The reef of Emanuele Filippone is a great example of not just a beautiful reef, but also of simplified reef keeping. This system, which is an Elos 120, was Emanuele first reef in over a decade, and in the beginning he struggled with maintaining the proper water parameters while using a RDSB, a Refugium, sand in the display, zeolites and daily addition of supplements, and a whole lot of other unnecessities before he decided to switch it all out for a much simpler Berlin system with just a calcium reactor, skimmer and liverock. The result speak for itself, especially when you consider all the corals were grown from frags in a little over a year, which is truly impressive.
Perhaps part of his great success is the fact that Emanuele feeds his corals every day with a combination of D&D H2Ocean Pro+ coral foods and Elos SVC zooplankton, along with a vial of Probidio Reef Booster spread over two doses weekly. Along with the fish being fed dry food three times a day, that is a lot of food entering the system. Yet surprisingly just the stock Elos skimmer is used, which is not exactly known for it’s great efficiency, in combination with weekly 20 liter (5 gallons) water changes as the main filtration. For lighting an ATI fixture with eight 54 watt T5 fluorescent bulbs is used, a flow is provided by two Tunze 6095 pumps. A LGMAquari LGr701 calcium reactor meets the high calcium demands. An Aquatronica controller keeps the whole system in check.
For more information and additional pictures be sure to check out the AcquaPortal write up, although be warned, it is in Italian.
