Blacknifes 50g Battle of SPS learning

[intarsiabox]

A standard 30g tank is 36"L and would make a good sump for your size of tank. Used ones go for pretty cheap. Good luck getting your tank all back together, moving a SW tank is a ton of work.

[blacknife]

I bought a 20 long for a sump. small rubber maid for the input/skimmer chamber. This should do until I build or get built a custom sump. Might move some of my excess live rock down there as well, like my peice that 2 years later is still battling dychiota<sp algee>.

Skimmer is not working good as it used to but still pretty good.. a bunch of the pins on the impeller are busted off but there are enough to do the job for the current bioload.

Was debating just doing fish only.. but... now that everything is running again the tank seems empty without some sps in it.
Gotta track down a few cheap starter frags before i get anything fancy again i guess.

[blacknife]

I forgot to take a fts before teardown, so here is a "damn im glad i only made one frag" quick shot of the new setup. Hoping the cycle is pretty light.

[blacknife]

my corals need more poo

[blacknife]

been lurking forever but no updates. so.. tank had one hickup early summer last year.. corals rebounded... started having minor hickups before christmass, updated peices here and there.. including ading a neptune atk instead of just replacing my float valves on my jbj or moving them to my apex.
think i bought that back on thanksgiving.

have had nothing but ato related failures since then.. a few different ones.. but now down to either just repeatedly failed sensors/defective sensor port

most of my sps are dead.. i had a few barely hanging on a few weeks ago.. but i moved one of my power heads it blew some sand around and over a few days all my remaining newer sps rtn/stn.. guessing the ole disturb the sand and screw your tank syndrome.. i am down to a couple ancient monties barely hanging on. have not tested sh@#$ all through most of the mess.. i know whats wrong most of the time.

not getting rid of the tank but.. almost that frustrated.

fish are supposed to be to make the corals nice looking not be the only thing to look at but for now ill be fowlr+ whatever left.
also going to slowly suck out the sanded.. leaving a very shallow layer in with whatever rubble is in there.

currently running the top off outlet on a timer and relying on the float valve. but things are staying stable that way instead of ... drying out the return chamber.. burning out pumps.. and having the tank go empty like it was before...

[DKoKoMan]

That sounds like a mess! hang in there, get your ATO tuned and salinity consistent. Then work on ALK/CAL/MAG stability. With minimal corals you should be able to do biweekly WC and maintain for a while. Then PO4 and nitrates.

Hopefully you can get it all back on track, start back with some zoas so you get some nice color pop to look at. Then ease back in to SPS .