My Nano Reef Set-up/diary (upgraded 45g) Step-by-step

Picture of all eqipment so far including newly purchased New-jet 2300lph powerhead to help aid water circulation. It can be turned down to a minimum of 900lph so will experiment with it when tank is set up to make sure water movement ain't too much!

Pictures of Hang-on-the-back refugium including equipment. End up buying a 5lb tub of mixture of Ecosystem Miracle Mud along with Marine mineral mud to go as a substrate in the refugium beacause it was going quite cheap on ebay!

Overhead Illuminaire: 3 x 24w 14000k Full Spectrum Daylight T5s, 1 x 24w marine actinic. Built in reflectler increases light up to 50% (so it was stated by seller when I bought it!)

Came with with both cables to attach from the ceiling along with clip-on tank supports (which I will be using as saves a lot of time and mess trying to drill holes into the roof!) B)

Lookin good

Dry run completed so time to move on to mixing the salt and have a full test run to make sure all equipment is in working order and see how much evopration I get per day so i know what/how often I need to top up with freshwater! Should be getting about 10kg live rock by the end of this coming week so things should start moving along a bit.

As I still aint got a RO unit, I had to go to my LFS and borrow 5 x 25litre barrels of RO water. Poured it all into the tank manually so gota right sore back from all the lifting and carrying it from my car upstairs into my room and then lifting it high enough to pour into the tank!


Going to leave the water in the tank a few hours to give the termostats (heaters) a chance to warm it up to 24degrees before I add the Reef Salt.

I am starting off using Seachems Reef Salt as it was recommended to me by a friend as "it is specifically formulated for the reef environment and will provide ideal seawater concentrations of magnesium, calcium, and strontium with proper alkalinity adn pH for closed reef aquarium systems. It also contains all essential major, minor, and trace components found in natural reef waters, but contains no toxic or non-essential components such as nitrate, phosphate, silicate arsenic, cadmium, or beryllium." I will see how I get on with it and if for some reason I am not too keen then I will swap over to another brand

looking very good, where did you get you hand on the back from, and do they do smaller ones. tank is looking great so keep up the good work.

rob : GOOD:

robbhp said:

looking very good, where did you get you hand on the back from, and do they do smaller ones. tank is looking great so keep up the good work.

rob

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Cheerz for the comments Rob.

I got my HOB refugium off ebay from seller piwakit1230. He is a really decent guy based here in the UK and he can make any size to fit. I would highly recommend him to anybody, just send him an email telling him what your after and he'll get straight back to ya at a decent price as well! I've recently asked him to make me a small mod for my refugium that I require. he should post it tommorow and once received I'll post pics of it here.

many thanks

Rob

Few pics of the tank as it currently stands. I've put the lighting and equipment on to see how much it raises the temperature and how much evaporation I get.

Added the Seachems Reef Salt... The bag says it makes 189litres of water so as I have got approx 100litres of water (inc. HOB refugium), I added just under half to let it dissolve before added a bit more. Checked my SG using my refractometer and it's almost 1.040!!!! Luckily didn't add any more!!

So got take some water out and slowly top up with freshwater to dilute the salt content and hopefully bring my SG reading down to the desired 1.023 mark.

looking good,

when are u getting some livestock?

Yeah, lookin good indeed. Question for you though. I see that the tank has black plastic trim on the bottom but not on the top? Did it come this way or did you remove the trim?

SkiFletch said:

Yeah, lookin good indeed. Question for you though. I see that the tank has black plastic trim on the bottom but not on the top? Did it come this way or did you remove the trim?

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Thanks SkiFletch.
The tank only came with the black plastic trim on the bottom but not on the top. It did however have a lid but I removed that and am using the overhead illuminaire instead! Why do you ask?

adamgreen240 said:

looking good,when are u getting some livestock?

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Cheerz adamgreen240
I should getting approx 10-15kg cured live rock by the end of this week. Then going to wait for the tank to cycle before adding live sand and then can introduce a few clean up crew before getting fish and corals etc.
Plan on taking everything nice and slow though without being impatient!

I think Ski probably asked because some tanks use the plastic trim on the top to protect the glass edge and reinforce it. On some tanks (to save money I think) they dont polish the top edge of the glass and just leave it as its cut. This makes it really easy to accidently chip and crack it if you take the trim off.

All looking good so far . I'm about at the same stage as you (have a tank full of salty water and thats about it ).

After receiving several feedback for my refugium plans I decided I needed to design a mod for it as a few people have suggested that I should not place both the activated carbon and phosphate removal media in the filter compartment of my refugium before the chamber containing macroalgae but instead place them AFTER the water has passed the macroalgae. This is so the chemical media don't absorb all the nutriets in the water which can/will cause the macroalgae to starve to death as it will have nothing to feed on!

However if the media is placed AFTER the macroalgae chamber than any remaining nitrates and phosphates that are not used by the algae are absorbed by the chemical media, which thus also enhances the life of the media so it can be kept for a bit longer without needing changing!

So I decided I needed to design a new/seperate chamber for the media to be placed in, but if you have a look at the pictures of my Refugium, you will see I do not really have much room or another chamber to place the chemical media in there. After much thinking I concluded as there isn't much room in the refugium itself I should place the new chamber/box inside the tank instead it should be a hang on the side box placed near/underneath the Refugium water outlet nozzle so that the water from the outlet should flow through it before entering the actual tank! It also had to have loads of holes in the base so water would not have a problem apssing through it as I wouldn't really want it to start pouring out the side of the tank!

After designing the chamber I emailed the drawing/design to the seller I had originally bought my refugium off and asked him if he would make the box/chamber for me out of acrylic. He agreed and so here it is!

I have opted to use Seachem SeaGel as my organic and phosphate/nitrate remover as I have heard good some good reviews about the product. "SeaGel is a blend of MatrixCarbon and PhosGuard. MatrixCarbon is an ultracapacity carbon for the removal of organic and color impurities. PhosGuard is a powerful remover of phosphate, silicate, toxic metals, and acids. Both components are bead shaped for optimum water flow characteristics and penetration. The components enhance each other and are ideal for reef and marine use."
The Seagel came in a sachel that fits directly into my new compartment!

I have not yet placed the SeaGel in my box compartment... I will wait till I have my live rock in the tank before doing so.

Please feel free to leave any thoughts/comments

One thing I completely forgot to take into consideration when designing the mod for my refugium and planning all its dimensions, was the overhead illuminaire aka... The tank lighting!!!

As one of the brackets also fits onto the same tank wall as my new compartment box, it meant the box came in the way thus leading to the lighting having to be placed angled towards the front and so not directly over the centre of the tank!

After some thought I decided the best way to overcome this little problem was to cut off a small section of the compartment box in order to get the lighting to sit a bit better.

So I used a junior hacksaw n guess what... it worked! Yippeeeee (originally I had thought I might need to get a smaller box made!!)

Also on another positive note (I think), the box has also stopped the millions of tiny microbubbles the refugium water was producing as it came out of the outlet nozzle and entered the the main tank! As now the bubbles 'pop' as they hit the base of the chemical filter box!