Our 30 Gallon Cube (pics included)

[mnat]

If I were not so lazy I would have a sweet tale of the tank thread up and running from the start of this tank, however I am lazy so there. You would have all been waiting with baited breath for the next picture or update to come, but again I have failed you all. So for those of you who are into instant gratification, here is everything at once.

We bought this tank from a fellow NJ reefer who did have his location in the FS/FT thread which saved me a lot of time because I did not have to drive around NJ with my head out the window yelling who has the 30 gallon cube for sale.

Basics:

30 Gallon Oceanic Cube
Stand that hold it up
250w MH pendant built by previous owner (I could not have done it)
Remora Aqua C skimmer with maxi jet 1200
CPR HOB small refugium with live sand, live rock, chaeto and carbon
2 Korlia #2 powerheads

What's inside:
20-30 pounds live rock
20 pounds live sand
1 goby pistol shrimp pair
1 mandarin goby (Don't start we have had him for a few months already and are feeding him live and frozen food)
1 Orchid dottyback
1 Cherub angel
2 Picasso clowns Grade A

Corals:
Green cap
Frogspawn
Many sticks from Stan
Nuclear greens, purple deaths (not quite purple), jokers, and an Un id purple zoa
2 different types of mushrooms
This is the pour-over sentence where any coral I did not mention gets covered.

Maintenance:
The biggest challenge is keeping up with evaporation due to the MH bulbs and open top. We manually top off pretty much every day. However as you read this I swear I am researching an ATO unit (I have a thread in equipment conversation to prove it). We dose all the basic elements and perform 10% weekly water changes. We buy our water from Trop, did I mention I am lazy?

Any comments will be appreciated, we have never done SPS before, and have never had MH lighting before so this is all new to us. The tank looks great, the fish are doing fine and some of the corals are actually growing. The birdsnest has plenty of new spikes growing out and the nuclear greens have almost doubled in size since being introduced about a month ago.

 

[mnat]

For those of you thinking you bastard you did not post any pics here they are. I needed a beer after typing all of that (or maybe I had it before).

Full tank shot:

Top of the live rock:

Our zoa rock forgot to mention the jokers:

Some of the sticks we have including the birdsnest with nice growth:

Front and center frogspawns with a little bit of the one picasso:

Same area with the dottyback and cherub:

 

[mnat]

Just wanted to post a few more things about the tank setup:

We cycled the tank for a month with just live rock and the powerheads to get rid of the debris and grow the bacteria. After that we pulled out everything, and cleaned the tank and put down the live sand bed. I also threw in a few shells from our other tanks that were covered in coraline to hopefully seed that. After that we waited a few weeks to add fish and corals doing everything very slowly and drip acclimating.

What has worked (so far)
Coraline took over the whole tank in less than 2 months. Our powerheads are almost purple.
Growth on our corals has been nice
Fish seem to be getting along and doing well together. When we added the orchid and cherub they spent most of their time hidden in the rocks and we really did not see them. For some reason, when we added the clowns they are out and about much more.
We had an acro frag fall onto the sunset monti and totally bleach out that part of the monti. A few weeks later all the orange was back, and then the green polyps grew back in.

What has puzzled me (so far)
We have never had a skimmer before so this is new territory for us. We let it run for a few weeks to get the slime coat and for the micro bubbles to cease. After that I started to play with the height of the collection cup as it was pulling out a lot of water but not too much foam. To this day it still pulls out a lot of water and some foam, but all of it is very dirty so I guess that is good.
The weird thing that grew on an SPS frag (check the SPS LPS thread)
Trying to get the damn corals to stay in place, I know epoxy is the easiest way around it but I am not sure we are done with the aquascaping yet.
Superman monti is not blue. The polyps are red and fully extended but there is really only one blue area. Another area is white with the red polyps on there and I am not sure if this is bleaching or what. Hopefully, I can get this thing to blue up whithout dosing potassium or switching to a higher K bulb. I want to keep the K down to promote some good growth for a while.

 

[mnat]

Some new pics

All the pointy growth on the birdsnest are new. The thing is just growing like that and we could not be happier:

Our goby of the the pistol shrimp/goby pair made their home up front now (sorry for the streaks just had to take the pic then):

 

[mnat]

The Picasso clowns have taken quite a liking to the frogspawn. We will have to get them an anemone soon.

 

[Steve0xr]

sweet pair of clowns

 

[Scottyrock]

yo mnat... what kind of fuge do you have to run that skimmer on your nano... can ya send me some pics dude? i need to mod mine out to run a skimmer. got a jbj24 gallon

 

[mnat]

The skimmer is just a HOB by Remora, and the fuge is also HOB. I will try and get a pic up of the back of the tank that will show two different units.

 

[mr_X]

hi. my experience with the remora was that it was about worthless.
microbubbles, lack of skimmate, and what sounded like the suction thing at a dentists office prompted me to get rid of it after 6 months.
ours was so loud i had to put it on a timer to only come on when we were at work, since it was in the bedroom.
i even bought the prefilter box suggested by someone at aqua-c, which was huge for our 30 cube, and it didn't do anything but take up space.
i'm just saying this so you consider ruling out user error.

i've heard good things about the octopus HOB skimmers.

 

[mnat]

So far so good with the Remora. It was a bit loud for the first few weeks and did produce micro bubbles. However, after about 3 weeks or so that all went away. We have the tank in our living room not the bedroom so I can understand how loud that can be. We have to empty the cup every other day with all the gunk it pulls out. It is actually kind of funny when we do an algae scrape off the walls of the tank, the skimmer cup it filled with little green pieces.

 

[mnat]

Pic of our new BTA. He has been doing very well and the clowns are hosting away.

 

[Yankees9191]

Tank looks good

Keep it up!

 

[mynd]

TANK LOOKS GREAT! CLEAN! AWESOME! Nice job... Let's get with the tank shots though.. wanna see some goodies..

 

[mnat]

For mynd.

Top down view of our zoa rock. There are nuclear greens, purple deaths, jokers, purple people eater, and alpha and omegas in there.

Two good pictures of our clowns near the anem. Both get a nice pic here.

 

[mnat]

So we went ahead and got the tank covered so we could add a new friend, a blue spotted jawfish. We introduced him today and he spent the day digging out a ton of sand behind the piece of live rock in the middle of the tank. He has about 3 spots he pops up in when he wants to. The coral beauty is not a big fan at the moment but there are enough hiding spots for the both of them. He is eating great, took Rod's Reef this morning and we did our weekly blackworm feeding tonight. He took the black worms right out of the baster and seems to be doing great. Here is a photo of him peaking out, I will try and get some better shots.

 

[mnat]

So we had a lot of fun at MACNA for out thirty gallon. First off hardware, we picked up a sweet ceramic magnetic frag rack. It holds on to the side of your tank and has six drilled spots for frag plugs. We are excited about it as having a nano does not give you the most room. We know we could have done the same with a mag float and eggcrate but we like the look. Now get ready to follow the logic of a reefer: Since we bought the frag rack, we would have to get rid of one of the koralia 2s we have on the side of the tank to make room, so I needed to upgrade the other pump, why yes vortech was at the show demoing the mp10, well now I have to buy that and it is the last day and it is on discount, if I don't buy it I will be losing money. So yeah now we have an mp10 on the tank, but I must say I LOVE that pump so far. So much more current, so adjustable and everything in the tank looks a lot better. So here is a new FTS with the additions:

We also added a great deal of new coral to this tank. We bought a yuma, sponge bob favia, captain america palys (the new Tyree LE), purple hornets, chong bongs, magician palys, AOI, and black people eaters. Right now the tank is a bit dirty so I have no good pics up will try and get them soon. I also added a gorgonian I had gotten from Trop about a week or so ago. Here is a pic with the nice polyp extension. The gorgonian also loves the mp10

 

[evoIX]

nice buys!

 

[mnat]

Forgot to mention we got a pair of yellow assesor basslets for this tank as well. Very hard to get a pic of, but they are doing well so far. When we were acclimating one decided to go carpet surfing but we got him back in quick enough. He has been a bit elusive but the other one has been great. We got the pair for 40$ and the vendor was nice enought to hold them even when we was offered 200$ for the pair.

 

[Hawkeye]

Forgot to mention we got a pair of yellow assesor basslets for this tank as well. Very hard to get a pic of, but they are doing well so far. When we were acclimating one decided to go carpet surfing but we got him back in quick enough. He has been a bit elusive but the other one has been great. We got the pair for 40$ and the vendor was nice enought to hold them even when we was offered 200$ for the pair.

Wow - those are really in demand! Good for you...those are from ORA right?

 

[mnat]

Same vendor who sold us the bangaiis sold us the assesors. I talked to the rep at ORA who said the will be shipping out this coming week and expect them in stores in October. He said the retail price should run about 30$-40$ depending on the retailer.