thebanker's 56 gallon

Outstanding looking tank, congrats

 

Nice tank! Love the pink birdsnest!

 

ugh the humanoid topoff system is teh suck. Mine kept getting stuck on. I made something real and ditched the humanoid system.

 

Humble beginnings

April 2009. When I started. Had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I knew freshwater fish on a basic level, plus I have a little biology knowledge from college. You're looking at live rock, crushed coral, a shut down UGF, and two marineland HOB filters from PetSmart. I'm cringing just looking at it.



June 2009. At this point I was relying on my LFS guy 100%. I have a sea clone skimmer, and an Aquaclear 110. Neither filter was really bad. But neither is really good either. It also may come as a surprise to the reader, but there is almost no coral in the above picture.



September 2009. Upgraded skimmer to the CPR aero force. Algae problems abound. Major frustration at this point.



November 2009 (after acquisition of more livestock and live rock). My buddy and I bought some rock at a tank firesale. Got tons of good stuff.

I'll post up some more tomorrow.

 

Thanks for the update. As of today your tank is beautiful. Your issues and thoughts when you started the tank are very interesting to me. The path we all go through to either succeed or fail. You truly picked up the needed skills to have this beautiful tank.

Thanks for all the fantastic pictures.
Rick

 

Wow. One of the nicest tanks I've seen on here, for sure!

Lots of variety... pretty adventurous as a matter of fact; I wouldn't even consider keeping some of those corals together... but you seem to be doing a great job with it, congrats!

 

I love your old school approach with this tank. Just shows the latest gee-whiz stuff doesn't guarantee a great tank down the road. Husbandry is key. Great to see.

 

With the biopellets involved, I'm not sure that I'd consider myself old school. But I do stand behind GFO, it's been around and it still works like a charm. Without it, I'd be knee deep in hair algae. Turbo snails too. Macro algae is extremely important in my system, without it, I'd be fighting a losing battle, or burning through more bio pellets than I could afford.

I'm really bad about doing water changes, but I found a local marine laboratory that offers filtered NSW for free. Gonna try it out, who knows?

Thanks for all the compliments . I'll post a pic of my newest addition, a pink/red goniopora.

 

I was thinking of your skimmer and 'ATO' when I said old-school. Stood out to me I guess. You are right about the other stuff though.

 

The ATO system and skimmer are both ghetto fabulous. I'm going to stick with the current ATO system, since the human in question needs the exercise of lifting the water jugs.

The skimmer, however, could stand some improvement. What I have now works okay, to a point, but doesn't pull enough volume of dark skimmate. My biggest problem is not having a sump, it greatly limits my skimmer choices. I have a CPR aero-force in my garage, which I can't use because the output trough is too big, in essence the thing just won't fit on the back of my tank. The refugium is so large that I'm left scratching my head trying to find a solution to my skimmer issue.

I like the Aquamaxx HOB-1, because you can adjust the output tube so the skimmer has a narrow HOB profile. ATB makes a HOB cone skimmer, but I can't figure out where to buy it.

Any ideas?