AlanM

I also love the idea of a huge remote sump and small display full of stuff that you shouldn't be able to keep in such a little display. My worry with those was always that if you're pumping water upstairs you are using a pretty strong pump and if anything goes wrong you don't have any buffer for extra water in the display, heh.

What are you using the 80/20 on the back for? This is looking really nice.

@Origamihas experience with well water.

They don't really look like acro eating flatworms to me. More like acoel flatworms which are harmless. In my old tank there were a few spots with them that would kind of wax and wane.

Stay safe out there. Hope you don't have to tackle anyone misbehaving these days.

Hmm. My 180 should be fine, I'd think. I only had it set up for around a year, but I would probably make sure the bulkhead seals are good. I don't know about the 120. You could always put it on the floor and fill it and leave it for a while to see if it seemed fine. I would not expect a failure of the bottom pane if the caulk isn't visibly damaged, though. It's a bit hard to see it because of the frame though, I bet.

Could you just pull out the rock and let it dry in the sun for a while then cure it afterwards? Bleach will take a while to neutralize, but letting the polyps all dry out will definitely make them dead.

This is a bit older thread, but one thing to be concerned about on a well is lots of CO2 in the water can eat up one of the two components in a mixed cation-anion resin. I forget which. Tom @Origami has dealt with well water before and can give advice.

I agree. Just run it for a while in a bucket with some RO water and if it isn't foaming like crazy, then you should be fine. You're right that you don't want to be putting surfactants into your reef tank.

The caulk you see inside the tank is a protective one that keeps water from getting to the actual seal that holds the glass panes together. The glass is held together and leak tight because of the thin layer of silicone squished (hopefully without bubbles or damage) between the end of one pane and the side of the other. Then a bead of caulk is applied to the inside and tapered down to keep water from getting to that seal and damaging it. Having said all that, if you want to do a new bead inside the tank you'd have to scrape it all off, clean it pretty well with a razor and maybe some solvents to remove extra residue, and then re-apply. I'm not sure a new layer over the existing one would do much. Plus it would probably end up looking bad. Others who have been around longer than me will be able to offer advice on a tank that has sat around for a while and if you can trust the seal or should reseal it. I guess if I had a tank I couldn't trust I wouldn't try to repair it unless I had a really good reason. Small tanks are relatively cheap, given the other costs in this hobby, and the potential cost of a mishap is so huge for a big tank that it wouldn't be worth it to me.

It will be interesting to see how they deal with now selling Neptune gear through their direct online competitors and local fish stores.

How does your current external one work? Do you have a link to the product somewhere so we can see what it is? Maybe we could help it work better. Drilling a tank is never a guarantee. I think anyone who would come to help drill it for you would want you to definitely be OK with losing the tank since it can crack even if someone is being careful. You also have to be really sure that the glass is not tempered. Many tanks are tempered because it makes the glass harder, but if you try to drill a tempered glass tank it explodes into a million pieces. If you know the manufacturer you could ask them.

I'm getting lots of side polyps from the zoas already, so thanks to the members who sold them to me. They were healthy! I lost a fruit loops frag somewhere. Amazing that a rock with zoas on it can go completely missing in such a small tank, but it's nowhere. Bizarro. I do like the tiny fruit loops polyps, though, so at some point I'm interested in getting a nice sized frag of that and some more ricordia colors. The green ones are multiplying and seem to be doing fine.

it's really nice to see it coming back.

Thanks. I'm staying on top of a little bit of aiptasia with Aiptasia-X from Red Sea. I'm pretty good at getting the white goop right in their mouths. I'm also staying on top of a little bit of bubble algae (valonia) by physically removing it. If it was red valonia I'd keep it because I think it's pretty, but the green stuff has to go.

Yes, bubblegum digi on left and anacropora on the right. They don't grow much, but I figure they get some of what they need from the water changes. I had a birdsnest in there too but it croaked in the crash.

Here's this morning. Sorry for the dirty glass. 8) It's lots of zoas, a few ricordia, a little bit of SPS, and a bunch of snails and bristleworms. The fish didn't make it, the hermit crabs also die. I don't think there is enough for them to eat and the tank doesn't do well with lots of nutrient additions. I just run some floss in the filter area and sometimes a small bag of carbon. I do a half gallon water change every 2 days.

Nice! It's really nice access to the dosing containers on the side like that without needing to wrestle them out of some narrow space.

Tank is looking much better. All zoas and other corals recovered and opened up. I'll just keep a close watch on it. I may add a tiny skimmer, mostly for fun: https://premiumaquatics.com/products/reef-glass-nano-protein-skimmer.html

I think you're right about what it was. Delayed bloom after the initial crash. It has cleared up now, but the coral responses are interesting. I have one SPS in the tank, a digital, and as soon as the water improved those polyps came back out. The zoas and Xenia are still mad though. SPS are more delicate and can completely die quicky, but forgive you faster once quality improves. Softies are hardier, but hold a grudge longer.

For the last few days I've been dealing with a mystery now of cloudy water and unhappy, closed zoas and xenia. It's easy to do nearly 100% water changes on this tank, so I've been doing that each day, but it stays unhappy. It looks like maybe there's a dieoff of the algae on the back wall as well? It's definitely kind of cleaning up. I ran carbon for a couple of days and that does seem to be helping a bit, but it's a real mystery to me trying to figure out what is going on (without testing). The water is clear this morning, so fingers crossed that it's turning around.

OK. I've never seen it, and I know you're handy so I won't suggest things that seem obvious to me like taking a dremel to it to make it normal, heh. I've admired the design of the red sea tanks in the past, though, and think it's pretty short sighted of them to make something totally different from everything else for which no replacement parts can be obtained.

Can you completely swap the bulkheads for normal sized non-metric ones? Even if the glass holes aren't exactly the right size the rubber gaskets tend to be pretty wide so there's some slop in the hole size. It's possible that BRK or Capital may have some? I know Manassas isn't exactly next door to you, though. The threads on those bulkheads seem really short compared to most bulkheads I've seen. I'm surprised that red sea supplies them like that.

I also confess that I've never tested any parameters of the water in this tank. Nothing except temperature and salinity (with refractometer). I figured I knew what I was doing and wasn't putting in challenging corals, so what's the use of testing lots of stuff. I have no idea what the pH was in any situations.

Confession time: I had a crash Friday night. I don't know exactly what happened, but when I woke up Saturday morning the water was cloudy and my dragonet and sole hermit crab were dead. The corals were also all very unhappy. I've been changing 2 quarts of water per day so around a 15% daily water change. I assumed that was enough to keep the water quality good despite not having a skimmer or any mechanical filtration, but I guess it was building up in there nevertheless. The thing I changed on Friday was that I made a screen top and set that on it instead of the glass lid. My theory is that I had been building up ammonia in the tank, but the glass lid kept the pH low and the ammonia non-toxic. When I put the screen on top the pH probably went up and the ammonia started killing things. Just a theory, but that's all that changed overnight. Saturday I did a 2 gallon water change after removing the dead things, then I put in some floss and spent the day occasionally blowing off the rocks and stirring up the sand to trap a bunch in the floss to remove it. Everything looks good today. Dwarf Ceriths and nerites are looking good. It will be a lower nutrient tank if I'm not trying to keep a fish happy, so I think it will be fishless for a while. I have mostly zoas and ricordia, but have a little bit of SPS. Digitata looks fine. Birdsnest started to lose tissue. Anacropora looks fine.