Decadence

That truck may have just happened to have been sitting around.

I am probably going to wind up with glass but am intrigued about the PVC. It may be just as expensive as the glass but it would offer the extra comfort of not breaking if I drop a large piece of live rock from 3ft up.

It would be a stretch to say that almost everything gets skimmed or removed in the sock. I can definitely give myself cloudy water be blowing off the rocks. There is also plenty of sediment that falls in the sump and/or winds up in the chaeto. The biological processes remove most of the inorganic waste and the gfo gets the last bit out. I only do water changes because I can't clean my equipment without it. If this weren't the case, I would probably do one 20-40% water change every six months or so just to remove any contaminants which may find their way to the tank from the air. To be honest, the freshly made water isn't quite as clean as the stuff which I pull out of my tank.

Good advice. I would just stick to water changes and make the adjustments in the salt mix.

I have a multitiered approach using biological filtration for everything it is worth. Normally I would be on an algae turf scrubber but my screen crashed due to a kalk overdose a few months back and I haven't gotten around to setting it up a new LED scrubber yet. Right now my weapon of choice is a lot of chaeto with a powerful light. Nitrate and phosphate are taken in at a pretty set rate so I also run some GFO to make phosphate the limiting factor of algae growth since it is significantly more harmful. I dose vinegar into my kalk which allows the effluent a higher saturation point and also acts as a free carbon source in the display tank to promote bacterial growth. This is all coupled with a huge protein skimmer with an amazing pump on it. Now, I do stock very heavily so to keep an edge, I run a bare bottom tank with very high flow. Basically, every time I do change water, the inorganic phosphate levels of the old water are just as low as the new. I only change out around 5 gallons a month and empty/clean my sump and equipment every three to four months which is another 40 gallons.

^^^ not sure what happened there but it won't let me edit or delete it. Thanks. Fortunately, my methods to reef keeping allow me to change very little water. In fact, The only water I change regularly is just from water lost changing out media and what not. I will probably make the initial batch of water in the tank and then adding live rock to the display will fill up the sumps. Lighting is probably going to be a mix between LEDs and solar tubes.

I can safely say without a doubt that if I am able to crack the bottom of this tank after I repair it, it would get a plywood bottom! 1" glass is so ungodly expensive that it would put this whole build way out of budget sadly.

That would be the one! Laurel glass and mirror. Exact price is $1090. They are he cheapest place I have found yet. It would cost around $500 to get all of the glass to build a standard 120 rimless in all 1/2" glass with all polished/beveled edges like an ADA tank. Just add silicone! That would be the one! I'm most excited for a clown tang.

Yep, that's the one. I can either replace the bottom with glass for around $1000 or I can do an epoxied plywood bottom for much cheaper. I'm leaning more towards glass because it will be a bare bottom tank. Either way, the tank costs $3600 plus shipping new.

It's a 730 gallon glass tank, the largest they sell on glasscages. It was a massive Craigslist score which will become our new SPS tank when we find a house. For now, it is just going into my garage back in Laurel. I'm really excited to be able to house some of the fish which have always been limited by space.

I believe that I already have enough people to lift this thing. It is sitting on a pallet and that is on rollers so it can be pushed to the truck. It will have to be lifted vertically onto the truck afterwards and weighs about 1500 lbs. I have 10 people ready as is but more would be appreciated. If you're available, please let me know! Thanks

Wrasses have a tendancy to do that... He will pop up ra do my one day. He is burried in your sand right now. They are also known jumpers but I assume you have some kind of a top?

I have made the mistake before of buying devoid live rock which is one of the big reason that I won't buy live rock from stores anymore. I don't think that a tank without algae is a healthy tank. If I have an unforeseen rise in nutrients, I would rather an algae bloom (lock them in as organic) than have all of the inorganic nutrients free in the water.

Glad to hear it is turning around. If the Midas begins to be a terror again, try sticking mirror on the tank in front of his hole. I do this every time I add a new fish and every remotely aggressive fish in the tank is so busy fighting their reflection that they don't even realize that there is a new addition. After about three days I will take the mirror away and the new fish will have already established himself and acclimated. So far this has worked with quite a few fish.

I've done some more reading and it is hit or miss apparently. It will depend on the demeanor of the Midas. It sounds like you have a terror on your hands. There are plenty of people keeping a Midas and bicolor together in tanks your size and smaller.. Some people are reporting that they are even the best of friends an sleep in the same hole.

That's terrible! I have never seen a Midas that bad. It sound like he has a bad temperament. My Midas is occasionally (rarely) goes after the cleaner wrasse I picked up from Jan and my yellow corris wrasse but the other 14 fish are completely ignored. Even the slight aggression doesn't last long and is just to scoot these fish away from "his" chalice. Give him a snickers. :-(

Bleach it and then soak it and vinegar a couple hours first and then brush it off and rinse in water or else all of the organics will be locked into it and it will be a phosphate factory when you try to use it again.

I'd stick some chaeto in the sump with a light and see if it grows. If it doesn't grow, the bacterial processes are being limited by phosphate and you are the luckiest man on the planet and carbon dosing wouldn't help. Often times, a strong plan of attack for phosphate early on will leave you with elevated nitrate levels. There isn't really a problem with this as has been alluded to by PaulB. Start testing for phosphate wih a high quality kit (not API).

In my opinion, you are beat off stocking your tank well with fish and giving them a good diet of various foods often. Ever since "overstocking" I have got nothing but the best polyp extension possible. Either way, I wouldn't even worry about it until you are rather heavily stocked with SPS. I wouldn't physically dose anything which I could not test for.

We have a Midas and two tailspot blennies in our 90. The herbivore blennies have a completely different personality than the omnivores like the Midas. You should be completely fine.

I used to have a few maricultured bright yellow millipora colonies in my tank but they slowly died while everything else thrived... Just he nature of maricultured a d wild-caught sps I guess.

Green slimers only have a yellow tint to them when their is too little light or too much free inorganic phosphate in the water. A healthy one is almost unbarebly green.

I have never treated the tank for red bugs. My reason for this is that I have a large clean up crew with plenty of hermits, three emerald crabs, a mandarin (needs the pods even though he eats black worms three times a day), a bunch of acro crabs and four shrimp (two cleaner, two fire). It would be a big procedure to rid my tank of red bugs without killing a lot of animals. I think that I am going to tackle this when we move everything over to the 150 in a couple months. We will probably move over colonies one at a time and treat them with bayer.

Yah, like I said, they cover everything in the pictures but the ones listed. They are definitely there and can be easily spotted with the naked eye. Unfortunately, most of the corals are too far away from the glass to zoom in on them. Some of the corals pictured literally have thousands of red bugs on them.

Unfortunately, I don't have a macro lens; however, just about every coral in the pictures has red bugs besides for the green slimer and the two bird nests. They don't look like they have smooth skin because of all of the polyp extension. Colors in the photos aren't even a fractional what they are in person and that type of polyp extension lasts all day. At night, my polyps extension is borderline comical.