Sascha D.

Do you mean my fire extinguisher? Yeah, all of the cool people have one! Being prepared is in style right now. When Hurricane Harvey was coming to Texas, someone asked me if I had enough drinking water to last three days. I said, yeah I've got about 100 gallons of filtered water in the garage. Do you know, she looked at me like I was straight up out of my mind? Some people!

The first thing that I had to do was drain about 100 gallons from the display to uncover the overflow holes in the back. Let me tell you, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done! Glass Holes really put that thing on there and I was really starting to wonder if I could get it off. It took about 3 hours to remove the glass and another 2 hours to remove all of the silicone. Boy did it stink! It smelled like some really thick skimmate! Finally, onto the box! The overflow box came in undrilled so that I could match it exactly to the existing holes. I affixed it to the back glass, made sure it was level, and then marked my holes. I used a 2.5" hole saw to drill out the 1.5" bulkheads. The eurobracing is installed below the rim of the aquarium and occupies approximately 0.5" from the top. I installed the box as high as I could leaving room to remove the lid when necessary. I reused most of the previous plumbing but I may decide to replace it with flexible PVC. The rigid plumbing is difficult to use in this application because the drain holes are directly above the stand header. Because of this I had to slant the lines about 45 degrees and that causes the water to trickle within the pipes. I'm hoping that using flexible PVC in the future will eliminate the water sound and make the drain quieter. I'm not sure if it will make a difference, but it may be worth a try.

Last month I began contact companies to build the new overflow. The main concern that I had was having an overflow built that would exactly match the existing holes drilled into the aquarium. If one couldn't be found then I would have to silicone in an overflow cover, which would be cheaper and easier but take more time. I first contacted Reef Savvy and found out that the Ghost Overflow cannot be customized and they would not send me one without the holes already drilled. Next up was Synergy Reef, who never responded to my emails. After that I came into contact with Glass Holes and we exchanged emails for a few weeks. The owner was very responsive, but his answers to my basic questions didn't leave me with enough confidence that he could build the overflow to my specifications. This leads me to Modular Marine. I had never heard of this company before, but I found them on Ebay and they were willing to build the custom box to my specifications for a reasonable price. The box came in well packaged and exact to my specifications. It measures 42 x 5 x 6 and will replace the 86" box that is currently in the aquarium. I plan to put 2,000 - 3,000 gph through the box using a BeanAnimal style overflow. One feature that Modular Marine advertises is the sloping design of the wier teeth. It's intended to reduce noise caused by the water overflowing into the box. I've had this problem before and I wouldn't mind a little less waterfall. I really wanted an overflow lid to cut down on the time I spend catching fish out of the overflow. Since this box is solid, it would be near impossible to see what I'm doing with a net. This lid insets within the box to help secure it in place.

What we need to get this build started is a good old fashioned To Do List! Overflow - It seems like a shame to replace the calfo overflow, but I really hate it. First, the manufacturer drilled the holes for the drain lines in the very middle of the tank, which means the ends of the 86" overflow don't drain properly. Detritus and uneaten food accumulate in the overflow box and I have to clean it manually. Second, the canopy and 30" depth of the tank make it very difficult to catch fish out of the overflow box. Even though I only have a few fish, I have to catch them out of the box 2-3 times a week! I've decided to replace the overflow with a smaller horizontal overflow. I'm going to have the box made out of acrylic to save time and because it will be very difficult to silicone it to the back of the aquarium. Stand - I'm stuck with this stand unless I feel like breaking down the entire aquarium and starting over. I'll have to admit that it does sound pretty appealing right now! To make this thing work for me I'll have add hinges to the doors, drill some vent holes, and add some fans. My wife has also requested that I stain it to match our cappuccino kitchen cabinets. It's probably the wrong time to mention that I don't like the color. Yeah, definitely the wrong time for a surprise! Equipment - Now is a good time to decide what equipment I'll use with the new set up and replace some of the older stuff. Aquascape - I plan on completely renovating the live rock in the tank. There is plenty of room to place corals, but it's just not a good use of space. I'll gain 5" of tank once I remove the overflow and I bet I could do a better job aquascaping this thing! Livestock - We're fish nerds and we love everything in the ocean! The problem is that not everything wants plays nice and live in a box. Now is the perfect time to really sit down and decide the direction that I'm going to go in. That means picking my must-have items and building a reef around those things that make me happy. It also means selling corals and fish that don't fit into my new plan. That will be the hard part... I think that about covers it! Talking is the easy part, now I have to find some time and pretend to know what I'm doing!

Man, you have some awesome egg crate! It's a beautiful shade of purple!

If it's safer and easier to use than copper, then it might be worth it to use in a quarantine tank as a preventative treatment. It may be necessary to treat the fish in QT and put the display through a fallow period to ensure the fish are parasite free after the velvet outbreak earlier this year. I'm 90% certain that I have Ich in the main display and that's a separate treatment. On the other hand, none of the fish have shown symptoms and I may be chasing ghosts.

Add Ruby Reef Rally(acriflivine) and that's literally what I keep in my arsenal at all times. I've never heard of it, but the website says it's reef safe and cures Brooklynella and Velvet. Add some Prazipro and the cocktail should take care everything that I want to avoid! Fungal and bacterial infections aren't very common in marine fish and those can easily be treated if they pop up. Have you used it to cure any infections or are you using them proactively?

I'm currently using Blogger, but it's difficult to use and doesn't have a quality app. I didn't really think the name through and the corresponding domain name is taken.

Thanks for the compliment! I've been writing reviews on many of my purchases over the last two years. It's long past time to build a website and buy a domain. I know some beginner HTML and CSS, but I need to find some kind of software that will help out. I'm going to treat this tank like a brand new purchase. There doesn't appear to be any obstacles that can't be overcome and I believe it can be salvaged. Hopefully 2018 brings us both success!

Sorry to hear about. It's been a tough year for fish. Thanks for the medication tip! I went through a whole bottle of Paraguard and it didn't cure anything it says on the bottle. I also tried Rid Ich Plus but every fish I've treated with that medication had died within a week. With a 100% failure rate I've completely stopped using it. Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

Right now I'm going through about 20 gallons a week in top-off water and doing one 50g water change a month. At this level of usage my DI resin starts changing color after 11 months. Do you notice dirt on your pre-filter? I notice it on my home pre-filter but the RODI filter always looks the same. Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

The build so far has been a little depressing, but you can't have a reboot without first having a shut down! Hopefully, someone will learn something from my mistakes and that will make the typing worth it. The next posts will be more optimistic as I start to plan the rebuild. Hopefully there won't be any major issues and we can start stocking!

Which filters are you replacing? It's been a year since I replaced my filters and membrane and I was planning to proactively replace them at the end of the month. I've been buying the RODI kit at BRS for $18 on Black Friday and the membrane is about $25 on Amazon. It's a small price to pay once a year if I need to.

My last post about what has transpired up until now is about quarantine. I've been keeping freshwater aquariums since 1992 and saltwater exclusively since 2001. Up until three years ago I had never quarantined any new purchases. I don't know if I've been lucky all of these years or the quality of aquarium fish has gone down. Maybe it's the shady practices at the wholesaler level has lead to the rise of diseases. Either way, you simply can't survive in this hobby without quarantine any longer. If you want to read more about quarantine practices, then this article will get you started. In August 2017 my tank was looking pretty good and I decided to purchase some fish from the local LFS. I decided on 3 Yellow Tangs, a Naso Tang, and a Yellow Eye Kole Tang to quarantine at the same time. The 30 gallon aquarium already had two chromis that were doing well and weekly water changes were ensuring good water quality. It's been my practice to observe first and treat if the fish show signs of disease. All of these fish looked great and I had no idea that one of them was hiding something nasty... The fish developed what I believe to be Marine Velvet and I began treatment with Paraguard. This treatment was recommended to me by the LFS, but didn't appear to have any effect on the disease and I have since stopped using this medication. One by one each fish was removed using a pair of tongs. Even though it was a disaster, at least it happened in the observation tank and a larger problem was averted (or so I thought). Everything up until now had gone to plan. After all, preventing disasters is the reason that we quarantine in the first place! All of the equipment was cleaned with fresh water, the tank was drained and allowed to dry. A few days later one of the corals had fallen in the main display. I took those same tongs and picked up the fallen coral. Can you guess what came next? A short time later all of the fish broke out with Marine Velvet and most died before I could catch them for treatment. It's not enough to simply have a quarantine tank. You also need sound husbandry practices that you follow every time. This is a lesson that I hope to only learn one time.

Jebao, what can you say? Some of them last for years and others don't last a month. My WP-40's worked perfectly for three years before going out and I decided to replace them with the Jebao Crossflow CP-40. It's basically a knock-off of the Maxspect Gyre pumps. I purchased the first pair of pumps from Fish Street, which turned into a fisco! I will never use Fish Street again and I recommend doing your research before you do as well. You can read more about that incident in my review here. Choosing the Crossflow pumps turned into another giant disaster and left me without circulation pumps for a few days while replacements were on the way. The main issue revolves around two design flaws. The controller has a built in safety mechanism that prevents the pump from operating if any resistance is felt on the impeller. A red light appears shortly after the pump is turned on and the controller must be reset before it will attempt to turn the impeller again. The second flaw is in the fitting of the impeller housing. The poor fitting makes it near impossible to clean and service the pump without triggering the safety mechanism. I spent more time trying to get these things to work than any other purchase that I've ever made! In the end I had to return them for a refund. You can read more details about the Jebao Crossflow CP-40 here.

I began treatment with manual removal over the course of five consecutive weeks. I fashioned a hose (shown below) and siphoned as many worms as I could find into a filter bag that was located in the sump. By siphoning the worms into the filter bag, I could work indefinitely without stopping to dump buckets of water. At the end of each round I would clean the sock and allow it to dry out. It was pretty gross! As you can see from the sock, there were a ton of worms pulled out every time. Sometimes if I would work too long, then the worms would wiggle their way through the filter sock and make a run (swim?) for it. Here is a great picture displaying the toxin that is produced by the worms when they die. It's very toxic to fish, but can be removed with activated carbon. I believed that I had removed enough of the worms by the end of the fifth week that I could safely use chemicals to terminate the rest of the infestation. I bought a box of Salifert Flatworm Exit to treat the tank. The instructions say to dose the tank in intervals, but I had read online that it was best to dose all at once. It's also recommended to have fresh activated carbon ready to remove any toxins released by the worms. I administered the medication and continued manual removal while it was working. After just five minutes I could tell that the worms were dying! The carbon was added to the system after one hour of medication. I also did a water change the next day; mostly because it was almost midnight by the time I gave up removing worm carcasses. The video below shows exactly how many worms there were. Keep in mind this was after five weeks of manual removal! As you may have guessed, the tank was thrown into a cycle for several weeks as everything that died began to decompose. I got lucky and haven't seen a worm since the initial treatment! Many people aren't so lucky and have to treat more than once to remove the pests. With all of the excess nutrients, GHA quickly took over and that was the next hurdle to pass. All of this because I didn't take five minutes to dip the corals! If you aren't dipping, then I suggest you start. Oh look, a coral dipping guide! The gravity of this experience left me in shock and I decided to post a guide How to Remove Red Planaria Flatworms for others dealing with the same issue.

Remember when I said that I hadn't dipped my corals? Can you guess what happened? We all know that there are some nasty critters that come in on corals frags, but it seems to always happen to someone else. I didn't take it as seriously as I should have and took for granted that local frags would be pest free. What came in on my frags were Red Planaria Flatworms. The worms themselves don't eat corals and I was lucky that it wasn't something worse. However, if left unchecked they will smother corals and they release toxins when they die. I would recommend checking out the coral dipping guide on the forums for more information on how you can avoid all of this mess. The worms look very much like red algae as they begin to cover the rocks. They can also be mistaken for cyanobacteria while on the sand. It's not until they're on the glass that you can really tell what you're looking at. Unfortunately, by then the population is quite high and they become difficult to eradicate.

One thing that threw me off was that the DI resin hadn't changed colors and I didn't even consider the filter was the problem because of that. It could be that the RO membrane or the carbon block was exhausted. It could also be that the DI resin was bad. I decided to replace every stage of the filter and the corals began to recover after that.

I purchased this aquarium in December 2015 and, thanks to a lot of help from club members, set it up in January 2016. The live rock that I used was from a previous tank and received an acid bath to get rid of the bubble algae spores. I used a bottle of bacteria to seed the rocks and the tank cycled normally. In February the tank was reading zero levels and I got some tester pieces from a friend to begin stocking. Here is where I made my first mistake by not dipping the corals. My friend had a beautiful tank and I figured the corals were clean. Spoiler alert! They were definitely not clean! More on that in the next post. The second mistake that I made was stocking corals before fish. As you can see from the pictures below, as soon as I added fish the GHA started a massive bloom. January 2016 February 2016 March 2016 June 2016 Sometime around July 2016 my tank started to decline. The corals were the first to show distress by not extending and turning a pale color. I started doing weekly 10% water changes, but the corals continued to decline. All of the parameters tested within normal ranges and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. After three months of water changes everything in the tank should be looking great, but nearly all of my SPS were gone. When you have no idea what the problem could be you start assigning blame wherever it may fit. In September I removed the biopellets and GFO, but the corals continued to decline. By this point the only filter on the tank was a protein skimmer and that must mean the problem is in the source water. I thought it couldn't be my filter because all of the media was less than six months old. I started to read about a case of contaminated salt mix years ago and thought I had found the problem. Later that month I threw out all of my salt mix, bought new salt of a different brand, and did a 50% water change, but the corals continued to decline. In November I got a call from a friend that explained everything! He told me that a water main broke during construction of a new elementary school nearby and the municipal water was flushed with chemicals to disinfect the system. He suggested that I test the water coming out of my filter to ensure it was still coming out clean. Sure enough, my brand new filter and membrane was producing 79 TDS! Something like that may only happen once in a decade, but you better believe that I'll test every batch of filtered water as long as I'm still in this hobby.

Thanks! It's going to be a long process getting the tank back on track. Haha, when I said "try to figure out what kind of tank I'm going to keep next..." I didn't really mean reef or FOWLR! Did you catch that thing out of there yet?

Hello Everyone! It's been exactly two years since I purchased this aquarium from Glass Cages in December 2015. You can read more about that craziness in my review here. Since then have been times of great excitement punctuated by some of the lowest times I've had in the hobby. Some of it fell into the category of freak occurrence and there was really nothing that I could have done. Some things were completely preventable with good quarantine, coral dipping, and redundancy practices. The last event in particular was completely my fault. Needless to say, the tank has fallen into disrepair during the last few months and I've considered giving up the hobby all together. After some careful thought and much deliberation with friends and family I've decided it give it another shot and this thread is my reboot build! First, a little bit about the aquarium and the equipment currently running the display. 300g glass aquarium 96x30x25 100g acrylic berlin style sump Reef Angel Aquarium Controller Ocean Revive S-026 LED lighting fixtures x 4 Aquamaxx EM-500 Protein Skimmer rated for 700g light or 350g heaving stocking levels Geo's Reef Solid Media Reactor with carbon and Phosban Reef Dynamics Recirculating BP Reactor A.E. Tech ETSS 400 Calcium Reactor with Azoo pressure regulator and solenoid Here are some pictures of the aquarium when it was purchased. Now, here is a picture of what it looks like two years and three tank crashes later... In my next few posts I will talk about each of the three tank crashes, what went wrong and how it could have been prevented. After that I will highlight what I want to change and then I'm going to try my best to do it without embarrassing myself too much. Lastly, I'm going to begin restocking and try to figure out what kind of tank I'm going to keep next.

Grow from the bodies of your dead ancestors in a glass box full of water and electricity! SPS are weird and creepy...Soft corals for everybody!

Awesome dendro! I can tell that you like it because the camera fell on it more than any other. Haha Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

Isn't that about what we do in this hobby anyway? LR is just dead coral skeletons that we try to make something pretty with. It doesn't sound very cool when you put it that way

It's good to be lucky! I'm afraid that I haven't had much luck with Naso, but it's nice to see one get to be that size. They're definitely one of the more challenging fish - prone to both disease, oxygen, and water quality issues.