The Panic 220 SPS and 270 Mixed Reef

[panic]

I've taken a hiatus from the reef forums for a few years and I'm back with new excitement for the hobby. Around 2012, I swapped out my metal halides for some Reefbreeder LEDs, changed up husbandry to basically topping off water, water changes every few months, cleaning the glass, and feeding the fish. I learned to enjoy the hobby again after taking a break, and now I'm ready for kind of a fresh start.

My 220 is in the main floor formal sitting room / dining room area of our home and is an older Perfecto 24x30x72 barebottom. It was originally a 20g FOWLR set up as a science project for my sister in 1987. I have maintained the "seed" from this tank to my current day system and have added to it. It grew in to a 46g bowfront reef in 2000, then a 75g in 2001, 180g with the current DIY stand in 2002, then the current 220 when the 180 popped a low bulkhead on Thanksgiving night - I think 2010.

My 270 is a really old Eurobraced Oceanic with 3/4" low lead glass that was an orphaned tank given to me for free. It weighs 50 bajillion pounds so it ended up in my walk-out level basement and was my "Land of Misfit Toys" reef on it's on system for several years while I planned my basement remodel from Wreck Room to home theater. This housed all the stuff that friends gave to me when they threw in the towel of reefkeeping. This tank was moved to it's current home at the back of the home theater 2 years ago and is now plumbed in to the main system in the basement level fish room.

The fish room was rebuilt 2 years ago when I finished the basement. The 220 display drains into a baffled 40g refugium, which gravity feeds a Reeflo Orca 250 skimmer and the 45g 12x24x36 growout tank directly below the refugium. The 270, the skimmer, and the growout tank drain into a baffled 75g sump on the floor that is half-full of liverock which is covered in all sorts of sponge and fauna. I gravity feed all 3 - a carbon filter, dual chamber calcium reactor, and kalk stirrer. The return pump is an Iwaki something or other - it's s0 old that the part number is in sandscript.

The 220 has 3 Tunze powerheads on multicontroller, return through a 1" Sea Swirl, and 3 Ecotech Radion xr30 G4 and Reeflink as the controller for lighting.

The 270 has 2 Tunze powerheads on multicontroller, 2 400w Radium in Luminarc III reflectors powered by old skool Hamilton HQI ballasts, and Reefkeeper for ph monitoring and a single titanium heater.

The 45 growout tank has a single Ecotech MP40 and a single Radion xr30 G4 also on Reeflink control.

All of the lights are new within the last month, along with test kits that I haven't used in forever. My old calcium kit expired in 2009! I have been dialing in my alk, Ca, ph,and Mag with the help of some 2-part and alk. I've removed some coral on the right side of the 220 and brought up some rock from the sump - which is have a lil algae bloom right now. I hooked up the growout tank which is just opening a valve, and stocked it with 5 baby tangs, 4 of them moving in to the 220 once they are good and healthy. Also loaded it up with a really nice set of pretty sticks courtesty of @FarmerTy . I have have grown some really big corals that I am moving out or trimming up, which is very hard to do. However, my local reef shop is happy to receive my "frags" which are often too big to fit in the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket.

I'm still dialing in how to take photos with these LEDs, so I will do my best to post photos from here on out instead of words. I have a Canon 5d and will use that whenever I can track down the 100mm macro lens... for now it's phone photos. Sorry!


The 220

The 270

Grow out tank

 

[panic]

I’m down to 8 sps now, which was around 50 before

 

[panic]

The thing that kicked off my need to get back in to the hobby was when I realized that I hadn't changed the bulbs in the 270, which were probably 3 years old. So I dropped in a new pair of Radiums and everything in the tank looked amazing. It was kind of exciting to me all of a sudden. So I started cleaning the heck out of it and moving a couple of corals around, which led to me doing the same to the 220 and I found that the top brace was broken in 2 places and the front was bowing out over 1/4". I was pointed to a local reefer who does steel fabrication, who built me a new brace out of steel.

 

[panic]

This stuff is like Bondo, but easier to work and sand. I filled in any spaces that water could sit and find its way to the steel.

I ran a fat bead of 100% silicon around the inside of the frame and squished it on. It was a perfect fit. I ripped out the plastic cross-braces after a week of it curing. I have better light spread now since the new cross-braces are less wide than the original plastic ones.

 

[Rattzreef]

beautiful tanks!! And welcome back..

 

[Rattzreef]

Looks like a legit fix.. Good thing you caught it.. Wow!

 

[Bj’s Reef]

You have some nice corals, welcome back to the addiction.

 

[Rattzreef]

Perhaps tho, it's time to retire that thing and upgrade it? Hopefully the steel doesn't get exposed and rust..

 

[panic]

Perhaps tho, it's time to retire that thing and upgrade it? Hopefully the steel doesn't get exposed and rust..

I agree. This brace will (should) last a couple of years. I'd like to replace it with a 48x48x24 cube, so when the time comes to replace it, I will rip the carpet out in that room, install hardwoods, and have the new tank and stand ready to deploy. We remodel a room every other year or so and that is about the only room left. I considered getting the tank now, but I was a bit sticker-shocked since I want starphire on 3 sides. aaaaaaaand I'm wiped out after buying the Radions for now

 

[panic]

I have some algae growing on all the spaces that the light didn’t hit before adding the new lights, so I’m doing a Megaflo operation getting all the crap off the rocks and also from under the rocks that I couldn’t siphon out. Looks kinda cool and the coral are all opening up for the extra food.

 

[panic]

I threw a grow light on the refugium and a lil ball of chaeto to see if I can get this to grow. I was low nutrient for the last several years and have flipped the table, so it might actually grow now. It gives the sump room a new look for sure.

 

[OffTopic]

These are beautiful tanks! Welcome back to the hobby

 

[Rattzreef]

Very nice, that skimmer is a beast!

 

[panic]

Very nice, that skimmer is a beast!

It is a very consistent skimmer. I increased the air intake to 1/2" for better air flow and bought it with the Pro Kit, but always had trouble getting it dialed in just right. I went back to the standard neck and have been much happier with it. It has been pulling out about a half gallon of skimmate per day since I have increased feeding and fish load a few weeks ago. It's right in between wet and dry skimming, which makes keeping salinity in check another thing to keep an eye on. It pulled out only a cup or two at the most per week when I was low nutrient.

 

[panic]

I’ve been dialing back some high calcium over the last couple of months - it was 650! Keep in mind that I have done absolutely nothing aside from infrequent water changes with RC over the last 4 years and never doing any testing. Alk was at 6 or below without supplementation. I had to dose BRS Alk at 100ml per day to keep the alk even at 7, and used baking soda 3 times to get it to 7 at .25 increments per week. My original corals are looking better than ever. My new frags are having a tough time. I even lost a Confetti frag - Ouch!!!! [emoji25]

So I started dosing Red Sea Energy and polyps started popping. Then algae started to grow in the display from these changes and also from switching over to the Radions. Phosphates have been .1 from moving a couple of Streams to the back bottom of the tank bilaterally to get some stagnant detritus moving that has been sitting there, out of reach of siphoning. I slowly added GFO to 1/2 cup and Po is .5 or less now, but started to lose some color on the new frags probably due to the more clear water.

So I bought a GHL 2.1 standalone doser a few weeks ago and am dosing Alk and the Red Sea Energy. Now things are stable. Alk is a solid 8.5, Ca is down to 500, and I’m keeping Po where it is for awhile.

I came home from a 48 hour shift this morning and the new frags have color returning, polyps are out, signs of new encrusting on frags that had been without much. 3 days of no light on the display have knocked the green off the algae that was on the bare rock nearest the lights, and the 3 new baby yellow tangs have been hard at work removing the dying algae.

 

[panic]

I don’t think I’ve shared a fts of the 270...

A new setosa frag. It’s not all fancy, but I sure love how bright it is

This lil guy is about 1’ across

 

[panic]

The Walt Disney perked up over the last 2 days

 

[Bob Weigant]

Good to see you enjoying the hobby again

 

[panic]

I was able to catch 2 of my 3 new baby tangs together before the powder blue scared them off. He’s going to be cutting serious weight with the amount of exercise he’s getting from terrorizing them. The yellows have found all the good spots in the sps colonies to hide and the powder blue is too fat to follow. I wish he would leave them alone because they love picking the rock clean and the Powder blue is a lazy freeloader, begging for food all day and hogging all the good stuff when I feed the tank.

 

[panic]

Fast forward 4 months to now...

One of the Tunze stopped being controllable so I bought an mp40. I liked it so much that I ordered 3 more and the Reeflink and the flow is on point. I moved both the Tunze Streams to the back bottom to keep detritus off the bottom. They are timed to fire up a few times each day for 10 minutes so that the fish that call that area of the tank home aren't put out too often. I also added an mp10 to the frag tank. All this extra flow helped the junk find it's way out of the rocks, combined with the new lights, and trying out Aminos, really helped the algae grow. Byropsis started really growing like crazy and I was spending 10 minutes every day manually harvesting it, my Powder Blue tang ignored it. I had to remove him to add some workers because of his aggressive nature toward all tangs. Major bummer because he was a beautiful fish, just lazy and mean. I added a small Sohal, 4 baby yellow tangs, 2 emerald crabs, and a pile blue and red legged hermit crabs who removed every piece of algae from the reef aside from the byropsis. So I reduced the red and green of my lighting to 5%, dosed vinegar for 6 weeks (100ml/day) which knocked the byropsis back quite a bit, but left the tank so void of nutrients that all the sps were pale like the early days of Zeovit reefs. I lowered my overall lighting intensity 30% to keep from melting my corals. I dialed back and away from vinegar dosing by the 8 week mark to find my SPS renewing with some color and growth, and the byropsis growing awesome as ever. Phosphate and nitrate undetectable, BTW. FINALLY, I was encouraged to try Reef Flux, which is just fluconazole, which started melting the byropsis away in 3 days. I'm on day 5 now and there is very little byropsis left, so I will prematurely call it a win.

I started dosing a very light amount of Reef Energy A&B (20ml/day each) to get some nutrients back in to the system and am leaving the lights and 75% over the display and 70% over the frag tank. Everything is looking awesome. I never had any byropsis in the 270 and only a tiny patch in the frag tank through all this, which was strange.

I've been collecting chalice frags from the local shops and trading in large pieces of my older, giant SPS that are hogging all the space in the 220. Today I ordered several very nice sps frags from a couple r2r members to fill up the void that the large pieces will leave.

A tiny sample of the lovely Byropsis

A few new additions coloring up in the frag tank