PghFishNerd
Member
Hello friends! Long time, no see! I've been out of the hobby for I'd say... 3 years now. I'd been waiting til I had the time and money to restart one of my tanks (I had a 30 gallon reef and a 37 gallon seahorse tank) but I just can't stay away from the hobby any longer. Due to a lack of funds, I've decided to sell off the old tanks and start kludging together a little baby 2 gallon pico reef! I'm using almost exclusively materials that I already had from my other tanks. So here's what I'm working with:
- The tank itself is a 2 gallon betta tank that I took the rim, built in light, and base off of.
- The lighting is a 10 watt 10,000k NOVA Extreme T5 fixture. It's 20 inches long so I blacked out all but the middle 8 inches with electrical tape. Kludge-tastic, eh? The first money I actually spent on this tank was yesterday when I bought an additional 10 watt Coralife 50/50 screw-in bulb. I will have to get my old desk lamp from my parents' house to set that up, so it won't be shown in any of my pictures yet.
- The filter is a little HOB rated for 5-15 gal tanks. It's currently running without any media for the cycle. I'll be putting chemi-pure and Chaeto in the back chamber.
- The heater is nothing special. It's kind of an eye sore because it doesn't fit in the HOB/Mini fuge, but I tested the handful of heaters that I'd had laying around and this one was the most consistent.
- The ATO is still under construction. I'm working on an inverted Gatorade bottle with an airline tube siliconed into the lid.
(I'm planning on putting a shelf a few inches above the tank and mounting the lights underneath it, and keeping my auto top off reservoir on top of it... So please ignore the box that's currently propping my light fixture up)
My plan for livestock is as follows:
Inverts
-2 blue leg hermits
-2 sexy shrimp
- 3-5 Snails (any suggestions as to which type?)
Corals
- Zoanthids
- Mushrooms
- Assorted octocorals/Xenia/GSP
The tank is currently in the early stages of cycling (ammonia is at .75), so in the meantime, please entertain me with questions/suggestions/criticisms. Thanks for following along!
- The tank itself is a 2 gallon betta tank that I took the rim, built in light, and base off of.
- The lighting is a 10 watt 10,000k NOVA Extreme T5 fixture. It's 20 inches long so I blacked out all but the middle 8 inches with electrical tape. Kludge-tastic, eh? The first money I actually spent on this tank was yesterday when I bought an additional 10 watt Coralife 50/50 screw-in bulb. I will have to get my old desk lamp from my parents' house to set that up, so it won't be shown in any of my pictures yet.
- The filter is a little HOB rated for 5-15 gal tanks. It's currently running without any media for the cycle. I'll be putting chemi-pure and Chaeto in the back chamber.
- The heater is nothing special. It's kind of an eye sore because it doesn't fit in the HOB/Mini fuge, but I tested the handful of heaters that I'd had laying around and this one was the most consistent.
- The ATO is still under construction. I'm working on an inverted Gatorade bottle with an airline tube siliconed into the lid.
(I'm planning on putting a shelf a few inches above the tank and mounting the lights underneath it, and keeping my auto top off reservoir on top of it... So please ignore the box that's currently propping my light fixture up)
My plan for livestock is as follows:
Inverts
-2 blue leg hermits
-2 sexy shrimp
- 3-5 Snails (any suggestions as to which type?)
Corals
- Zoanthids
- Mushrooms
- Assorted octocorals/Xenia/GSP
The tank is currently in the early stages of cycling (ammonia is at .75), so in the meantime, please entertain me with questions/suggestions/criticisms. Thanks for following along!
progression progression
