Earlier this year in February we attempted to share with you what was supposed to be a simple video about how to move a reef tank. This 15 year old acrylic aquarium setup really sparked our imagination with its older fish, natural wild live rock, and very interesting dimensions amounting to around 200 gallons of water.
But alas the decade and half old acrylic stand had exceeded its shelf life preventing us from following through on our one-day mission. Here we are six months later and we’ve gone through many steps to finally bring this tank to life and into the modern age of reef keeping –
- Moving a 15 Year Old Reef Tank
- Making a Saltwater Pond to hold livestock
- Building a composite aquarium stand
- Restoring a well-loved Acrylic aquarium
- Making a Great and Affordable Sump with a Breeder Tank
And finally here we are at the most enjoyable part of reef keeping which is aquascaping the reef tank and laying out how this tank will grow, evolve and develop over the next handful of years. With every new tank we scape, we always start with some kind of vision for what we want to accomplish but some anxiety about how the irregularly shaped rocks will come together, especially with these natural wild rocks.
While we did encounter one stubborn rock that was hard to manipulate in such a deep tank on a tall stand with very wide eurobracing, the general layout of the aquascape turned out pretty much right in line with what we were aiming for. With two notable ridges of unequal height and bisected by a large deep valley we have lots of real estate upon which we can plant a ton of new corals. Our intention with the population of corals is to concentrate on adding a lot of zoanthids, shrooms, some chalices and the obligatory Euphyllia which always help to introduce some nice color and motion.
While most of the biological filtration was imported with the legacy rocks and some pre-cycled Polyp Lab Genesis blocks this is now still a “new” ref tank which will take some time to settle in, experience the uglies, and balance the mineral and nutrient chemistries into something that is more conducive to a healthy thriving reef tank over the long term. We’ve reached a huge milestone in finally getting the reef life back into their old aquarium but we’ll be following up with yet more videos about steering this reef tank in the right direction so the journey is just beginning.
