Marine Tank Lighting

A big part of any fish tank setup is the light unit. Most people just see it as a way to light up the tank to display what's inside it. However in keeping Marine life the lighting unit is extremely important. Many corals are photosynthetic meaning they use 'light' to create its own food and as a results grow and thrive. Light also helps keep a stable PH, something often over looked, a stable PH is important to keeping your inhabitants happy and healthy.

In my tank I use a LED unit to light my tank, LEDs are cheaper to run than conventional lighting, they are also very customisable and programmable. What this means is that in my 3' long unit I can have a mixture of white, blue, red, and UV LEDs and each channel can be programmed from 0-100% brightness. There are 3 channels in my unit which can be programmed to change brightness every 30mins, channel 1 moon lighting 0-10% channel 2 blue and UV 0-100% and finally white, red, and green 0-100%.

Getting the right intensity of light for the corrent time period can be difficult. Below Image 1 shows how I originally had my light setup, ramps up slowly, peaks then begins to ramp down again. After seeking advice from a forum called Ultimate Reef I was advised to have a longer peak intensity and ramp it up and down quicker. Image 2 below shows what I am running now.

Image 1

Image 2

Marine Tank update August 2015 (part 2)

After attending a Wedding 4 hours away from home I decided to look around for a Marine shop. Anytime I go away I usually have a look around as the nearest LFS (Local Fish Store) to me is a 2 hour drive. I found myself in Kettering Aquatics. I was highly impressed by the place, their display tank was amazing to look at and something to aspire to. Their frag/coral tanks looked clean and tidy with a good selection of corals, fish and inverts.

For the last few weeks I’ve been researching new ideas to improve the flow in my tank, there’s 3 options I have narrowed it down to, Maxspect Gyre 130, Vortech MP40 or 2x Jabeo RW8’s. All have their pro’s and con’s however after visiting Kettering Aquatics I managed to narrow it down to either the Gyre which they had running in their display and was the only wave maker in there or the 2x Jabeo RW8’s which they had in many of their frag tanks. The gyre 130 produces a nice wide blanket type wave and has various settings such as pulse and gyre mode, this is a fairly new product which many reefers have ‘upgraded’ to over the vortechs. On the other hand the Jabeo RW8’s are also known for good cheap wave making capability. They don’t look too bad and having 2 allows the controllers to be pair and run in a sync’d mode. Still having a hard time on choosing, will research a bit more before I take the plunge.

While at Kettering Aquatics I made a few new purchases. 3x Green chromis, fighting conch, 5x turbo snails, maxima clam, toadstool softie coral, a few frags of xenia and a collection of sps frags.

I’ve add them all to the tank and so far all look ok, the SPS still looks like its sulking hopefully this will be ok and colour up soon. I have been researching Red Sea Reef Colour ABCD additives which I may give a go to see if it improves the colours.

Finally, I’ve always kept my marine tanks slightly higher temp than the norm due to having high powered lights that output a lot of heat or a hot house. Normal temps are usually 29-30c however I haven’t been that happy with them at that temp so I built a cooling fan which is hooked up to my STC1000 temp controller. The controller currently is set to bring the temp down to 28.5c, which over the next week I will drop it down to 27.5-28c and see if that has any improvement on coral colouration. Will talk more about this next week as a Tip of the Week. Stay tuned.

Test results this week.

CA – 390 (slightly low due to taking Calcium reactor offline to fix a leak)

KH – 8 (dropped to 6 recently now dosing sodium bicarb to bring back up to 8.5)

NO3 – 0

PO4 – 0

I will probably do a ICP test soon which costs £35 but you get results for a lot of parameters including some trace elements, it will be a good test to see where my tank is at now.

Tip of the week: Marine Tank

Water Changes Made Easy. 

Depending how you manage and replenish your water elements whether it be using triton, balling or good old fashioned water changes all these tasks can be laborious, time consuming and messy.

I run a calcium reactor to replenish the main 3, ca, kh and mg, however water changes are needed to remove nutrients and replenish trace elements. Previously I used a 2 bucket method for changing water, mixed fresh salt in one and used the other to remove the tank water. This resulted in a 10 litre water change which is less than 3% of my total volume. It was also messy, spilling salty water on my wood floor didn't go down well with the wife.

The resolution - I stumbled upon a product on various reefing forums. The company is called Reefloat and the product is the Automatic Water Changer.

It's a great bit of kit. I have the 32 litre version. Fill it with RO water add the salt and the internal pump mixes it. An hour or so later put the lid on put the 2 pipes into the tank and press the go button. It automatically changes the water and after the pre-programmed time it turns itself off. Water change done. No mess, no fuss just what I like.

Marine Tank update August 2015

Almost been a year since the last update. not much has happened, I let the tank settle and establish it self and just kept it ticking over. water change roughly once a month changing 32L.

Few problems along the way, the usual algae, had a weird brown sludge on the rocks which seems to be dying back. Green algae on the sand bed, thinking this is partly due to my RO water TDS creeping up in my storage container even though my RO unit produces 0TDS. My deltec calcium reactor sprung a leak around the aquabee pump, in the process of sorting this out, in the mean time I'm keeping an eye on the parameters and having to dose a little sodium bicarb as the KH dropped from 8.5 to 6 over a few days.

Other problems, I seem to have flow dead spots, my wp-25 and tunze 6025 dont seem to create enough of a wave effect so i get detritus settling in places, I'm looking at replacing the wp-25 with 2x rw8's or I may invest in a 130 gyre.

Stock wise, My 2 clowns that I have had for 10 years are well, spawning every 2 weeks. I added 2 bangaii cardinals however one of them seemed to hide constantly since i put him in and unfortunatley I lost him a few months later. I also added my favourite fish the Dwarf flame angel, had one previously in an old tank and really wanted one for this tank. Managed to pick up a 5+ head duncan for cheap and a few zoa frags. Future plans, heading to a wedding this weekend hope to stop in a few places along the way to pick up some new goodies. anyway, words are nothing without pictures Background in this FTS looks strange - think its just the way the camera captures the LEDs

Flame angel Bangaii Cardinal Duncans