Well, I haven't posted since my last rescape update because I've been so wishy washy about what to do with my 135 tank and whether to keep it and have 2 reefs or 1 reef and 1 fowlr or sell the 105 and keep the 135 or what, so I didn't want to talk about it till we'd actually done it. Long story short (if such a thing is possible for me), we got this enormous electric bill for May and decided one of them had to go. So we sold off my 105 and the light. Everything came together perfectly last weekend and I had a buyer for the tank and a buyer for the light AND a seller with the perfect light that I had only dreamed of owning! The buyer for my light and the seller of my new light actually were in the same area of town so I got to sell my light, visit a LFS I hadn't been to yet (spend some of my tank sales $$!) and go pick up my new light all in one trip! And the guy I bought my new light from gave me a bunch of frags!
Saturday morning, I had a guy come by here to swap me my 9 gallon nano for a couple of rocks. This worked out perfectly because I needed somewhere to put my corals during the changeover. Okay, so I moved over most of my live sand to the 135. Already had about 70 lbs of live sand in there so now it's probably around 200 pounds or so. It's a pretty fat sand bed.
My rocks were in buckets, my corals and fish were spread among my new nano, a 10 gallon QT and the sump of the new tank. I gave away my blue green chromis because so many have warned me about them being mean in the future and I'm not sure what all other types of fish I want, so we're starting out lean. My coral beauty is still in the QT with a few rocks and some anthelia. She started out in the sump but thank goodness I checked on those fish a lot because she went over the refugium waterfall and got stuck between the baffle and a filter pad I hadn't thought to remove. She got a little beaten up, but is fine now and doing well in the 10 with a little melafix and eating and begging like normal. (ok forget it, I can't do short stories LOL) I'm going to keep her there for a while because, as I've mentioned before, I'd like to have another angel in this tank and I plan to put them both in at the same time. The new one, whatever I decide on, will do a tour of qt in my nano.
So the rocks went in the tank and I pretty much blindly aquascaped them and it actually turned out ok. I'm still futzing around, but I'm pretty happy overall. I'm even starting to use some putty to stick things down permanently!
Tank specs are:
135 gallons
30 gallon sump/refugium
1 Tunze 6080 ph & 2 Koralia 4s
Iwaki md70 return pump
We picked up my new light on Sunday! It is an Ultralight brand, so not the best out there, but still, pretty great. 3x 250w MH w/ 4 80w T5s!!!!!!!!!! :headbang2: The MH bulbs that came with it are Hamilton and have about 3 months left and the T5s were new when the guy took the light down and are Giesseman!!!!!! The MHs are 14k, 2 actinic T5s and 2 daylights, 6500k, I think, but it might be 10k. I got this fixture for an incredible deal! He had also just put in new fans before he took it down. He only quit using it because he wanted to switch to just using T5s to save on the electric bill. (which I'm dreading, but trying to run them conservatively)
SO, I actually bought some sps frags on Saturday! I got what I was told is pink pocillopora and pink stylophora, which are two that I like when I look at pictures online. Neither looks very pink yet, but maybe they will after a while? All the polyps have been out already, so that's good.
(the only thing a bit disappointing is that there turned out to be more scratches than we thought on the tank once we put the light on, but for what we paid for it and for the increase in space for fish, corals and types I can keep, I'll live with it for at least a year or so.)
Fish stocklist now is pretty small:
1 citron goby
1 ocellaris clown
1 lawnmower blenny
1 PJ cardinal
1 target mandarin
Inverts: 2 electric blue hermits, 4 scarlet hermits, various other boring ones, lots of various snails, 1 purple reef lobster (who got so torked when I caught him out that he lost both his claws).
Anyway, pics are more fun than my gabbing, so here you go!!! Guess I have to start a new reef diary? :headbang2:
(the last pic shows my new chiller! It's got my tank down to a cool 82 degrees!)
Saturday morning, I had a guy come by here to swap me my 9 gallon nano for a couple of rocks. This worked out perfectly because I needed somewhere to put my corals during the changeover. Okay, so I moved over most of my live sand to the 135. Already had about 70 lbs of live sand in there so now it's probably around 200 pounds or so. It's a pretty fat sand bed.
My rocks were in buckets, my corals and fish were spread among my new nano, a 10 gallon QT and the sump of the new tank. I gave away my blue green chromis because so many have warned me about them being mean in the future and I'm not sure what all other types of fish I want, so we're starting out lean. My coral beauty is still in the QT with a few rocks and some anthelia. She started out in the sump but thank goodness I checked on those fish a lot because she went over the refugium waterfall and got stuck between the baffle and a filter pad I hadn't thought to remove. She got a little beaten up, but is fine now and doing well in the 10 with a little melafix and eating and begging like normal. (ok forget it, I can't do short stories LOL) I'm going to keep her there for a while because, as I've mentioned before, I'd like to have another angel in this tank and I plan to put them both in at the same time. The new one, whatever I decide on, will do a tour of qt in my nano.
So the rocks went in the tank and I pretty much blindly aquascaped them and it actually turned out ok. I'm still futzing around, but I'm pretty happy overall. I'm even starting to use some putty to stick things down permanently!
Tank specs are:
135 gallons
30 gallon sump/refugium
1 Tunze 6080 ph & 2 Koralia 4s
Iwaki md70 return pump
We picked up my new light on Sunday! It is an Ultralight brand, so not the best out there, but still, pretty great. 3x 250w MH w/ 4 80w T5s!!!!!!!!!! :headbang2: The MH bulbs that came with it are Hamilton and have about 3 months left and the T5s were new when the guy took the light down and are Giesseman!!!!!! The MHs are 14k, 2 actinic T5s and 2 daylights, 6500k, I think, but it might be 10k. I got this fixture for an incredible deal! He had also just put in new fans before he took it down. He only quit using it because he wanted to switch to just using T5s to save on the electric bill. (which I'm dreading, but trying to run them conservatively)
SO, I actually bought some sps frags on Saturday! I got what I was told is pink pocillopora and pink stylophora, which are two that I like when I look at pictures online. Neither looks very pink yet, but maybe they will after a while? All the polyps have been out already, so that's good.
(the only thing a bit disappointing is that there turned out to be more scratches than we thought on the tank once we put the light on, but for what we paid for it and for the increase in space for fish, corals and types I can keep, I'll live with it for at least a year or so.)
Fish stocklist now is pretty small:
1 citron goby
1 ocellaris clown
1 lawnmower blenny
1 PJ cardinal
1 target mandarin
Inverts: 2 electric blue hermits, 4 scarlet hermits, various other boring ones, lots of various snails, 1 purple reef lobster (who got so torked when I caught him out that he lost both his claws).
Anyway, pics are more fun than my gabbing, so here you go!!! Guess I have to start a new reef diary? :headbang2:
(the last pic shows my new chiller! It's got my tank down to a cool 82 degrees!)
. To give you a good idea, I have a modified Tunze 6100 (~4000GPH), 4 modified Tunze 6025 nanostreams (~1400 gph each), and my main circulation pump, which is a mag 12 (actually pumping ~700gph). That's nearly 10000 gph or close to 160x turnover in my 75. Still not enough.