Schnitzel's Shallow Leemar 250

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Its becoming harder and harder to take decent pics of my corals. They are growing right to the top of the water, and I dont have room with my light fixtures to get my camera at a good angle. This is the best I could do.

Shades of fall


PC rainbow


Acid Trip Milli



Somewhere over the rainbow milli


PC Superman


RRC Shazam


Chemical warfare



ASD rainbow Milli
 
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Someone asked me about current filtration, here it is...


I have a basic 3 compartment sump. Sump is fed from a bean animal overflow.

First chamber is an Aquamaxx skimmer. I had a Vertex, a bubble king, and an ATB. IMO high end skimmers are the biggest waste of money in this hobby. I get the same colors and same growth with this $400 Aquamaxx as I did with the my $1200 bubble king. Much rather spend money on a quality light fixture, calcium reactor, return pump, apex, and an ATO.

Havent ran socks in 3+ years. They just create more maintenance.

Second chamber is a tiny fuge. I have a Tao Tronics grow led light I got off of amazon. I found a bunch of reefers using it, so I tried it out. I only keep chaeto in the fuge.
I also run 2 Tunze pumps in my sump to help keep detritus from building up. One in the fuge, and 1 in the skimmer section.

Third chamber is a Fluval SP6. The Fluval is an AC, non adjustable pump that uses an Askoll motor. Having a quality return pump is extremely important. Everyone now a days is running controllable DC return pumps. IMO adding a controller just adds another point of failure. No thanks! I have a manifold off the Fluval that feeds my calcium reactor. I also have a line that bleeds off extra flow back to the sump. The Fluval is a monster, almost too much flow.

I dont run GFO, I dont run bio pellets, and I rarely run carbon. I do have some extra live rocks in my sump, but its not much, and honestly i doubt it really does much. I did run Siporax at one point, but it just became a detritus trap, so I ditched them.

I run a Geo CR818 calcium reactor with a Geo second chamber. Everything is controlled by a classic apex.

Im running an avast marine ATO that is also controlled by the apex. They have an option to plug in their ato to a break out box instead of a stand alone ato controller.

Water changes are done 40-50g at a time, and only when I have spare time. Currently its been almost 6 months since my last water change. I do think water changes help, but clearly they arent a necessity.

Flow in the tank is 2 mp60s, 2 Tunze 6095s, and 2 Tunze 6105s attached to sea sweeps.


I started the tank with all dry rock and dry sand. I used the cheapest dry rock from marine depot, I forgot what they called it. I did acid wash the rock, which I think helped from keeping the rock from leeching nasty stuff back into the tank. When I acid washed the rocks, all kinds of gunk came off them.

Not the biggest fan of starting with live rock. I went through a lot of headache making sure there wasnt any bad hitchhikers going into this tank.





 
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Wow. Honestly those might be some of the best SPS shots that I have ever seen. Absolutely stunning! Thanks also for the look into your equipment. I'll look a few pages back as well, but if you give your standard parameters that would be fun to see what kind of levels you like.

Truly amazing and inspirational. I need to re-read this thread!
 
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ok, just went coast to coast on this build. Good grief pretty wild, and nice to see that a relatively simple equipment setup can yield such awesome results.

Looks like you ditched biopellets at some point, and got rid of the kessil fuge light? Was there a reason for those changes?

I rarely get down south, but when I do next, I'd like to PM you on the off chance that you might have time to show off this beauty.
 
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ok, just went coast to coast on this build. Good grief pretty wild, and nice to see that a relatively simple equipment setup can yield such awesome results.

Looks like you ditched biopellets at some point, and got rid of the kessil fuge light? Was there a reason for those changes?

I rarely get down south, but when I do next, I'd like to PM you on the off chance that you might have time to show off this beauty.
Biopellets werent needed. Almost 5 years ago when I setup this tank, BPs were the go to nitrate reducer. I never thought I would have a tank that had low nutrients. After a few months I realized I had no use for BPs. To this day I can feed as much as I want and Ive never seen nitrates over 2-5.

My fuge is so small, the Kessil was just too much light. No reason to use so many watts if I didnt need it.
 
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man, I wish I had that nutrient issue. I look at the tank wrong and the nitrates climb. I've kind of done away with the refugium idea, other than offering a haven for pods I just didnt see that much nutrient export from it.
 
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I haven’t been posting many pics lately cuz I got a new iPhone XS and the camera isn’t as good. It’s like it tries to over compensate for the bright blue lights, and the orange filter doesn’t work and if I don’t use the orange filter pics look just as bad. Kinda bummed. The older iPhone camera took great pics with the orange filter.
 

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