madweazl

They are cool; do they come out of the rock much?

Grrr!

Not just vacing, I disturb it often with my hands. You arent going to hurt a thing with that much sand. If deeper, perhaps. Not sure how deep the OP's sand bed is but I wouldnt hesitate at 3" or less.

Trapped nasties? I run 3" sand beds and have never had problems disturbing the sand (vac'd 2-3 times a year to remove any detritus that may have accumulated).

Yea, probably not a good option if you have sand but if you have courser crushed coral it's probably great.

They make foam socks that can be placed over the impeller preventing inhabitants from getting hacked up.

Oh, didnt even know they made the stuff. Very cool; wish you hadnt told me now... Edit: Oh no, they make the fittings too!

What paint did you use on the plumbing? Beautiful tank.

Can probably trap him with the inverted plastic bottle method.

On the plus side, they should start knocking one another off freeing up space for other fish whether you wanted to or not

Not meaning to derail your question but what prompted the move from Kessil?

I think more than two is over kill. Definitely more practical on a large tank (200+ gallon) just because of the sheer amount of wattage necessary to heat that volume of water.

I was jumping down rabbit holes on my snow day and came across this site that looked pretty cool. I havent signed up or used the color search feature but thought it was neat and useful given how many zoa names/variants are out there (not that this will curb all the crazy names that are coming out).

Holy moly, four heaters on a 16g?

Absolutely. Plan is to have items like zoas, shrooms, and various polyps at the side/perimeter of the rock. Reason was two-fold, the space as you mentioned along with the lower light at the ends of the aquarium.

Hmm, time to edit doesnt last very long (guess my post count will go up). Anyways, did a little reworking and this would make 64% of the sand visible and should give a nice balance (was shooting for 2/3) while hopefully making the tank look bigger than it actually is with the additional diagonal line.

Given the fins that it's happening too, it sure likes like he's being chewed on to me.

I'd go with two, 100-150w heaters and probably leaning toward the lower wattage unit (100-125w) provided your aquarium isnt in an abnormally cold area of the home or you like keeping the home cooler than about 65°. The reason being, if one heater malfunctions and stays in the on position, it will take longer to heat the aquarium to an unacceptable level giving you more time to identify and correct the problem.

Did a little more thinking and decided to move the upper most portion on the right island about two inches to the left. Something I completely forgot about was the sand and there just wont be enough showing like this. If I remove a four inch area of rock in the lower right of the tank, that should help out along with under cutting the over hang at the front right structure another two inches or so. May provide some cool contrast with the shaded sand down there providing a little more depth of field. I'd like to get the visible sand to occupy about 1/3 of the tank. Checked the tracking info and the rock should be here tomorrow. This shipment is only 50lbs but I'm hoping to get the "framework" constructed and epoxied; we'll see how far I can stretch it.

Do you have the temp rise and fall with the seasons? That's a cool reef.

Pretty sure I'll go with the 75g. I loved our original 50g (36x18x18) but the replacement sucks at 36x16x20. You wouldnt think 2" would make such a big difference but I hated it. Once I started thinking about it the 75g tanks were cheap enough to just make the switch and opened up a lot of possibilities for the rockwork. I've made an inquiry into a rimless 75g (nothing fancy, just rimless) too. I'm not so good at visualizing my ideas without laying them down physically. Hopefully the rock shows up this week and I can really check it out.

Keep the house warm tonight and the 100w should be fine until you can replace it tomorrow. Which heater were you using?

I've only had one clown that actually fed the anemone, the rest have been no good greedy son of a guns LOL.

An algae scraper and manual labor. Safest way too.

Playing around with some virtual aquascapes. Think I'm pretty happy with this one; maintains a lot of negative space with just enough design ques to keep it interesting. Tough to tell with the PVC but the split running between the rockwork will be concave (pushed out 2" at the top of the left structure with the PVC). I pulled this over to the front of the right structure for about a thrid of the tank as well (really hoping a goby sets up shop in both locations). The highest step is an attempt to help brake up the location of the overflow box. It was actually a lot of fun messing around with the PVC. There is a minimum of 3" between the virtual rockwork and glass all the way around.