Cali Kid Corals

Your first reef tank (and mistakes)

Nav

Guest
I was looking at my past pics and came across the first reef tank I setup when I fell in love with this hobby after visiting a LFS.

tumblr_n4uryglfNr1tw65zzo1_500.jpg


It was a basic Aqueon 29 gallon, sumpless setup...lots of mistakes made!

Mistakes
  • Used 4 different types of rock
  • Got only LR... & had lots of hitchhikers (aptasia, worms, etc.)
  • Although I got LR & LS, I dosed pure ammonia to start a cycle... how much did I dose? 10ml and ammonia was so high that API test turned black (8+)
  • I thought Aptasia was a coral and was happy LFS didn't charge me for it ;)
  • Never dipped coral
  • Acclimated fish too fast
  • Used a cheap Ikea $15 powder-wood table as the stand, it would've collapsed any sec!
  • Used out-of-box Aqueon 6500k T5
  • BIGGEST MISTAKE OF ALL??? I DIDN'T KNOW BAR!! Had I known, I'm sure none of the above would've happened :)
Things I did right:
  • Get a HOB ReefOctopus skimmer
  • Add fish only after ammonia & nitrites were 0
  • Lots of water changes (did't ever have GHA but had cyano attacks)
  • 2 Koralia powerheads with good flow
Notice a green hammer above the clown in the left... that was what I got from @Geneva at the first BAR newbie hobbyist workshop I attended.

Aaaah! good memories :) Feel free to share your first FTS & mistakes...
 
;)1996, a 29g. Crushed coral. Three pieces of live rock. Three damsels. Arrow crab. Three normal output fluorescent tubes. Bubble wall in the back for "flow." My stand was a particle board entertainment center I'd found in the trash.

I used to sit and watch the arrow crab eat bristle worms. I had one mushroom coral. Couldn't afford any more. Bright purple though! :rolleyes:

I got the call to go crabbing and they said I needed to be on the plane to Dutch in two days if I wanted the job. When I called the lfs to ask if the guy would pick it up for free he didn't want to. When he showed up he congratulated me on having a nice tank and said he had expected the worst.

Those were the days.

I didn't have another tank until I stopped being a migrant worker in 2001, tried to recreate that same tank at first. Luckily I lived a few houses down from Darcy and she invited me to a BARE meeting.

Got home from the BARE meeting and basically began dismantling and "updating" after seeing Matthew Schmucks amazing 29g and Darcy's spectacular 100g. She even had a giant clam!

It's amazing how much the hobby changed with the advent of the Internet as a communication channel. The techniques we all use were developed long ago, but didn't reach widespread use until the Internet replaced books bought at the LFS and LFS guy advice.

Now we use the Internet to make fun of LFS guy advice. ;)
 
Last edited:
I think the year was 2003, right around Nov/Dec, I finally had enough jibber jabber from that dude who ran the fish section of the store in San Bruno on San Mateo Avenue (forget the name, but if you've been around in the area for a while you probably know who I'm talking about), I was done with the "Saltwater is super difficult" speeches, all the cool fricking fish are salt water fish!!!!
So I got a 10g box of instant ocean salt at PetCo (yup you heard me right!) and had a 10g glass tank, and went to work!
So tank had a bag of "bio active 'live' sand", a plastic piece of driftwood with a "coral" on it, a couple of those rocks that look like they came from Arches national park in Utah, an air driven protein skimmer, and one of those reddish/pink mercury aquarium lamps to go over it. Two fish a tomato clown (my nemo) and a blue damsel (who regardless of what people say was never a mean fish) that was the coolest tank ever! The damsel actually lived in the hollow part of the fake plastic driftwood and zipped in and out of there. Went water got low (evaporation) I topped off with more salt water, that was super awesome :D

Then I found reef central, and at the time BARE's forum on the website. And listening to what most people said (and probably acting a bit arrogant thinking I knew everything when I obviously didn't) I knew I was doing it all wrong. So I upgraded, I went to places like PetSmart to see what tanks they had, and at the time I think I just finished college, or pretty damn close, so I was quite poor at the time. So spending $500+ on the "nice" tank I wanted wasn't going to happen, so instead I went to Craigslist! and I bought...
day1.jpg

Tada! a 135g glass tank for $200, the 10 gallon tank I mentioned earlier is in the corner. The fluval canister filter came with the tank, and yeah I used it because it was "free"... the amount of times I dumped a ton of salt water on those floors when I tried to clean/open, etc is uncountable. Needless to say those floors don't look anything like that today, definitely need to refinish them. So how did I set up?
Mistakes
Few bags of play sand at home depot for my sand bed, this was on the tail end of the "you could get southdown aragonite sand at home depot!!!" period.
I think about 180 pounds of dry rock, that came from Hawaii (to make room for a pier??) that I rinsed off by putting in my bathtub and filling it up (I wish I was joking)
90 pounds of Tongan Kaileni live rock from Dr Mac & Sons (now Pacific East Aquaculture), that came into SFO at 4am, during a heat wave that makes what we just had seem cool, it was so bad you could smell the garbage dump from the freeway (101) when passing Candlestick park. Then I promptly inspected the rock, and tossed it into the tank. Oh boy the cycle that occurred!!! I don't think I went into my living room for 2 weeks except when I needed to get to the kitchen (then I held my breath)
Water flow initially was an Aquaclear 802 powerhead, and some pond pump that was rated for a few hundred GPH (yup all this for a 135g tank)
Lighting was 4 - 55w 10000K PC bulbs, which wasn't SUPER horrible, but definitely no SPS.
left3-20.jpg

Skimmer was a Jebo skimmer (not Jebao), and that bad boy supposedly was rated for 180 gallons, HOB skimmer of course :)
Eventually after the cycle, I made a HOB skimmer box with a few siphon tubes to go to a sump, which was... a plastic Rubbermaid tub, I went through a few of them actually...
Everything associated with changing/removing water was a train wreck on those floors.
Me going to Lucky Ocean and meeting a nice guy running it named Steve, who gave me so many junky corals for free... little did I know this is how drug dealers work to make sure they get clients later!
The very first BAR frag swap, I came home with a big cluster of brown palythoas that I was so happy to get so many of after seeing the size of the frags other people got... oh boy! At least they are officially gone to this day, some of which are still on display at the Steinhart Aquarium! (They managed to keep my soft coral donations alive :D)

Eventually though things did get better, I upped my flow to a couple Seio water pumps, lighting I think stayed the same, but eventually once all the micro-stuff started to gel and get into a groove everything else about the tank came together. I still didn't learn my lesson with cheapskating the sumps though for a while :D. All in all it ended up making me happy at the time
tank072104.jpg

Favorite fish in there was a foxface that you can see the yellow right in the middle, he was smaller than a chromis at the time, he got bigger... much bigger. You can still see the janky overflow I made.

I think from here my next biggest mistake was buying a 100g acrylic tank from a local reefer, not that there was anything wrong with the tank, but the mentality I had that acrylic was better than glass, it was a smaller tank, it wasn't reef ready (I made it reef ready though), and overall I learned to despise acrylic for it's ability to be scratched so easily. The "it's clearer" argument really holds no bearing unless your panes are absolutely clean as can be, which didn't take much for them to not be... and with glass, some swipes with a razor blade makes its clearer than acrylic :D That and being an ultra-cheapskate was the biggest mistakes I've made.


Props to SFSU for still having my webpage up considering I haven't been there in over a decade.
 
First reef tank was a 10g standard. Sourced everything out myself after 2 months of research so I didn't make that much mistakes, but I still had a few.

Mistake 1) 200w water on a 10g. OVERKILL
Mistake 2) Used lived rocks. Not much complaints, but it had some hydroids on it
Mistake 3) buying old equipment without testing first. Got some broken equipment ):
Mistake 4) Never quarantined or inspected frags/plugs for pests (had bubble algae that overran my tank)
Mistake 5) Used vinyl backing instead of painting for black background. Looked so ugly when it started coming apart
Mistake 6) Buying before researching. Still stuck with a brand new BRS biopellet reactor..any takers? haha

But then again tank looked alright. Here's a pic of it when it was in its prime:
upload_2015-9-23_13-47-7.png
 
Mistake 6) Buying before researching. Still stuck with a brand new BRS biopellet reactor..any takers? haha

hahaha...I so did this too, but I then turned it into my Carbon reactor instead and bought a Reef Octopus BR-110 for the biopellet reactor
 
I gotta say, back when I started, no cell phone, you're in a LFS relying on the workers being knowledgeable. Today I was in one, and just looking at a juvi angel, wife was talking about how pretty it was, I told her they change when they become adults, and wammo showed her. If I had a smart phone (with unlimited data too) back in the day, it would have made reefing so much easier, figuring out if a fish I wanted was a good fish or not.
 
We bought a marineland 29gal aquarium kit in 2013. Oh man, we did everything wrong but ended up with a nice mixed reef aquarium a year into the hobby. It's a classic example of having sticker shock - buying cheap equipment, having it fail or disappoint, upgrading to more expensive but not good equipment, and then eventually buying proper gear.

We learned the hard way how to keep fish and coral alive and did probably everything wrong you can imagine, but worked hard to learn and get the right equipment.

Mistakes
  • Live Rocks from Petco :-C (every pest ever)
  • Using "biowheel" in hang on filter, was a cyano and algae factory
  • Cheap tank cover w/ cheap LEDs, burned out < 1 month in
  • Bought horrible Marineland "reef capable" lighting, overpriced, no spectrum, also failed quickly
  • Poor acclimation for initial snails/cleanup crew stressed them out and probably led to very short lives
  • Using free swing-arm hydrometer to measure salinity :-C
  • Jawfish as a new aquarist was too high maintenance for our skills and experience
  • Ran open tank w/out a mesh lid and lost a fish to jumping
  • Started a second nano tank instead of upgrading to a bigger, reef ready tank (sticker shock)
Things I did right:
  • Weekly Water Changes (when a 5gal bucket was all you needed)
  • Lighting upgrades to Kessils
  • Nutrient Export w/ Hang on Skimmer & Media Reactors
  • Managing to make a deep sand bed/burrow for our Jawfish and keeping him happy
 
Last edited:
@Enderturtle It was a blueberry gorgonian. I kept it alive for a few months then sold it when I was downgrading tanks.

I was target feeding and doing heavy water changes every week to keep the nutrients in check
 
Back
Top