A Shallow sps reef

[Ryanerickson]

Hi everyone I wanted to share my new tank with the community, it was started in late September of 2016 for now the display is a frag tank of mine 48" long 24"deep 12" high. The tank is nothing special but works fine.

My goal is to achieve easy to maintain smaller sps reef. (That is algae free) in the past I've grown lots of sps with overall a pretty good result but I've always had my buddy bryopsis, bryopsis drives me crazy but regardless of what I've tried I could never kill it.

September 24 was the day the tank was moved in the house to a spare room now the (tank room). That day I also added a small 30 gallon tank for sump and plumbed it all up, By night it had live rock in tank and water running thru it.


Next day I started on the lights my plan was a lot of light in a hood I will build.
6x48"t5
2xai sol blue
1 250 halide
I'm using this combo hoping for the best color, I want the halide for the deep sps color they achieve, ai sol are for fluorescents they can produce and I like the dawn and dusk effect , I'm only running the blue channels white is off. And the t5 are for the fast growth I find they help with also they do a great job of removing most shadows in rock work.

Pic with all lights

Added a white trim for finish


The following week anything I wanted to keep from my frag table was fragged up and moved to new tank also added a few fish and my rock flowers . For the most part only high end sps frags made the cut as I was pretty picky with the limited space in this tank. I also added a older vertex skimmer a buddy let me borrow.




In the following week I also added 60 left hand hermits 4 golden cowries 10 trochus snails for clean up crew and 3 peppermint shrimp for aptasia. Well weeks later the aptasia was gone but they also ate 20 or more rock flower babies it was then I realized this combo will not work so I ordered a new sump, I got a eshopps adv-300 it has a nice refugium that I could use for my rock flowers.

Couple weeks later the sump showed up as it came from Ontario I'm in bc, by this time I've also added a bubble king mini 200.


Back side

Last pic has new skimmer in old sump also shows the brightwell bio brick and bio pellets in reactor.