New to me Reefer 250
- Thread starter Rostato
- Start date
Coral reefer
Past President
Looks good! Now upgrade!
Flagg37
Guest
Yeah, but don’t use an MDF stand.
Coral reefer
Past President
Sucks man! Just keep on keeping on then. I am an over pruner/fragger to maintain space in my tank. Huge colonies are cool, but they're also...huge...
Rostato
Guest
Yeah it would just be nice to have all my acros grow about the size of all my montis. Then my tank would look killer. My montis have grown exponentially the last few months, while my acros are only encrusting a bit.
rygh
Guest
Disappointing, but sounds like a smart move.
You can always do it later as finances change.
Rostato
Guest
Big update.
Tanks been chugging along. I’m up to 70ml of b ionic 2 part per day to keep things going. Only adding about 7 ounces of b ionic magnesium every 2 weeks to keep the magnesium between 1325-1425
I’ve been dosing Red Sea reef energy A and B every day when I feed the tank my custom mixture of rods food, reef roids, mysis, selcon, and thanks to reef nutrition, I’ll add a bit of phytoplankton and ROE. My auto feeder goes off 2 other times a day, which feeds Neptune’s cross over diet. I’ll switch to reef nutrition CDO when I run out...same stuff anyway.
I dose red seas trace elements base on calcium uptake every week.
I’m getting great growth on everything but my acros. I’m getting growth on them but it’s very minimal....mostly encrusting growth. Corals seem to look great to me, but I’m no expert.
I stopped using NOPOX because it was taking all the nitrate out of the tank but the phosphate was rising steadily. So, I decided that I needed a bigger fuge and went back to just using a GFO reactor.
I also decided to try no using any carbon in the tank to see if that helped with coloration. I was thinking maybe it stripped out my trace elements.
I realized I needed more flow because I had detritus settling in a couple spots. So I picked up some used mp40wes’s from @ashburn2k and bought the upgraded quiet drives to quiet them up. So now I have 2 mp40’s and 2 mp10’s all running together with a nice program through the apex’s WXM. No more detritus In the display...anywhere...it’s awesome. No more sucking out detritus during water changes.
In order to get a bigger fuge, I had blue tide acrylics make me a custom divider, removed the old ATO fuge, and the stock filter sock holders. I also used the extra fitting off my returns manifold to run back into the fuge to add more flow. It shoots water along the bottom to keep detritus from settling. This gives me about. 7 gallon fuge by my calculations..but I need to redo that. Seems smaller. I picked up the new AI Prime fuge for the fuge light, and this thing is awesome it doubled my chaeto size in a week.
In order to maximize fuge space and keep my automatic neck cleaner from my old octopus skimmer, I got the smallest footprint Octopus skimmer I could find with a 6” collection cup. I also wanted a quieter simmer, so I got the reef Octopus 150s. It’s way overpowered for this tank, but I feed like crazy and skim wet...like really wet...like lite tea color. My hope is that one day I can upgrade, and not need to change my skimmer.
I also wanted to move a lot of the electronics away from as much moisture as possible and wanted the sump area to be more organized.
So, I relocated the ATO container next to the tank behind the couch(don’t tell my wife) and built a media board.
I also swapped out heaters as a preventative measure. The finnex heater just started to show a few signs of wear and I didn’t want to risk it.
Current equipment list
2 Hydra 26’s with custom mounts
2 Vortech MP40’S
2 Vortech MP10’s
Reef Octopus 150 S Varios Skimmer
Reef Octopus automatic neck cleaner
BRS CO2 reactor
BRS mini media reactor with GFO
Reef Octopus various 3 (I think) return pump...It’s the first generation
2 cobalt 150W heaters
Apex Classic with Vortech module
Apex DOS with DDR
Tunze 3155 ATO
Trigger Saphire 10g ATO container
Tanks been chugging along. I’m up to 70ml of b ionic 2 part per day to keep things going. Only adding about 7 ounces of b ionic magnesium every 2 weeks to keep the magnesium between 1325-1425
I’ve been dosing Red Sea reef energy A and B every day when I feed the tank my custom mixture of rods food, reef roids, mysis, selcon, and thanks to reef nutrition, I’ll add a bit of phytoplankton and ROE. My auto feeder goes off 2 other times a day, which feeds Neptune’s cross over diet. I’ll switch to reef nutrition CDO when I run out...same stuff anyway.
I dose red seas trace elements base on calcium uptake every week.
I’m getting great growth on everything but my acros. I’m getting growth on them but it’s very minimal....mostly encrusting growth. Corals seem to look great to me, but I’m no expert.
I stopped using NOPOX because it was taking all the nitrate out of the tank but the phosphate was rising steadily. So, I decided that I needed a bigger fuge and went back to just using a GFO reactor.
I also decided to try no using any carbon in the tank to see if that helped with coloration. I was thinking maybe it stripped out my trace elements.
I realized I needed more flow because I had detritus settling in a couple spots. So I picked up some used mp40wes’s from @ashburn2k and bought the upgraded quiet drives to quiet them up. So now I have 2 mp40’s and 2 mp10’s all running together with a nice program through the apex’s WXM. No more detritus In the display...anywhere...it’s awesome. No more sucking out detritus during water changes.
In order to get a bigger fuge, I had blue tide acrylics make me a custom divider, removed the old ATO fuge, and the stock filter sock holders. I also used the extra fitting off my returns manifold to run back into the fuge to add more flow. It shoots water along the bottom to keep detritus from settling. This gives me about. 7 gallon fuge by my calculations..but I need to redo that. Seems smaller. I picked up the new AI Prime fuge for the fuge light, and this thing is awesome it doubled my chaeto size in a week.
In order to maximize fuge space and keep my automatic neck cleaner from my old octopus skimmer, I got the smallest footprint Octopus skimmer I could find with a 6” collection cup. I also wanted a quieter simmer, so I got the reef Octopus 150s. It’s way overpowered for this tank, but I feed like crazy and skim wet...like really wet...like lite tea color. My hope is that one day I can upgrade, and not need to change my skimmer.
I also wanted to move a lot of the electronics away from as much moisture as possible and wanted the sump area to be more organized.
So, I relocated the ATO container next to the tank behind the couch(don’t tell my wife) and built a media board.
I also swapped out heaters as a preventative measure. The finnex heater just started to show a few signs of wear and I didn’t want to risk it.
Current equipment list
2 Hydra 26’s with custom mounts
2 Vortech MP40’S
2 Vortech MP10’s
Reef Octopus 150 S Varios Skimmer
Reef Octopus automatic neck cleaner
BRS CO2 reactor
BRS mini media reactor with GFO
Reef Octopus various 3 (I think) return pump...It’s the first generation
2 cobalt 150W heaters
Apex Classic with Vortech module
Apex DOS with DDR
Tunze 3155 ATO
Trigger Saphire 10g ATO container
Last edited:
Rostato
Guest
Yeah. Decided the mounts were too bulky
ashburn2k
Supporting Member
Would they come off and fall into the sump? That would be my only worry since it’s mounted on the door and eventually they would become loose?
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Rostato
Guest
Worst case scenario...yes. But I used some high powered Velcro. I don’t see it happening.
Mozby
Guest
That sucks. And he just recently started eating pellets too. RIP [emoji22].
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Coral reefer
Past President
Tank looks great. But those across are gonna have problems when they start to grow (into each other)in 6-12 months.
Rostato
Guest
Yup. Plan is to start to remove the easier to keep corals out as the acros grow, and move the acros around to give more space...or maybe to force the wife to allow an upgrade...[emoji12]
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