First Reef Tank Experiment

[scubasteve3610]

I’ve been getting tired of just having fish so I just started experimenting with soft corals. Its been about 8 months now and change of address late and everthing seems to be holding up and growing really well – however I would appreciate any helpful hint anyone can give me as this is my first reef tank. Once I get the hang of this I plan on upgrade to at least a 110 gallon tall full-blown reef tank with a refugium possible.



55 gallon tank

LIGHTING - 48" Coralife Aqualight with 2 x 65 watt Actinic bulbs, 2 x 65 watt 10,000 k bulbs & lunar blue moon glow led lamp

PROTEIN SKIMMER - Coralife Super Protein Skimmer 65

FILTER - 2 Kent Marine Phosphate Reactors plumb together and powered by Max Jet 1200 powerhead with a flow rate of 295 gph. Filter media employed is Kent Marine Phosphate Sponge & Kent Marine Reef Carbon

POWERHEAD - Rio 2500 with a flow rate of 782 gph

SUBSTRATE - 45lb mixture of CaribSea Florida Crushed Coral & CaribSea Seaflor Fiji Pink Reef Sand. Also 20 lb of Fiji live rock and Base rock mixture

Coral - Xenia & an assortment of yellow / green, green and purple / brown star polyps

Fish - Golden Stripe Grouper, Clown Grouper & Red Lionfish.

Crustation - 2 Blue Leg Reef Hermit Crabs, 1 Turbo Snail & 2 Margarita Snail

[Dragonist]

From the info you listed scubasteve, sounds like a decent reef. I would recommend to add more lr(live rock) to the tank, due to being a 55g 20 lb is quite small. Did a little research on Coralife Aqualight, is this fixture a pc(power compact)? Also if interested in checking out another 55g reef check out mine if you will.

Dragonist 55g build(growth) build
http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f7...ef-132270.html

[Loverotties]

Sounds good but I also think you need more rock.Normal is 1 - 1.5 lbs to a gallon.

[scubasteve3610]

The coralife aqualight I have is a PC. I really like it and my corals seem to do well with it. I think the best feature of this light fixture is the blue moon LED's as it give my tank a strange eerie felling at night.

Thanks for the tip on live rock - I think you and Loverotties are total right. I've been holding off on getting additional live rock because from the size of my current fish.

[scubasteve3610]

I had to make some changes to my aquarium over the past few months, as I just could not keep up with the ever increasing amount of algae growing in my aquarium. So I decided to get rid of my lionfish and groupers. I’ve cleared up my algae issues and I slowly added a Two Spoted Goby, Red Scooter Dragonet and a pair of Black and White Ocellaris and Teardrop Ocellaris Clownfish to my aquarium.

Plus for a while now I’ve been working a second job for a while just so I can make several upgrades I’ve been planning for my 55-gallon aquarium. The first thing I did was to get rid of that old school undergravel filter system. I bought two Hydor Koralia #3 pumps and these things work great. They require some much less space and produce a considerable more amount of flow.

Next, I beefed up my Coralife protein skimmer. I added 5 feet of air tubing to the air intake, which has reduced the noise to a much desired tolerable level. In addition to this I as reduced the tubing between the power head and skimmer and this unit is a lean mean nasty green gunk producing machine.

I also had to add an egg crate lid to my tank. One of the back molly that I added during the clean up tried to commit suicide leaping from the aquarium. Thankfully, my Boston terrier spotted him before he dried up and he is now hanging out in my 30 gallon aquarium with a little blue damsel.