Coolhandgoose's 55gal build

[coolhandgoose]

hehe so I got some new coral today as well as some new type of food called Ocean Plankton, this stuff is crazy awesome!

Here's a crappy iphone pic of a polyp devouring 4 pieces of plankton in one gulp :)

http://s866.photobucket.com/albums/ab227/coolhandgoose/

 

[coolhandgoose]

I know the tang police will be upset with me but I bought a yellow tang yesterday and he's awesome!! They've had him at the store for a couple months so I think he'll appreciate the bigger tank for now. I promise I'll be giving him to a bigger tank if I notice any undue stress or gets too big. Crappy iPhone pics when I get home from Vancouver!
On a side note he took the biggest fish dump I've ever seen after he got in the tank. Glad I got the skimmer working.

 

[coolhandgoose]

Couple of pics, couldn't get anything good today unfortunately.

 

[Bifferwine]

He looks good! I personally think a yellow tang will be fine in a 55 for quite a while. I won't call in the tang police just yet. ;)

 

[coolhandgoose]

That's good, thanks for that!

 

[coolhandgoose]

That's one fat blenny, eh?

 

[Bifferwine]

Yeah he is a chubster! They are cute fish.

 

[troybuckle]

How the hair algae doing, is it starting to clear up?

 

[coolhandgoose]

Yeah, it's nearly gone, with the blenny, tang and snails it's pretty much all gone. But I do notice that some of it is just dying anyway so it's food source is definately being depleted. Of course now that it's clearing it's exposing a new problem of red bubble algae, I'm hoping it goes away on it's own but I'm taking a wait and see attitude with it.

 

[coolhandgoose]

I'm wondering if I need more nassarius snails. I currently only have 6 and my sand looks like crap mostly thanks to the huge craps by the new tang. Any suggestions on how to keep the sand clean?

 

[Bifferwine]

Do you have any serpent or brittle stars? They usually do a pretty good job of taking care of that detritus. You can get more nassarius snails though. It wouldn't hurt.

 

[coolhandgoose]

Thanks for the suggestion I will look into getting one.

 

[coolhandgoose]

Argh, no one has brittle starts in stock so I've gotta wait awhile with the sand looking like crap. Most of the red bubble algae is disappearing and the green hair algae is gone about 98%. Although now diatoms have reappeared, I guess this is part of a new tank growing pains.

On a positive note I've counted 3 new baby polyps from my two colonies.

 

[troybuckle]

Hey. Do you have a pic of your sump and plumbing, was just wondering what you have done.

 

[coolhandgoose]

I'll post some pics for u in about 2 hours.

 

[troybuckle]

thanks

 

[coolhandgoose]

Okay here are a few pics of my sump and plumbing first the overflow, you can also see the return line:

Feeds into the sump:

This shows the left chamber which gets fed for the skimmer and the right chamber for extra live rock/fuge (even though it's not really fuging at the moment). Both feed into the middle return pump area. I also have a small pump in the middle for my reactor (which you can't see but it's on the left) and it returns back to the left chamber.

My GFCI

Tons of wires

And finally return to the tank, you can't see the bottom one but it goes against the back glass

 

[troybuckle]

Thanks for the pics, I just wanted to see how it was set up compared to mine, it’s almost the same. I am having a bit of trouble with salt creep because of the bubbles in the overflow so I’m going to put a filter on there like you motioned.

 

[coolhandgoose]

I found two weird snails in my tank at night, I think they're stormatella's. Looks like they were both shooting off some spawning material, it was kinda gross.

I also bought a hairy mushroom but it ripped off the little piece of rock it was on probably due to flow. So now I have it in a little rubbermaid dish with a bunch of other small rocks in a lower flow area hoping it will reattach to one of those.

 

[Dana42078]

Mos def stomatta snails or whatever, they work nice =) I like them because they move so fast and have cool lookin shells