The SPS Cube65

Papitto

Papitto

PatrickF
Joined
18 Feb 2014
Posts
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Location
Durban north
I'm creating this thread of my cube to share the journey and hopefully guide newer reefers by igniting useful conversations. I know how valuable this forum is from my 1st reef tank.
After I sold off my 5ft tank, I was really missing the hobby and I got back in 2 years later... Addiction I guess.

My current system is an Idol Marine 650x650x550 cube with skinny overflow. Roughly 200L
120L sump
80L black plastic refugium plumbed into sump
BM gravity fed RODI top off

Mechanical filtration:
BM Curve 5 skimmer
Nylon mesh filter sock
Carbon reactor diy cannister
BM reactor with ATI Phophat stop

Biological filtration :
Orca labs Bio-cubes Titanium in diy perspex reactor running bomb method
Liverock in sump and fuge
Cheato in fuge

Flow:
1xJebao CP40 cross flow
2xJebao Ow10 wavemakers
SICCE Syncra 2.0 return

Lighting:
2 x Zetlight UFO ZE8600 (sides of tank)
1 x AI Prime HD (Centre)
T5HO quad with 1xcoral+, 3xblue+ ATI

Livestock:
4 Lyretail Anthias (f)
1 pink square anthias (m)
1 Kole tang
1 blue chromis
1 green mandarin goby
1 cleaner shrimp
1 fire shrimp
15 trochus snails
1 large turbo snail
6 local yellow and white tip hermits (buggers)

Tank was started cycling in July 2019 for 2 months without any inhabitants.
I have quite a few acropora frags at this point but still collecting. I have some uncommon zoas and some LPS but minimal.
Plan is an SPS dominant tank.

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My update on the tank with some progress and pics of a few of my corals.

For like 3 months my sps were not showing much growth, PE and encrusting. I've been testing frequently to just gauge what is happening in my tank to stunt realistic growth expectations.
Dosing kalk via a slow drip and all is stable for about a month. Still no growth.

So, I decided to vacuum out half my substrate to test of I had bound phosphorous, as my salifert kit gave me 0.30 within 4 days from previous test. I didn't panic, just removed half the sandbed and dosed aquavitro seed. Next morning I dosed 1ml KZ zeostart.
Within 4 hours I had crystal clear water and my corals were extending polyps all of a sudden.

I decided because my Kh consumption fell out of balance with CA, to dose a balanced additive. I chose Red Sea reef foundation ABC+ dosed at 10ml per day into the sump.
5 days into this, I've notice really good polyps extention on my acros. They have begun to encrusted which I'm so frikkin chuffed with.

Began dosing Acropower and Easy Reef Sps Evo and these additives are absolutely amazing within the last 4 days of dosing. I have a 2cm frag of ARC Fireworks that has been dark burgundy color with lavender axial Coralite tips. Today I saw neon orange flame looking polyps peeping out!!!  need I say more :slayer::m07::m07::m07:

This has been my best tank yet. I will post gopro video and pics when I get to it.
 
Papitto said:
Thanks gents. @brentch this build was inspired by your cube though
I need more sps acro frag variety though
Click to expand...
Thanks Patrick. Yours can hold it's own against most anyway, great progress! You're welcome to swing by my place any time if you want to do a swap for some variety. I see we have a lot of similar pieces but there may be a one or two different ones.
 
What happened after this change..... My N03 and N04 just disappeared. I'm on 0 for both after testing tonight. I have seen the rocks get covered in brown algae.... Not sure if this fiatoms or dynos. It has bubbles so I'm thinking dynos but I siphon it easily of the surfaces.... I had also added 1kg maxspect bio spheres into my sump a I'm August.
Could this be why my nutrients were removed? I'm quite concerned with the changes taken place.
 
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