I wanted to provide a long overdue update of my 187 gallon reef tank. At the beginning of March I broke it down due to a lost battle with dinos and had the tank dry for a few weeks. I got rid of everything, fish and corals, and restarted the tank the end of April. With the reboot I decided to do a few things differently. First of all I got rid of my calcium reactor and replace it with 2 part from ESV. I just didn’t want to have the extra C02 in my system and I liked that I could do more precision dosing with two part. I did 2-part when I first starting keeping SPS reef tanks a long time ago so I sort of went back to my roots.
Opted For Live Rock Versus Dry Rock
I also decided to go with live rock versus dry rock since I just had one problem after another with the dry rock only tank. Besides the dinos, I had diatoms, a bad case of cyano and a couple of different bacterial blooms. Essentially, I just couldn’t grow SPS like I was used to. Another thing I did differently was to ditch GFO and go with an ARID algae reactor from Pax Bellum.
Additional Resources
If you would like some help with a new tank build, including help designing a custom aquarium, or help re-configuring your current setup then you can visit this page for more information. And if you are looking to add some equipment, I do sell GHL, Pax Bellum, Reef Octopus Calcium and Kalk Reactors and Royal Exclusiv products, including Dreamboxes, which is the equipment I use and recommend. I also sell Reef Brite metal halide and LED fixtures as well as Maxspect & IceCap Gyres.
As for additional insights and information, please explore my many other reef tank and SPS related articles as well as my YouTube channel. For an even deeper dive into reef tank care you can check out my Reef Keeping Master Class. This online course is an immersive and one of a kind educational tool designed to help reef aquarium hobbyists build and maintain a beautiful SPS reef tank. The course is a series of video presentations with some supplemental video from my YouTube channel. There are also quizzes to help students retain and understand the information presented in the course.
Need some frags…..I can help with that as well 🙂 Please visit my SPS Frag store to see what is available.
