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WAMAS Tank of the Month


Thank you for featuring my young tank as the Tank Of The Month! After most of a decade without a tank, I dove in again at the beginning of April 2021, and the tank is really starting to get past those early tank issues common to so many. This is the largest tank I’ve kept, to date, though it would still be considered a nano by many, and it has, by far, the widest variety of creatures that I’ve ever tried to keep. While I’ve worked with interesting tanks and creatures in the past, my interest has certainly reached a new height in the last year, and I expect to be busy with new projects in the hobby for a long time to come. It’s great to have these creatures one would never normally see, let alone learn about, be part of my day-to-day again.

This tank is a Read Sea Max E170 All-In-One with a total volume of about 45 gallons including the rear chamber mounted on Red Sea’s matching stand. The box itself is about as stock as they come and I don’t have a sump, but I’ve tried to make the best use of the space I can, so there have been a lot of tweaks and customization to the setup. The tank and stand are freestanding with a short shelf next to it for holding food, additives, and test kits, but it’s in the most trafficked, most central part of my home, so I can greet my creatures and see what they’re up to dozens of times in a day.

I started with water, live and dry sand, dry rock as a base, and maricultured live rock from the Gulf of Mexico, and I’ve managed to keep quite a variety of the hitchhikers on the original rock still going while adding a whole slew of other kinds of things, and have worked through the few pests that came in with it.

As the tank is only a year old now, while the growth I’m seeing is promising, a lot of the corals still look like frags. I think the standout feature of the tank is really the diversity and fertility of its inhabitants – there are dozens of kinds of creatures (soft, stony, and non-photosynthetic corals, bivalves, crabs, shrimp, and of course fish) which seem to be thriving and at least half a dozen documented spawns of fish, shrimp, and crabs.

It’s worth mentioning that as a bit of an oddity: almost nothing on the tank is automated. I’ve got relatively detailed plans for how I want to fix that problem (some of which were mentioned when the tank was first started!), and I’ve made some real progress towards that goal, but right now basically everything is done manually – ATO, dosing, feeding – with only the lights, the heaters, and the vodka dosing set up to be automatic.

26.5-27 degrees C Temperature – Early on this ran high because of the number of things using power in the tank, but switching to DC pumps helped a fair amount. It can get warmer with ambient temperature, but has been consistent in this range for months.
35 ppt Salinity – This tends to creep up because of phyto dosing, so I have to take out a quart or so per week and measure to keep it in check.
7.8 pH overnight – I measure at night and don’t monitor pH continuously, but I believe daytime pH is about 8.2.
9.1 dKH Alkalinity – The target is 9.0 dKH, recently recovered from an accidental dosing of soda ash instead of kalkwasser that sent it to 14.4 dKH!
0.4 ppm Phosphate – This fluctuates as I periodically dose a few drops of Phosphate Rx to keep it down, but has been as high as 1ppm recently. Ideally, I want to keep it below 0.2 ppm, but at least so far it’s the most challenging one to manage (the clams growing may take care of this).
5 ppm Nitrate – A little below the 10-15 ppm target I’m going for, this last measurement got me to reduce the vodka dosing from 3.3 mL to 2.2 mL a day-to-day.
400 ppm Calcium – A little low, so I dosed after measuring it, target is 425-450 ppm.
1335 ppm Magnesium – Again a hair under what I go for, but in a good range.
400 ppm Potassium – In a good spot!

I use two Reefbreeders Reef Power RP-M powerheads to provide the majority of the flow in the display and a Hydor Seltz D 750 pump for the return from the rear chamber. The RP-Ms run at about two thirds, whereas the return pump is turned down to about one third. I had liked the idea and the look of this style of powerhead and they were rated for great flow for the size and price, and since the rear chamber is also full, I couldn’t go with something like an MP-10 and keep the powerheads on the back wall. At one point I had them running in counter cycles, but because of the programming limitations with these units, I couldn’t get long enough pulses to really get the wave action I was hoping for, so I have them both set for randomly variable flow patterns. The return pump replaced the original Sicce one because of one thing: heat generation. With the ~30W Sicce pump, the tank without external plumbing had trouble keeping cool enough with everything running it at once even with the heaters off, so I tried to swap to DC pumps to get more efficiency and less heat delivered to the water. The return pump only just barely fits in the pump chamber for the E170, and only with a 3d printed custom intake cover – the stock one was too long to fit.

The one light over the tank is an Ecotech Radion XR30 Pro G5, and I’m pretty happy with it. It runs around 60% total output with about a 7 hour photoperiod with two hours of ramp on either end. I had started with a Red Sea ReefLED 90 which worked just fine, but was both bluer than I prefer in my spectrum and had much more shimmer than I was really after, so after a couple of months I switched to an XR15 G5. I had some trouble with using the app and had way less light output than intended for some time, but when that was figured out and I gradually ramped things up, I found it to be just barely enough for where I wanted to keep some higher light corals and sort of insufficient for any kinds of Tridacna clams, so I swapped to the XR30 and drove it with a total output only a little over what the XR15 could do. I saw better color and growth and could support the corals more where I wanted to have them, so while something with a wider, more even blanket of light and less shadowing would maybe still be nice, I’m happy with the XR30’s performance and look. I have it set to use the automatic moonlight mode, and while I don’t notice the differences much, I have seen some spawning events start to sync up with other organisms (3-4 spawns in a single night), so I think it may be playing a role in spawn timing.

I’ve got an Ice Cap K1-50 protein skimmer that’s been customized with a mount to fit in the E170 and an SR Aquaristatik DC 300GPH skimmer pump. The original pump seemed a little underpowered and I knew I needed to be able to pull a fair bit of gunk out, but I also had to make a mount as well to replace the strange (but actually somewhat functional) stock mount as well as to accommodate the water height in the rear chamber. The water height in the skimmer section is something like 19” – far above a normal skimmer’s operating depth – so I got a longer skimmer, run it on the deeper side, and have it suspended a ways above the bottom. Also worth mentioning that the skimmer only barely fits in the rear chamber, so when I want to service it, I have to swing the bottom over to the opposite side of the skimmer chamber to get around the built in glass pieces for aligning the stock skimmer. On the topic of the original RSK skimmer – it did a great job and fit the size perfectly, albeit with another AC pump and some heat, but it was tall and centered enough in the tank that I couldn’t use most kinds of light mounting arms with it easily, so I ended up replacing it.


In addition to the skimmer, I’ve got a Santa Monica Filtration Drop 1.2X algae turf scrubber that’s just growing in again after a breakdown a couple months back that it took me some time to spot, and I’ve got two custom 3d printed baskets of Marine Pure ceramic media in the filter media caddy in the rear chamber.

The above sections outlined really all my main equipment, I just use the switchable outlet built into the E170’s stand to quickly shut things off when needed, but I wanted to point out some supporting equipment outside the tank that certainly contributes to it, namely, my plankton culturing rack and my breeding/grow out system.

The plankton rack uses two 36” Finnex Stingray 2 lights on a timer (18 hour photoperiod) and an Alita AL-15A linear air pump to grow 8 gallons of phytoplankton in one gallon cultures and 8 gallons of copepods in two gallon cultures. Currently I’m growing Isochrysis, Tetraselmis, and Chaetoceros as well as Apocyclops and Tigriopus copepods, but I’ve got some new copepod cultures growing in and may expand that somewhat.

The breeder system is a complete tank in its own right, but it’s three standard 10G tanks plumbed together into a single system, where the top tank is a little bit of a display and a grow out space for juveniles, the middle tank is a space for raising larvae and fry, and the bottom tank is a sump that’s mostly a refugium. It’s been going for just a few months now, but already has been supporting dozens of attempts at raising things and getting them to a point where they can survive in a full blown system.

An important final mention for equipment is that both the tank and the breeder system have a 1500VA UPS connected to one heater and the main circulation pump. This way, in the event of an outage, I get about three hours with some heating maintenance and a baseline of circulation before I have to worry about trying to care for things. It’s not as robust a backup power system as I would like, but it does allow for some additional safety and time to react.

I haven’t maintained a consistent water change schedule, so especially for a smaller tank, I have a fair bit of dosing to do. Each day, I’m currently dosing 500 mL of kalkwasser (in the evening to help with pH overnight) and dose 20 mL each of calcium chloride and soda ash solutions in the morning. My only automated dosing is 2.2 mL of vodka daily, early in the morning, but this number has been gradually decreasing for months, so when things grow in more, I may shut it off. I also dose 6 mL of either KZ flatworm stop (in theory to promote polyp extension and fleshyness of corals) or 6 mL of Acropower, alternating each day before regular feedings. The theory being that dosing something that gets pulled out by the skimmer right before feeding helps increase feeding response and is less likely to be pulled out by the skimmer when it’s recovering from the oils in the food.

In addition to the daily schedule, I check magnesium and potassium levels every week or two and dose as appropriate, usually in 50-100mL increments every month or so.

The real reason why all the rest of it exists, my tank is conventionally overstocked and I really like it that way. I’ve got 13 fish (manyline basslet, orange spot goby, yellow banded possum wrasse, ruby longfin fairy wrasse, hector’s goby, two firefish), including three pairs (banggai cardinals, mandarin dragonets, sharknose gobies), but everything is considered reef safe and friendly, so they’ve been getting along well. I tried to pick fish with different behaviors, sleeping preferences, and hang out locations so that I could have some movement all around and so they would be less likely to get in each other’s way. I’ve always been sort of an invert guy, so I’ve got no shortage of those either – at least six shrimp, at least that many crabs, that many urchins, a couple cucumbers, a whole bunch of clams, some tube worms, etc. Then the corals also span the gamut, ricordea and rhodactis mushrooms, a whole bunch of zoas, LPS including the corals formally known as acans and platygyra, SPS including acros, porites, montipora, and basically whatever strikes my fancy and that I think I can keep good care of. I have a few NPS corals as well, a small sun coral colony that lives under an overhang in front, a bunch of hidden cup coral that came in on the live rock which seems to be thriving in several places, and a chunk of red gorgonian with white polyps which is hard to see in the cave in the back of the rockwork, but which I see some polyps out on every day.

To highlight a few: For fish, I have the pair of banggai cardinals which are always out and have spawned half a dozen times already, the pair of mandarins which scoot around all day and spawn in the evenings, and a pair of sharknose gobies where the second one was added only recently. The two single fish that are most interesting are also two of the shyest, the yellow banded possum wrasse and the manyline basslet, and I’d like to find a buddy for either one to try to encourage them to be out more, but it will be a challenge as I don’t believe either has external sex characteristics to identify one that would get along with them.

For inverts, I’m really liking the three derasa clams that are in the sand bed, and the big one especially has great coloration. I still have a flame scallop that was added last summer which is going strong, so I got a couple more recently and look forward to catching them flap around the tank at night to find a new spot. My porcelain crabs are the red and green varieties, but they’ve gotten big and spawn a couple times a month, and it’s always fun to see their arms out straining food out of the water. I’ve also got two breeding pairs of shrimp, skunk cleaners and fire cleaners, and while the skunk cleaners are much more bold and out in the front more… they may be afraid of the fire cleaners. I haven’t seen any actual fighting, but when the fire cleaner shrimp come out from their cave the skunk cleaner shrimp make an effort to stay out of their way. There are a few nice looking rock flower anemones, but they seem not to do well in the high flow if they get up and move, so I’m a couple shorter than the number added. I’d be remiss not to mention the hitchhiker inverts that I’ve still got – a couple of pistol shrimp that live all the way in the back and I hear but don’t see anymore, probably dozens of jewel box clams that look like bumps on the live rock with vents, and a few wing oysters which keep a steady current of water going through their gills when I turn off the flow.

The corals are as mixed a reef as I can imagine, but to point out a couple I like particularly: a couple of the zoa frags growing in (yellow with black and orange rims, then the icy yellow and purple looking ones) really draw my eyes, but I’ve got a bunch that are happy, colorful, and are growing to cover up things. I’ve got a few goniopora which I look forward to see really growing, but my favorite color pieces are smaller, shorter polyps that haven’t gotten that big yet. The acans are starting to fill in the gaps between the frags glued to larger bits of rock, and the red one that is partly shadowed so that it has a bubble gum pink side in the brighter light is particularly interesting to look at. The branching montipora on the rock in the front left (confusa and stellata) are growing well but don’t yet have as dramatic a shape as I hope they get to. Then there are some acros that are starting to get going – the purple candle tip frag that started as a ¾” single stick and has had some of the fastest growth of anything in the tank, the echinata near the top which has gotten going and has such a smooth look, the little piece of garf bonsai that hasn’t taken off but has great color, and that one blue/green/purple stick that I kept knocking off the rock so I broke it into thirds and now it’s starting to reform into a single colony after finally staying glued.

My tank is overfed by most people’s standards, but I think it’s what’s encouraging all the spawning and what allows NPS organisms to hold on in the tank. Every day I dose 200 mL of phytoplankton in the morning and 100 mL at night, and feed daily a single cube of frozen food (on a rotation: mysis, marine cuisine, capelin roe, bloodworms) plus a 1 mL scoop each of Benereef and Reef Roids (these change, but I go for two kinds of particulate food), and then a couple dozen pellets from three different jars, one pellet type is for vegetarians. If that wasn’t enough, in the last couple months I’ve been feeding LRS’s Reef Frenzy Nano during the day every other day or so. Everything seems to be happy to eat twice, but it’s also small enough chunks for the fry in the grow out tank to eat, and the extra feedings really seem to speed their growth a lot. I haven’t missed a day feeding since starting the tank, and unless I target feed the sun coral and goniopora, they don’t seem to be nearly as happy.

There have been and will be tons of challenges, far to many even to mention in the build thread. There’s figuring out equipment oddities, dialing in parameters and dosing, figuring out solutions to algae blooms, trying to get fish who get along, and countless more things, but I try to do my best to understand the underlying issues and address them methodically. I think being around the tank a lot and being fairly sensitive to things changing helps, but I’ve also been keeping a written log book of most of the things I do to the tank or big, notable observations, and it’s been really handy to see longer term trends, pick dosing amounts, and monitor spawning activity. I may try to move this log to a digital version at some point – having tables or graphs for parameters and dosing may help a lot to visualize trends, but for now my poor handwriting is getting regular exercise, at least.

The future will see changes and new additions, but probably the thing I’m looking forward to most is growth. The tank is still fairly young, and even my largest corals are only just getting out of the realm of being called encrusted frags, and I think as the branching, stony corals grow in, there will be more places the shyer fish will want to hang out in. As things are fairly closely spaced, I’m sure this will involve pruning and some chemical warfare, but I’m looking forward to seeing the real growth patterns come out. Beyond growth, I’d like to get a buddy for more of my single fish, both to encourage more extroverted behavior so I can see them more, and so that I can have a shot raising up the babies – something that’s been both surprisingly complex and surprisingly interesting in the past six months or so.

In the *hopefully* not so distant future, I want to automate this tank properly. In the earliest parts of the build thread I mentioned wanting to build a controller, and after tons of delaying and thinking about it, the wheels are finally turning. The commercial options work great, but I was looking for a slightly different feature set than the cheaper controllers and didn’t want to drop more than a thousand dollars to get the functionality I wanted, and years ago I had made a simpler controller which ended up working well, so I wanted to take the knowledge and skill developed since then to design a much more robust, much more fully featured version. In the last month, the first schematic for the first module has been completed, and while the next month is looking busy, I’m hoping for hardware prototypes in the early summer so that I can get a little time running to debug before hopefully some vacation in the summer.

A year, a week, and a day ago (at time of writing), this tank saw its first water, and despite a lot of lengthy battles and tough to decipher issues, it’s grown into something I’m really proud of and which I get to enjoy every day. I hope in the coming months and years that it grows into a jungle of a reef system that is almost bursting at the seams (but not actually bursting a seam) with this wealth of life that so few people get to see up close. Thank you again for the TOTM nomination and for reading this lengthy tome of a write up!


  • Salinity: 35 ppt
  • Temperature: 26.5-27.0°C
  • pH: 7.8 (overnight)
  • Alkalinity: 9.1 dkH
  • Calcium: 400 ppm
  • Magnesium: 1335 ppm
  • Phosphate: 0.4 ppm
  • Nitrate: 5 ppm
  • Potassium: 400 ppm

  • Display: Red Sea Max E170 All-In-One
  • Skimmer: Ice Cap K1-50
  • Lighting: Ecotech Radion XR30 Pro G5
  • Return Pump: Hydor Seltz D 750
  • Circulation: 2x Reefbreeders Reef Power RP-M
  • other: Santa Monica Filtration Drop 1.2X Algae Turf Scrubber

  • Manyline Basslet
  • Orange Spot Goby
  • Yellow Banded Possum Wrasse
  • Ruby Longfin Fairy Wrasse
  • Hector’s Goby
  • 2x Firefish
  • 2x Banggai Cardinal
  • 2x Mandarin Dragonet
  • 2x Sharknose Goby

  • Zoanthids
  • Gonioperas
  • Gorgonians
  • Ricordeas
  • Rhodactis
  • Acanthastreas
  • Sun Corals
  • Porites
  • Montiporas
  • Acroporas
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