20L Mixed Reef

It's been a long time since I was active on this forum and a lot has happened since then. To start with, I moved out of the DC area and all the way out to Denver, CO. There was also the purchase of our first house and along with that, our first little baby girl! The tank has also gone through a major change. When we moved from DC, I sold my old 40B/20g fuge setup and have since downsized to a 20L and a 3.5gal pico. The downsize was mainly because that's really all there was room for in the initial apt we had in Denver. I've stuck with the 20L and probably will until we got some house work done and have the time and money for a larger upgrade. So here is that tank as it is now. It's been up and running for about 1year and has a custom built LED fixture, BH-1000 HOB skimmer, MP-10, a generic HOB filter rated for 55gal I think, a Bubble Magus dosing pump for Cal/Alk/Amino Acids, and a BRS dosing pump with a 5gal tank for ATO. It is all controlled by a Neptune Apex which I upgraded to when my RKL went out and started turning everything on and off like it was possessed. The stock consists of a pair of snowflake clowns, 2x bengaii cardinals (which I'm 99% positive both are males), several heads of dendros, duncans, and black suns, various zoas/palys, a squamosa clam, 3 maxi minis, and various SPS including birdsnest, stylo, pocillopora, tricolor validia, and several others. Well enough talk, here are some pics:

FTS:

 

Very nice.

Boy it has been a long long time.

Welcome back.

 

Looks great!

 

Thanks guys!

 

Could you elaborate a bit more on your lighting? This is a cool little tank.

 

Yes please, lighting info. Lighting is always something we can learn about with the ever changing times

I also like to hear of different lights being used besides the two brands often recommended

 

So the lights were built from the ground up with a 30in long heat sink. I have about 40 individual LEDs from Rapid LED to include a mix of royal blue, white, red, green, and UV. They are wired to three dimmable meanwell drivers and then all controlled via one Rapid LED controller. The controller has options for sunrise/sunset and I can also control the brightness from there as well. I added two aluminum L channels on either side of the heat sink to make a splash guard holder. I have also added two moonlight LEDs that are controlled via the Neptune apex LSM. For cooling, all that was needed, if at all because the heat sink is so large, was I took a small computer cooling fan and wired it to plug straight into an outlet. The lights work amazingly well and have been running strong with no issues for about 5years now. They were originally built for my 40B but have been working well on the 20L. I'm able to grow pretty much anything with them as you can see from the other tank pics.

 

Oh and the different colored wiring in the last pic was so I had an easy way of differentiating one driver string from another.

 

Great job!