A few months ago while browsing Gumtree looking for a new light for my planted tank when I came across someone selling a marine tank for a giveaway price. I'd never kept marine before, but thought as i already maintain a successful planted tank it would be just as easy. I bought the tank and set it up at home
The tank came with two clown fish and a pink hairy mushroom. For a month or so everything was going amazingly! I even bought a hammer coral and some new mushrooms which all seemed to be doing well, but due to my laziness (lack of consistent water changes) and lack of knowledge the tank started to crash.
Shot of the tank before all hell broke loose:
I tried my best to get the tank stable again, I did water changes, rinsed all the rocks and cleaned the sump but it was already too late - I lost my hammer and all my mushrooms except for part of my pink mushroom colony.
In an effort to save my remaining livestock I decided to move everything into a new tank.
The clownfish both survived the move, but my last two mushrooms looked beyond saving. At this point I was going to shut down the tank and just stick to fresh water, but then about a week after setting up the new tank I was taking pictures of the fish for Gumtree when I spotted something amazing - a tiny mushroom and it was alive!
I thought to myself "Hey, if this coral is alive you must be doing something right this time". So i decided to stick it out and see if round 2 would go better than my previous attempt.
I started reading a lot of articles on the web, especially MASA, on keeping a stable reef. I realized what an idiot i had been previously and why I had lost the previous tank - I HAD BEEN TOPPING UP WITH SALT WATER
I HAD BEEN NEGLECTING TO CLEAN MY FILTER FLOSS REGULARLY, the list went on, but i also learnt what i should have been doing.
With my new found knowledge my tank started to bounce back.
The mushrooms i had assumed dead started to come back
After a few weeks and an outbreak of red cyno my tank was looking great and once again i fell in love with reef keeping.
Over the next few weeks i started to add equipment to the tank. I replaced the skimmer with a better one (Berlin airlift) and added two HOB filters (One with just filter floss and the other with carbon, purigen and phosban)
I also built myself a frag rack, because why not
The corals were growing amazingly getting bigger and bigger each day
I decided to add more live rock so i bought a bag of coral pieces and got to work
I wasn't happy with the flow in my tank so i replaced the power heads with two wavemakers and did a rescape
During the re-scape I found a mushroom lying under a rock, it wasn't attached to anything and wasn't getting any light where it was so i wrapped netting around a rock and put it on my frag rack to hopefully attach.
A week later i spotted another tiny mushroom growing on a rock
And that brings us to where i am today. The tank had been running for around 3-4 months. All the corals are growing fast and the algae in the tank is slowly dying off.
I may still be a novice at keeping marines, but i'm learning as i go along and loving it. Hope you all enjoyed my story and i look forward to sharing more as the tank progresses.
Here are some of my latest pics
The tank came with two clown fish and a pink hairy mushroom. For a month or so everything was going amazingly! I even bought a hammer coral and some new mushrooms which all seemed to be doing well, but due to my laziness (lack of consistent water changes) and lack of knowledge the tank started to crash.
Shot of the tank before all hell broke loose:
I tried my best to get the tank stable again, I did water changes, rinsed all the rocks and cleaned the sump but it was already too late - I lost my hammer and all my mushrooms except for part of my pink mushroom colony.
In an effort to save my remaining livestock I decided to move everything into a new tank.
The clownfish both survived the move, but my last two mushrooms looked beyond saving. At this point I was going to shut down the tank and just stick to fresh water, but then about a week after setting up the new tank I was taking pictures of the fish for Gumtree when I spotted something amazing - a tiny mushroom and it was alive!
I thought to myself "Hey, if this coral is alive you must be doing something right this time". So i decided to stick it out and see if round 2 would go better than my previous attempt.
I started reading a lot of articles on the web, especially MASA, on keeping a stable reef. I realized what an idiot i had been previously and why I had lost the previous tank - I HAD BEEN TOPPING UP WITH SALT WATER
I HAD BEEN NEGLECTING TO CLEAN MY FILTER FLOSS REGULARLY, the list went on, but i also learnt what i should have been doing.With my new found knowledge my tank started to bounce back.
The mushrooms i had assumed dead started to come back
After a few weeks and an outbreak of red cyno my tank was looking great and once again i fell in love with reef keeping.
Over the next few weeks i started to add equipment to the tank. I replaced the skimmer with a better one (Berlin airlift) and added two HOB filters (One with just filter floss and the other with carbon, purigen and phosban)
I also built myself a frag rack, because why not
The corals were growing amazingly getting bigger and bigger each day
I decided to add more live rock so i bought a bag of coral pieces and got to work
I wasn't happy with the flow in my tank so i replaced the power heads with two wavemakers and did a rescape
During the re-scape I found a mushroom lying under a rock, it wasn't attached to anything and wasn't getting any light where it was so i wrapped netting around a rock and put it on my frag rack to hopefully attach.
A week later i spotted another tiny mushroom growing on a rock
And that brings us to where i am today. The tank had been running for around 3-4 months. All the corals are growing fast and the algae in the tank is slowly dying off.
I may still be a novice at keeping marines, but i'm learning as i go along and loving it. Hope you all enjoyed my story and i look forward to sharing more as the tank progresses.
Here are some of my latest pics
