while.