New 180 Build (Forced but FINALLY!!!)

[MoKan Reefer]

And tonight I found the lucky deal of a lifetime while on craigslist lol. Every few days I look up what's searching "reef" or "saltwater" in the surrounding areas craigslist and tonight I found one that didn't really catch my attention but I decided to click it anyway... And boy am I glad I did.

Got a 40g Innovative Marine aio with AI Prime LED for $100 (going to set it up for the wife) but beyond that, what I thought was some funky green star polyps and algae in the cruddy pics from the ad turned out to be either Indonesian dragon soul gold torches!!! About 20 heads! And about 15 heads of some other euphyllia below. Guy said he bought them as a single head back 6 or so years ago for $30 and the second colony should be the same torches. He no longer cared much for the hobby. The setup was in the way of his home renovations so it had to go. Lucky me!

Unfortunately forgot to save the pics of the tank they had on the ad before they took it down but here are some quick pics I took as I ticked everything off as we took the tank down.

The quick pics I took of these torches tonight do them no justice! They're amazing!

 

[Roc83]

And tonight I found the lucky deal of a lifetime while on craigslist lol. Every few days I look up what's searching "reef" or "saltwater" in the surrounding areas craigslist and tonight I found one that didn't really catch my attention but I decided to click it anyway... And boy am I glad I did.

Got a 40g Innovative Marine aio with AI Prime LED for $100 (going to set it up for the wife) but beyond that, what I thought was some funky green star polyps and algae in the cruddy pics from the ad turned out to be either holy grail or dragon soul torches!!! About 20 heads!

Unfortunately forgot to save the pics of the tank they had on the ad before they took it down but here are some quick pics I took as I ticked everything off as we took the tank down.

The quick pics I took of these torches tonight do them no justice! They're amazing!

Also got some more green frogspawn lol

Awesome find[emoji106]

 

[MoKan Reefer]

These should color up nicely!

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Current tank shots.

In the coming weeks I should have 2 more regular leopard wrasses and 2 black leopard wrasses, female blue throat trigger, and target mandarin.

Thinking about getting 2 sea apples. Anyone have experience with them?

 

[MoKan Reefer]

So, after 8 months, I'm finally getting around to updating...

I've made alot of changes to the equipment and even more on the stock and coral.

I'll start off with the lighting:

For about 4 months I'd changed over from the reefbreeders photon48 v1 to 2 AI Hydra 52 non hds.

Then I changed those out to for 3 black boxes with sbreef retrofits.

Recently, I finally found 3 Radion Gen3 non pros again just as we'd had on the 150 which sprung the leak.

I've also upgraded the return pump from the trusty mag18 to a Jebao DCT-8000, upgraded the refugium light with a Kessil H80, removed the Jebao PP-15's, and fixed the oceans motions 4way so I don't really need powerheads anymore. I haven't upgraded or done anything with the skimmer because I haven't seen a need with as well as it's done. But I have added a biopellet reactor so between the refugium, skimmer, and biopellet reactor, I've managed to keep everything in check for the most part even with feeding more than I probably should and having my lights on a 14hr schedule.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Felt like taking some more pics earlier today with full day lights on

 

[MoKan Reefer]

And just took some more while the lights are going down for the night. Unfortunately most everything is going to sleep for the night and not fully out but I'll take some more under more blue lighting tomorrow while everything is in it's full glory lol.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Finally had a day off to catch the phases of the radions ramping up and going down for the day.

Around noon

Ramping up a bit with more blues

A bit more

Mid day (Love the more natural look for a few hours)

Going back down

Little before lights out (love the fluorescence)

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Also got around to taking some coral pics finally

The brightest indo gold torches I've personally ever seen. Don't care much about made up names but bought as Indo "hellfire" with an awesome "NY Knicks" behind them.

Euphyllia garden

Half bleached Hawaiian purple torch starting to color back up

Green indo torch colony

Brains, acans, cyrenia, and plates

Awesome lobo

Giant Aussie elegance (almost the size of half a basketball when fully expanded)

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Tank have been through some changes over the last few months and some of my favorite corals (my huge welsophyllia and red cyneria I'd had for over 2yrs, trachy, a few cans, a couple torches, hammers, etc...) unfortunately but all in all, the tank is coming back around and looking great again finally.

I actually got a new bigger tank last November I'm going to start working on soon and I'll start a new thread for. That tank is going to take a decent while to get together so it should be a bit more interesting than this one.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Hate having little memory and even less time to post...

Here about a month or so ago, I traded the radions for 3 Hydra 52 non hds to go along with the remaining one I'd had on this tank before. I love the UV/violet look of the hydras but miss the crispness of the radions.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

This past Sunday, I finally had a small window of free time so I took a small hour and a half drive to buy out a friend of mine who'd owned a saltwater store until he sold it. He had moved all his higher end pieces to his construction company office tanks where he realized he had no time to maintain things. So he gave me a killer deal on everything in his remaining 120 and 180 systems.

We picked up a everything. When I say everything, I mean 14 3g buckets of coral, a monster reef octopus Diablo 300ext, mp40s, etc...

And then we stuffed everything we could into our 180 after removing the giant top rocks we'd had on top of the 2 structures we'd had on each side so we had more sandbed room.

This was the night we got everything home and got things somewhere situated...

I'd made a smaller arch on the left you can see for the euphyllia garden but 99% of the coral was on the sandbed and I still didn't get done until 5am.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

And here's the somewhat final product at least for the rockscape anyway... Still not done situating coral but ran out of super glue for the moment lol

Not the greatest pics because I'm still getting used to the coral lense and experimenting.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Next to come is the hopefully short wait on the new 2020 Orphek Atlantik v4 g2 fixtures I ordered direct from Tommy at Orphek a week ago tomorrow to arrive to see what the buzz is all about lol. Will update so long as I remember and my schedule allows once I receive them and have them up finally.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

And now the new lighting update!

The orpheks are in and amazing!

 

[MoKan Reefer]

These Orpheks are powerful and bring out colors I'd never imagined possible with this tank!

We've also updated the overflows from the inky boxes that have been on it with Fiji cube 800gph external overflows. The wiring is a mess but still lol. Also replaced the refugium light with a Kessil H380.

 

[ethridge78]

Looks good

 

[MERKEY]

Great update thank you for sharing!

How are the lights treating you?

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Still love the Orpheks. As anyone will point out, the app is finicky but to me thats a plus because it makes you stop to think if it's really worth it to change your settings and messing with things lol.

 

[MoKan Reefer]

Some updated pics!

FTS

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