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KimP - 47 gal column


KimP

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A quick history on my tank. Picked it up on craigslist on a whim after only keeping a few freshwater tanks in my past. Didn't know what exactly to do with it but I liked the amount of water for such a small footprint. It's only 18"x20" but 30" deep. I thought, WOW 47 gallons, that's HUGE!! (lol...blush.gif) After browsing the web I found out this is a problem because of the small surface area for gaseous exchange, but that a tall tank is great for seahorses. Seahorses? I love seahorses! I had no idea you could keep them in a tank in your house :yahoo:

So I found a few pieces of LR at aquadome, threw them in, and I believe I even mixed the salt in the tank - with tap water :doh:

Luckily I had enough sense to leave the tank be while I did about 4 months or so of research on seahorse.org :book:

Finally ordered 4 erectus - 1 female and 3 males in late 2007. Things went along just fine for a couple of years, I never changed anything, just enjoyed the horses and trying to raise some fry. I had a bout of pop-eye in one of the males, and that was an adventure to say the least. I had to put a tube down his throat every day to tube feed him until he was better. That's something I never would have thought I'd ever do!!! wacko.gif Had another male get a terrible case of pouch emphysema that was manageable for almost 6 months or so before we had to euthanize him. Poor guy.

I had my son in Dec 2009 and as you can imagine, basically forgot about the tank for a year except for very basic maintenance and used Oceans of Austin for most of it, which is where I met atxmandarin, and he's been a great resource ever since.

Last Dec I decided to fix up the tank and get some more horses and that's when I found the ARC. Boy have I learned a whole lot from yall!! A couple of the members on here ever-so-nicely dropped hints that my aquascaping was lacking to say the least. I had always been frustrated with it, but never knew what a nice reef tank could look like. After some good nudges :poke:, and lots of time spent browsing FTS, I finally took the plunge and re-did my aquascaping, with atxmandarin's help and brian.srock's tank as inspiration, along with some tanks on reefcentral. This shape of a tank is so challenging, and continues to be, but it sure makes a great seahorse tank, and hopefully will morph into a nice reef tank.

Now if the baby stays asleep I will post the semi-embarrassing pics of what my FOWLR tank was and the not embarrassing anymore pics of the reef it is becoming...

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Here's one of the only old fts I can find. All of the others are zoomed in on the seahorses :P That's fine though because literally nothing changed from day 1 of putting the rock in all the way to Jan of this year when I took the pic! The plants are all fake and I was using a coralife compact fluorescent that I never changed the bulb in until maybe Feb of this year - so I had the same bulb for what, 3 years?! I also was running a fluval 305 canister filter that I hardly ever cleaned, and a remora skimmer that I hardly ever had plugged in. :thumbsdown: But hey, the horses were happy....and so was all the hair algae and cyano...

Don't laugh too hard - I had no clue what I was doing as far as aquascaping.

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Alright, now that that's over :blush:...

By this time I had gotten rid of all the fake plants and started adding more macros and corals (thank you to the people that gave me free frags - vwmike and stoneroller), and was up to speed on flow. I was still running my canister, but cleaning it just about every week and using it to run carbon and sometimes other media. I had been buying pre-mixed saltwater for a year or more by this point too and staying on top of water chemistry which was great. I had also bought a T5 fixture which I thought was great...more on that later...

After joining this group in Jan of this year, I learned about aqua-mags. I thought, hey! that's exactly what I need! I like the look of rock walls, they don't weigh anything so I don't have to worry about rocks tumbling down, and I'll have lots of places to stick coral. So I ordered a bunch of them and half-hazardly stuck them all over. I love aqua-mags btw, I just couldn't get them to look right. I still had no freaken idea what I was doing....

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So now we're around a month ago. I enlisted the help of atxmandarin of Oceans of Austin to help with the aquascaping. I knew what I wanted to do but needed his awesome stash of LR and the muscle to lift the very heavy soaking wet rocks out of and into the really tall tank. I moved the horses to a small tank, all the coral and macros to my qt, and had some new water on hand. He brought some awesome rock and set up this rock structure. It's very stable because it's made up of mostly huge pieces of rock and it has tons of tunnels and space. It's not against any of the glass, although in 2 places you could barely slip a piece of paper between rock and the glass :) Oh, and at some point several months ago I had changed out most of the black sand to white.

I was mostly happy with it, but I wanted it to reach as close to the top of the water as possible. The original plan was to get some tonga rock from him at a later date because we were out of time.

So here it was at this time with all the coral and fish back in...

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So later the next day I finally had an idea for the rock stack. I took out one of the rocks from the original stack and put it on top of what had been the top rock. That rock fit so perfectly that it's almost like it was made to go there. I sits in a notch on top of the previously top rock and wraps around the skimmer box for a perfect fit. I used some epoxy just to be sure! I love how it makes a shelf and I am so happy with the way it looks now. I'm still playing around a bit with the aqua-mags, but after pulling one and a half out of the tank, I think I'm happy with the look.

If anybody has advice on coral placement, or any ideas on how to improve things, please let me know! I'd love to hear other's ideas on my tank :D

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Alright, so now on to the challenges I'm facing. The most important one is my lighting. I got a T5 fixture thinking it would be great for my tank. I was pretty excited to have found one that was 20" and would fit on my tank. Well, after more research and borrowing a par meter (thank you subsea!) I found out I have ~75 par right under the surface of the water, down to the low 20's on the sand :hmm: I'm only interested in growing mostly softies and LPS, but it's still not adequate. I do like the built in timer and moonlighting though.

So I figure I'm down to LED's as my only option to get some light down to the sand. I can't heat my tank up even a degree more, so MH is out. I have a simple set-up, no sump, only a skimmer and a hot filter for some media, and I really don't want to run a chiller. I can't even get the good T5 bulbs because only this one company makes 18" ones that I know of. Right now I'm settling on the AI Sol fixture. I'm ready to buy but I've learned my lesson and I'm going to put it out there to the great folks on ARC first. Anybody running this fixture? I have no doubt it's a great product from a great company, I'm just concerned with how tiny it is. I can hang the light way up high but I'm worried the sand will be shaded by the rock stack if the light comes from such a small point a foot or so awl. I can get 2 fixtures, but then I'd have to run both of them turned down so much that it feels like a waste of money. I can't stand the thought of wasting more money on light, so I'm dragging my feet a bit. I need to figure out something soon!

More later...baby's crying.....

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looking good! =) i plan to raise a couple erecti(us?) when i get back from this deployment. any advice?

Thanks! I guess to sum it up, my best advice is to read all you can from seahorse.org. That place is a wealth of information. Then ask all the questions you come across when the time comes. Having seahorses has been a blast!

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Nice build. Its a totally different tank from when you first started and I'm glad my tank gave you inspiration. I would definately go LEDs for lighting. I researched them for the longest time and the growth in my tank has been awesome. I could get you free shipping and some free frags if you decide on my lights. I have my eye on a couple nice frags you have so I need your tank on steriods. :) looking forward to more pics as all your new frags start to grow.

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Some updates. I finally figured out how to get the AI Sol to work on my tank, and went ahead and ordered it. It's going to take a little tweaking with the hanging, but I think it'll work great. I'll post pictures when it gets here! I ordered the super blue sol. Besides the obvious features of putting out tons of par and coming from a seemingly great company, what I really liked about it over some others I looked at is the programmability (is that a word?). I was dead-set on a dimmable fixture, and I love how this fixture is able to do the moon cycles and have different intensities throughout the day. I'm pretty excited about it, and I sure hope this works out!

It's been fun watching these little basket stars. I've been fascinated since I found them. So far the first one I found sits curled up around a branch of one gorg all the time. I hope he opens up to eat when the house is all dark. The other is a traveler. He ventured all the way over to the devil's hand leather for a day or so, then wandered to a little gorg frag, then up to the original gorg he came in on, and is curled up on the dragon's breath this evening. I did see both of them spread out today, hopefully eating. One thing I still find especially odd is that both only have 4 legs, then where I would expect another leg to be, there are 4 little short somethings sticking out instead. I thought at first, the one must have lost a leg, and these were new legs? But I find it strange that both are like that. :huh:

Another thing I've noticed are spaghetti worms way up near the top of the tank. One in the feeding dish, and the other on an aqua-mag. Maybe this is normal, I've just not noticed it before.

I'll post another fts soon! There are quite a few more corals, and things are really starting to settle in and open up.

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Check out this crazy spaghetti worm. In all my years of keeping this tank, this is the first time I've noticed them anywhere but the sand. Interesting...and kinda cool.

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First here's a fts from 6/2. In a second I'll post a fts from yesterday. I've been working on moving a couple things around and further cleaning up the look.

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A new fts. In this picture, I hadn't figured out where to put the red finger gorgonian yet, so that's why it's in the feeding dish. It was pretty clear the xenia was irritating it. Vwmike took a look and agreed (thank you!). It was opening up in the feeding dish after days of not opening up at all. Glad I moved it!

I also moved some of my sun polyps. I thought they'd be completely in the shade under this rock, but it's not in the shade at all! What was I thinking? :doh: I'm going to watch it and if it shows any distress or signs of algae growth, I'll find it a new place.

I am having trouble with my duncans. I have 2 frags, and neither of them are opening up much. I'm probably going to move them lower. When the new light gets here, they will be directly under the light and will probably be even more unhappy. If anyone has coral placement comments, I'd love to hear them :) I'm trying to make the tank visually interesting from all 3 sides since it's basically a cube.

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Now for some random updates...

I've found some dragon's breath growing on the aqua-mag that my devil's hand leather is on. I'm very surprised because I've never had the dragon's breath on that side of the tank. Kinda neat!

Found one crazy seahorse sitting in the rubble box :lol:

Some coral pictures - a happy brain, happy litho, happy seahorse, and solid yellow sun polyps. Got a decorator crab, new gorgonian, some chitons, and these beautiful virgin nerites. I have to say, the inverts in my tank are easily some of my favorite things in there.

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that tank really looks good

love this tank

Thanks for the compliments. There's still work to be done on it, but I guess that's always the case! Thanks for checking it out :)

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I had forgotten to update everyone on my little basket stars. I still have the one on the green lace gorg and the other on the dragon's breath macro. I don't see them stretching out much, which is how they filter-feed as I understand it. I've been hoping they just stretch out at night to eat when it's all dark and I just miss it. Well I ordered some filter feeder food from reefcleaners specifically for my gorgonians and tried it out last night. Everything in my tank went bonkers for it! Prior to this I didn't really believe different foods of the same type/size made a difference. I do now! Both basket stars stretched waaaaaay out. Whew :) I'm thrilled to have found something they like.

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