Electrokates 93.5 gallon budget tank

[Electrokate]

Found this quote on Demotivators.com:

"It may be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others"
While this is a joke, in some cases throughout my life this applies really really well.

A couple years ago I spoke up for a 93.5 gallon tank (which I was told was an 80 "or something".) It was a friend's plant tank, and was in Portland. I am in Olympia. Figured I would toss it in the car, and that it would take either two trips or tying the trunk shut to get both stand and tank here. At 125 bucks for an acrylic tank and stand I figured it was a bargain.

From there things went really really badly for a long time.

First off the tank didn't fit in the car. Not no way, not no how. Ditto stand. Took a ride with a friend in her RAV 4. Nope, not that either. Later came down in a van, and one again it doesn't fit. The tank ended up out in the friend's driveway where it grew an outstanding mosquito culture and was banged up a bit by the kids. Finally a friend moved it to her house, also in Portland, where she had storage and a station wagon. 3 months later she hucked it up here. Time wasted: 1 year. During this time I got a job at a fish store (Extreme Marine) and could have had many bigger drilled reef ready tanks such as the coveted Oceanic 72 gallon reef ready bowfront with stand and hood for only twice what I paid for this tank. Dang!

Next, I had to refinish the stand. It was pine, finished in something gummy and brown that doesn't do well left out in the rain. Sanded it by hand til it was baby butt smooth, stained mahogany, and sealed in spar urethane. Took a while but man is it nice! Never thought I could make pine purty.

When I started this I had a good job and plenty of money. Then I got diagnosed with keratoconus, which meant my vision can't be 20/20 without some extreme measures, none of which worked. Between that, migraines 5 days a week and back problems I lost my job and got the part time fish store job. Medical bills up the wazoo killed my savings quickly. So I looked for the cheapest possible ways to do this tank. Solution? Bought a sump and pump, sight unseen. When I got it... overflow is broken and held together by brass screws. Pump caught on fire when plugged in. Sump is a Tidepool, need I say more? Was also missing a part, which I found out when I bought the SOS overflow for it from Marineland. Thus it took 6 weeks after getting the sump to fire it up. Never try to get a part from this manufacturer without taking names and being willing to harrass them.

On the 5th day after filling the tank (which didn't have any filtration) the nano reef crashed. Choice: stuff the coral in the other nano or in the big tank. I did both. Really amazing, everything lived except the sandbed. The smell was sort of like halitosis and Budd Bay multiplied by 20. If you haven't visited Budd Bay trust me, it's a kaleidescope of olfactory horrors...

So actually that big tank got stocked and looked kind of good during the cycle. I put additives in from day one, as I figured the live rock was more likely to stay live if I buffered. Borrowed a used CPR skimmer from the shop and tossed a couple 96 watt powerquad fixtures on it and was good to go, for a while.
This tank is 5 feet long by 18" by 20". On the plus side with the coral in it it looked a lot less like a coffin for a dead dictator. It all survived the stinky cycle but it was a white knuckle ride. Results were pretty nice. Sometimes you get what you pay for, that rock was 10 bucks a pound. Almost all the coraline on it survived and much of it plated like Montipora cap.

 

[Electrokate]

That first picture is actually from a couple months after cycle, as I didn’t get the tang til then (Thanks Elmo!) but everything else in the picture was there after only 5 days. Here are some shots. The tang loved the brown plating algae, wish I had more of it. The red algae and mini sargassum were also quickly devoured. Besides the bryopsis seen with the plating algae there were numerous tulip and majano anemones. I don’t actually hate them as much as others do, I just peel them off if they are in a bad spot. The sharp end of a bamboo skewer does the trick. Didn’t have any aiptasia as all new stuff was quarantined with a peppermint shrimp. Some day I am going to set up an unheated underlit desktop nano with just tulips, majano and kenya trees. Maybe a mantis shrimp. It will be my pest tank. Hitchhikers included plants, zoanthids, Siderastria coral, and a plate coral. And a plethora of flatworms!

 

[Electrokate]

I had planned on putting halides on this tank as soon as possible. Ordered a hood built by a guy locally, and he took forever. I knew he was bad at finishing stuff so I asked him to not stain and varnish, and to keep it simple. Well, he was a tweakin one night and tried to get fancy... and also stained and verithaned the whole thing. It's functional but nowhere near the stand in design or finish, and some day will make a nice raised flowerbed! I'd bought a couple 250 watt ballasts from Elmo but people told me not to use them, that in this shallow tank it would be too much. He wanted one back anyways so I sold it back and kept the other. A couple friends brought over some old 175 watt retro stuff they had picked up with a free tank and one ballast wouldn't fire so they tried the 250. It fired 175 not 250 bulbs and had no printing on it so they insisted it was a 175. They also wired it for me which turned out to be a bit of a nightmare-the scavenged ballast was a mess. In the end they got it up and running. The sps immediately colored up and started growing like crazy, even though I was using very old bulbs til I could afford new ones. The tank is in front of windows so that the HOT fuge gets both natural and artificial light, and the back of the hood is half open so at the right time of the day sun comes in. Some people say that grows algae, but the coral love it. The softies turn to face it and light up. Halides are nothing compared to normal sunlight. The first shot is halides plus a sunbeam. No comparison. Around this time my friend Susie has a problem with her tank so I took her coral which really filled the tank up and made it look good!
I had been taking coral home from the store that were not doing well, either to rehab or keep. This was a bad thing in two ways: first off I brought home a lot of disease and pests, and second I had no direction in my tank and mixed species that probably shouldn't meet. Someone out there should learn from my mistakes, I hope... I believe the ultimate effect was to bring home every possible pathogen the store had imported from around the world. Never rescue anything with your main display!!!

 

[Electrokate]

That last post was supposed to have pictures so here they are: (I hope)

 

[Electrokate]

I am a zoanthid nut so I got all I could, and it was a lot of fun, til they got sick, fungused and/or parasitized. Found a moss green asterina type star that eats them, never saw the classic zo eating nudi's but can't rule them out. I set up a 30 in the basement with the unused 96 watt pc and made an "ark" for the surviving zo's, they recovered so I put them back. Some are now acting funky again. Every so often I pick the ill looking ones up and remove any invert I can't ID. So far have found 2 reef spiders, an olive snail and a nudibranch type. Quarantine and dip if you love to impulse buy! The second photo shows a colony in desperate need of attention. I scraped the dead stuff off and the adjacent polyps and did a few freshwater dips. Looked like the problem was dead sponge rotting, and the polyps returned to health soon after.

 

[Electrokate]

A few more zo's:

 

[Elmo18]

Nice tang Kate

If you have other recent photos, post them if you have the time

Best,
Ilham

 

[Krish]

Sorry to hear about the problems you encountered in the beginning...Not always an easy road. Looks great now though! Congrats and thanks for sharing

 

[Electrokate]

Thanks but I had even more problems... it's been real interesting... and those are old pictures.

After the first couple weeks I noticed the return pump, a cheap Gen-X submersible, just wasn't as fast. I took it out to clean and found up to 2 mm of rust on the impeller, irregularly crusting all the way around but mostly at the seam. It had already gotten the pump hot and worn a groove in it. Needless to say, I was not happy. Sanded that off, and had to do it again a month later, though it wasn't as bad. Later I learned that the manufacturer considers this to be my fault, that it is merely "attracted metal ions from your tank" and they suggest using a more pure source of water or blaming my rocks for containing iron. This topic has been covered on RC by other dissatisfied customers and the product rep, do a search if you seek such amusement. Opened up the back and also found rust.

Since I was also having trouble with the Marineland SOS overflow, I switched from the one big flat U tube it comes with to several round ones, and switched from the Gen-X to a Rio Hyperflow. Cut the wattage in half, the temp by 3 degrees and it pumps twice the water twice as high! Quite happy with that so far. Only problem was when I hooked it up. Plugged it in and the hose disconnected. This was my next big lesson:
DON'T PUT POWERSTRIPS NEXT TO YOUR RETURN PUMP!!!!!!
Instinctively I put my left hand over the fountain to try and deflect it back into the sump, which splashed over me and sent about 2 gallons across the floor. With my other hand I tried to push the button turning off the powerstrip it was plugged into. That was plugged into an outlet behind the sump, which was full of saltwater. I got 3 shocks before I managed to turn it off and now I may need surgery to repair the damage-have a large purple hemangioma and 2-4 smaller satellite ones... it's cosmetic so I guess it could be worse. My doc said another of his patients blew his arm off with household current, and it wasn't the heavy duty kitchen circuit.

My powerstrips now live outside the stand, and my next stand will have a special medicine cabinet size compartment for them. A separate door on the side with a back wall that doesn't come all the way to the bottom will be installed. Powerstrips will be hung on the wall with the cords running down under, creating a drip loop. Emergency shutoff will mean opening the side door and hitting one switch. All cords will be labeled as well.

Now to more pleasant topics: the fish!

I got some more fish at the store, and from friends. Half the fish were freebies-rescues and fish returned for aggression. The only problem fish I have had was a yellow clown goby that ate sps polyps. Not just a few, ALL of them! I had a few frags that were just starting to color up and grow and he was killing them so he went away. I got a stunning Solomon Islands filament flasher wrasse which unfortunately jumped out 6 months later, a couple bangai’s, a royal gramma, and 3 anthias. Some would say my tank is overstocked and I agree, and plan on putting a couple of these guys in my next tank, a 50 gallon anemone system.

 

[Electrokate]

RIP... one green clown goby (rode the overflow), 2 mandarins, 5 bangai cardinals, one royal gramma and a filament flasher wrasse. The second mandarin got eaten by a Discosoma mushroom, that goes in my hall of shame. @#$)(* I waited a full year before even trying and they had sufficient food. Have decided mandarins are not for me, at least not in this tank. My current gramma is doing great.

Some of the fish I just can't photograph. Chromis move too fast, and the tang seems to avoid me. The square anthias however gets between the camera and whatever I am trying to get a picture of. Sometimes I think he is mocking me

 

[Electrokate]

I got a terrific RBTA from Northstaraquatics, a member of this board up in Bellingham. It grew to the size of a dinnerplate in a couple weeks from less than teacup size. Splits under halides every 2 months like clockwork, I do feed. It eventually proved unmanageable in this tank as it kept creeping toward the overflow after the last split there. I moved it to a 20 long temporarily til I could set up an anemone oriented tank... and it's been there 4 or 5 months. I am a little slow. A couple weeks ago it split in the 20 under 2 65 watt PC lights. Will I get flamed for saying that? I don't want to give newbies bad ideas... halides are much better for an anemone! The 20 is a VERY shallow tank, the anemone is about 4 inches from the light.

So here's a picture of it prior to dividing, a sequence of it dividing, and a sequence of it barfing and playing dead (panic inducing behavior) followed by reinflating.

Also threw in a picture of some ricordea I really like, and I got a clam from another RF member who was going FO. It's not liking the big tank for some reason-closes up and goes limp in there. Moved it to the 30 zoanthid "ark" with 2 96 watt pc's on it and it's happy as a... you know. I don't know why it likes the crappy underfiltered, underlit, underdosed and not at all skimmed 30 better than the big tank. Kind of worries me that something is wrong that my test kits are not catching.

 

[Electrokate]

So lets see... what else went wrong. Hmm. I started getting RTN about 6 months after the tank getting set up. One by one I lost all the sps except two tiny chips of an acro and most of my Montipora. Each coral was lost sequentially, usually adjacent colonies a day or week after the last one died. I think a predator, probably one without much mobility and nocturnal, was chowing down on them. Despite many days and nights of fish staring as my boyfriend calls it I never saw the !@)("%* cause. It finally stopped and I left the tank devoid of susceptible colonies for a while, then tried a couple frags. No trouble since, but now that the tank is mostly softies I think it's better to not have acros anyways. Acros are neat for other people. I like the soft coral, they move, pulse, grow fast, and most of all don't die all that easily. Between the RTN and the zoanthid losses I was pretty bitter about my hobby for a while. I also switched from magnetic MH ballasts to a couple ARO electronics with a pair of 14K bulbs from some guy in Canada. I think they are plus. Don't know the par but they didn't grow much except brown digitata, mushrooms and RBTA's in the 9 months I used them. Am going XM next. Hoping for Xmas money

The RTN started with a lovely freshly imported aquacultured acro from Bali. Not pointing any fingers here, could have come from the store or the wholesaler or the grower. But they grew in the ocean. Wonder if RTN is out of control worldwide?

Also had cyano galore, it was coating everything at one point. After watching it choke a few plate corals to death I broke down and dosed Chemiclean. I know I know... bad bad bad. But the slime was killing everything. I had tried doubling flow, water changes, parameters were perfect, cut feed... no dice. I have a tank in the basement containing macros and pods that has never been fed and it has flaming cyano. So I don't buy the overfeeding theory. The chemiclean worked but now I have some diatoms, nitrate was 160 post ammonia spike despite several large water changes indicating major bio filter disruption, and I still had to remove the detritus it was feeding on. At least it's gone, knock on wood, and the nitrate fell drastically. Especially after I tossed the giant biowheel that comes with the Tidepool!

I am a perfectionist, maybe this is not the best hobby for me. I took up knitting after the RTN hoping for a cheaper less stressful hobby. Ha! Costs several times as much as reef fish. Go figure.

 

[Electrokate]

Here are some successes, knock on wood. Wish the chromies would stop spawning in the digitata. Every time it gets good and big they get in the middle of it and spawning involves shaking violently... frags galore.

The pinkish one shows 7 months growth. Am hoping the XM bulbs will continue this and correct the color-it should be pink not brown. The P damicornis is supposed to be green, but it's growing and eating as well, so I can't complain.

The softies are going great, so they are the direction I am headed, but I will keep the brains and digitata, long as they are growing and healthy. The brains were rescues that don't seem to be picky about anything.

 

[Electrokate]

Here is a current photo montage. The tank is so wide and the room so narrow that I can't get far enough away to shoot the whole thing unless I move other furniture, so I shot it in 3 sections and used photoshop to stick them together. There are some problems with overlap, and one of the anthias appears twice.

Lately I have been getting some hair and diatom algae, probably as a result of dosing the cyano remover and disrupting the bio filter. Still think it was worth it but ask me again in a month when everything is coated in green fuzz...

Also switched the bulbs from 15K generics to really used Ushio 10K's in anticipation of going with XM's... wanted to see what that would look like and also introduce the coral to a higher par. XM 10K's are going to be a real shock but already I have seen more growth and color so am anticipating great improvements overall. It may be that the algae is mostly fueled by the expired Ushio's which are probably 2 years old. The last picture shows Montipora digitata pink which bleached under the old bulbs. The red and orange are also nearly white, and only the orange is looking like it might recover. That sucks. The little starfish I found a week ago, think it's been in there a while since I haven't added anything recently.

 

[Electrokate]

Over the last couple weeks things haven't gone well. First off after my last water change I forgot to plug the powerheads back in so detritus got nice and thick. Then a hair algae and diatoms bloomed, feeding on the detritus. It killed half the brain coral and all the Montipora digitata, and a softie. It got everywhere. I tried blowing the rocks off with a turkey baster and for some reason this caused the anthias to get finrot and the square anthias was worst off, was gasping and miserable. Every few days I blew the mulm off the rocks and cleared the algae again and the anthias would gasp. Blowing the rocks off mostly allowed the algae to spread. I aimed the 1250 GPH powerhead straight at a chunk of it 5 inches away and it is stuck good and fast, even lives on the outflow deflector of both powerheads. More water flow is not going to get rid of this stuff.
Did a water change and cleaned everything I could think of, even FW dipped a lot of rock and coral and turned the baserock upside down to kill the algae by burying it. Reupped the carbon. Tank looked good for a day, then got tons more algae. Checked the RO unit, it's still running.
Found out the moonlight fell into the tank. Neat. It was releasing a foul looking green liquid so did another water change. More algae. Today woke up and the big anthias was on its side gasping. I don't know what is in that tank, probably toxins from the circuit board in the moonlight or something. But the problem started before that. All the digitata died in the last couple days too. So did another water change today and started removing the sandbed, since I was told it is a source of phosphate. I have never gotten any detectable phosphate level in the tank but I don't have any better ideas so out goes the sandbed. Really strongly considering selling the whole dang tank. If I solve this problem it will probably catch on fire or something, that's about the only thing left to go wrong. At least my hand is healing from where I electrocuted myself with it.
Right now freshwater is sounding like a good hobby. Or maybe just hitting myself in the head with a hammer. It would be cheap at least.
When I started this marine thing I had 50 FW tanks. Got a 10 gallon nano for a pair of dottybacks. Wanted to get into breeding saltwater fish since I breed freshwater so often, I was really not interested in clownfish though. A guy at a Seattle reef store asked if I was a member of the PSAS, I said no as I was in so many clubs that I was paying over 200 bucks a year in FW club dues, had only one nano, and I am not safe to drive at night and live really far away. He said if I am too poor to pay dues to the PSAS then I am too poor to have a reef tank, shouldn't be allowed to have one, this isn't a hobby for poor people and that if I didn't have money I would be treating my animals poorly and cruelly. He said he wouldn't sell anything to me. Much as he pissed me off I am now giving him so much ammo, all my corner cutting has just resulted in massive losses of coral and more than a few fish. I won't tell you who that guy was or which shop that was at but he said he was important in the PSAS. Another time I went to his store and was told he watches my RF posts and gets mad at me but will have no discourse/commerce with me either in person or online. HI WEIRDO!!! I loved that store too, it was really nice... great display tank. That tank costs more than all my possessions combined including my car. Sigh. Maybe he's right in a way, I should pay my medical bills before I get new tanks
Kate

 

[Electrokate]

On 2/22 I gave up on this tank. Lost the tricolor and square anthias, my favorite fish. The hair algae was all over and getting worse. My water changes were near daily and I couldn't get any improvements (though did learn the 160 ppm nitrate was a false reading from a lousy kit, was actually 30-40). I posted a request to trade it for anything drilled, I just really wanted to quit but decided to try a properly set up tank first. The coral was stuffed here and there, even in a cooler on the floor. I swapped with Tony who lives nearby (thanks Tony!) and set up the 55 reef ready. Oddly he got frazzled by it as well and sold it in it's entirety shortly after. I think he was working about 120 hours a week and plans on buying a new one later. Said he never saw the tank except to work on it.
So far I couldn't be happier. Only problem with the 55 is the overflow is so huge it takes up about 1/5 of the floorspace. It's not that big a deal. Oddly the 55 looks larger. Coral and fish are happy, downgraded the lighting from halide to pc and they still are growing better. Put up the 50 I was storing with help from Tangee and her husband, he built a very nice stand. So now the obnoxious RBTA's and surviving gorgonian are in a separate tank, the fish were divided up and there is zero detectable nitrate in the 55 and 10 ppm in the 50. Much better. I have to thank Marty Finn for helping me with the entire job and doing the plumbing, sump design and install etc, and Big T for building the sump. It's great.

Here are the things I know were wrong with the 93.5:

Chunky substrate picked up lots of mulm/detritus

Left powerheads off after a waterchange for 2 weeks leading to algae bloom on rocks

Used cyano killer-not the one by ultralife though both are supposedly bad. Everything really bad started after this, though with cyano the tank was hardly doing well.

Didn't quarantine the rescue corals or the coral with electric green cyano which has been virtually impossible to remove. That stuff can't be blown, siphoned or even scrubbed off!

Added non photosynthetic gorgonians to the tank, which of course died. Gorgonians are incredibly toxic.

Used cheap halide bulbs of unknown par.

Used a black backed tank against a sunny window! Hot hot hot

The rest is open to debate. I removed the sandbed (after sifting out the chunky stuff) and liverock and put them in the 55, did not get the same troubles despite being told I needed to cook the rocks first and toss the sand. No nitrate, no phosphate, cyano in spots for the first few weeks but it has mostly gone away except a few patches on the prefilter in the sump. I got a lot of advice for my troubles, some good and some bad. Worst from the LFS, best from here. Just glad it's over. RIP, tank from hell. Maybe it was appropriate it looked like a dictator's coffin.

 

[Detri]

Wow, this is kind of an inspiring thread. Thank you for taking all your time to post all this information. The pictures are great.

I have had the opposite as far as tanks. My first tank was a 37 gallon I couldn't get a frogspawn to last more than a week. I have a 100 gallon now and have trouble finding room for it LOL.

Thanks for posting. I learned a little from this and appreciate why you would want to continue to dabble in the hobby. Thanks for sticking around

 

[Electrokate]

Did you figure out what went wrong with the frogspawn? Finn hooked me up with one and after a tendril of caulerpa wrapped around it the tissue receeded. Looked up the LPS section in Borneman's book and found that both caulerpa and halimeda can cause this if they touch the coral. Interesting. I want to make sure that is ALL that is going on so if you have any further advice it's appreciated. I moved it to the 55 where it gets sun + PC light and it appears much happier.
Currently am trying to downsize to the 2 reef tanks. No nano's, no side projects. I will still have the dwarf seahorses but their housing is simpler than a goldfish tank. Well, almost. They like macroalgae and macros like to hide cnidarians. The goal is to not have to worry about the chemistry of too many tanks at one time so I can enjoy my hobby.
Kate