Reddog170
Active Member
I have not been on here for a while so with the start of a new little project I thought I would share.
A while back I downsized everything to just a single 8 gallon Bio-Cube. It has been OK, just never great. I have had 2 ballasts burn out, learned to hate the lighting all together. The filtration bugged me as insuficiant and a couple other things I did not like. But what I did like was that a weekly 4 gallon water change took only about 20 minutes, food lasts forever, and it is a cool little tank to just sit back and watch. I had one little fish, a maroon clown. I found her a new home and got rid of the mushrooms and misc other softies and got started.
I am in the process of doing what I started a year ago, a DIY led light. Nothing fancy, no dimmers. The second step will be converting a 5 gallon tank into a small sump to hold a skimmer and maybe a media reactor. Now this will not be an elaborate setup or anything. I wanted to upgrade the lights for a few reasons, 1- no more spending $45 every six months on new bulbs, 2- heat, 3-Better lighting = more colorful(and happier) corals.I wanted to upgrade the filtration to 1- better accomadate water changes and 2 improve water quality. I am sure that the buildup will be a couple months going, but it will be interesting to see how it goes.
Now I have taken almost a year to think this out and plan just how I wanted to do this rebuild, how I ended up with so many mushrooms I will never figure out, and have planned things out very carefully. I wanted simple, and efective. So no controllers, nothing more than timers on the lights. A simple nano skimmer, and some carbon for filtration, ( LR does the most of the filtration). The hardest part of having a nano, for me, is feeding. It is just WAY to easy to overfeed. I also found out that things go bad FAST in a nano tank. Not much water volume. So I have to pay close attention to what I am doing to avoid mistakes. I thought I was a decent reef keeper until I went with this nano, I now know I was nowhere as good as I thought I was.
Well that is where I am at now. Still reefing, and still learning. Shaun
A while back I downsized everything to just a single 8 gallon Bio-Cube. It has been OK, just never great. I have had 2 ballasts burn out, learned to hate the lighting all together. The filtration bugged me as insuficiant and a couple other things I did not like. But what I did like was that a weekly 4 gallon water change took only about 20 minutes, food lasts forever, and it is a cool little tank to just sit back and watch. I had one little fish, a maroon clown. I found her a new home and got rid of the mushrooms and misc other softies and got started.
I am in the process of doing what I started a year ago, a DIY led light. Nothing fancy, no dimmers. The second step will be converting a 5 gallon tank into a small sump to hold a skimmer and maybe a media reactor. Now this will not be an elaborate setup or anything. I wanted to upgrade the lights for a few reasons, 1- no more spending $45 every six months on new bulbs, 2- heat, 3-Better lighting = more colorful(and happier) corals.I wanted to upgrade the filtration to 1- better accomadate water changes and 2 improve water quality. I am sure that the buildup will be a couple months going, but it will be interesting to see how it goes.
Now I have taken almost a year to think this out and plan just how I wanted to do this rebuild, how I ended up with so many mushrooms I will never figure out, and have planned things out very carefully. I wanted simple, and efective. So no controllers, nothing more than timers on the lights. A simple nano skimmer, and some carbon for filtration, ( LR does the most of the filtration). The hardest part of having a nano, for me, is feeding. It is just WAY to easy to overfeed. I also found out that things go bad FAST in a nano tank. Not much water volume. So I have to pay close attention to what I am doing to avoid mistakes. I thought I was a decent reef keeper until I went with this nano, I now know I was nowhere as good as I thought I was.
Well that is where I am at now. Still reefing, and still learning. Shaun
