50 gallon skimmerless & sumpless

[Carrera75]

Originally Posted by brianlow

Great tank! Any tips for others running sumpless and skimmerless? How often and how large are your water changes? Dosing? Lighting?

Hi there,

Going skimmerless and sumpless is not for everyone. You have to be patient and go slow and a lot of people don't know how to do this. All the corals you see in the tank started from one single head or polyp. I took my time and planned this set up well. The goal was to create a low maintenance reef. If you want to go skimmerless and sumpless I would say go slow, take your time. Don't add 5 fish or lots of corals at the same time. Allow the tank to mature and achieve a good balance.

At the beginning I used to do 10% weekly water changes but as the tank matured that changed. At one point I was doing only a couple water changes a year but this is NOT something I recommend you to do. When this happened, my tank had already been set up for 4 years and it was pretty mature. I know do 10% monthly water changes and I don't add any additives.

There is also an AC110 that was turned into a refugium and I run another HOB filter with some filter pad in there to keep the water clear. The lighting is 2x150w MH + 4x39 T5's.

I feed the fish twice a day and feed the corals once in a while. One thing that I would recommend you to do is to rinse the frozen food before you feed your fish. If you don't do this you will adding a lot of extra nutrients into your set up. I should mention that I have always kept around 5 to 6 small fish and perhaps this has also helped to keep the bio-load in check.

I hope this helps.

Originally Posted by DisneyCoralReef

Outstanding! why are you shutting the tank down?!

Thanks for your comments. why am I shutting down this? I have been told that I have to downsize