No water change, no problem
This is a tank I am very proud of because of the lack of maintenance that needs to be done on the aquarium to keep the fish and coral thriving. I never test the water and I have seriously only performed a handful of water changes on the tank. I started this tank in December 2019 as an LPS and softy tank. The rock was standard dry Marco rock with a couple of “live” pieces from the sump of another tank that was running. My first mistake was adding bubble tip anemones to the tank way too early. They died a month later because the aquarium was just too new. Another setback was dinoflagellates covering every surface in the tank for months, killing all the LPS corals. This was tricky to get rid of, but once I did the corals took off and grew like crazy. When I moved to Florida, I gave this tank to my mom, and she is still running it today. When I visit, I will take pictures cause its incredible how much the corals are growing.
Lighting and Flow
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I started with an AI prime 16HD for about 16 months which worked fine and realistically I didn’t need to change it, but I wanted more light to fill the tank. After acquiring a few gen 5 Ecotech Radion XR15’s blues, I put one on and it was much better, but It was a bit too green and blue. I think that soft corals like these look much better under a schedule with more white light so I ended up swapping out the diode cluster for the gen 6 pro which has both cool and warm white channels as well as more diodes for the white lights compared to the blue model.
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I start and end this schedule this same with 2 hours of ramping up or down with intensity of the 4 blue light channels at 100%. For 8 hours a day I had the cool white and warm white at 50%. I always have my violet, UV, blue and royal blue equal at 100%. The schedule intensity is always 100%, the point intensity was 80%.
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The hang on the back filter was just enough flow for the tank, but I also wanted the back and forth wave action so I added a small Jebao SLW10 that worked out very well and really helped the corals thrive.
Filtration
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This was a 20g tall tank so it didn’t need a sump, or canister filter. I tried a couple different brands of hang on back filters that were set up the same. They each had a half-pound of calcium redactor media for biological filtration, carbon or chemipure, and filter floss/pad. I started the tank with the Aquaclear 50 hang on back filter. The advantage of the aquaclear is that there is a lot of space in the filter and it has a decent flow rate. I even designed an attachment for the intake that had a surface skimmer to eliminate the surface scum. I even turned an Aquaclear filter into a refugium, but wasn’t necessary for a nano tank. After a couple years, I switched the hang on back filter to the GRECH CBG-500 5W UV Sterilizer Hang-On Back Filter 132gph. This quickly became my favorite hob filter I’ve used because it has a surface skimmer, UV sterilizer, as well as plenty of space to use any filtration product.
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There wasn’t much testing or dosing going on with this aquarium. At first it was because of laziness, but eventually it was to prove a point that it didn’t need to be done. Aside from testing salinity and temperature, I never tested for any other major compounds like nitrate and alakalinity because of the lack of stony corals and the easy-care requirements for the soft corals. This also meant that coraline algae and other calcareous crustaceans like tube worms would not grow. There were times I would dose Polyp-Lab One to the tank once a week just to see what would happen and corlaine would start to grow and the tube worms would come back, but nothing else improved so I stopped dosing. I did dose Brightwell amino acids once a week to help with coral health and polyp extension. The only other thing that was added to the tank ever once in a while was iron by Two Little Fishies. I found that if this element wasn’t present, dinoflagellates would take over the aquarium.
Fish, Coral and Feeding
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I started the tank with a pair of clownfish from Petco, a green chromis, and a pajama cardinal fish. My favorite fish that was in it was the cherub angelfish that loved snacking on the gorgonian. This was a fine compromise for how pretty it was. For a while I had three clownfish in there where two of them,I raised from egg. The current pair is one from the original pair and a snow storm clown that had been moved around a lot from 4 of my tanks. A newer resident is a black goby. The most fish in there at a timer were 6, 3 clowns, chromis, cardinal, and angelfish.
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Even with 6 fish I still fed once a day. I wasn’t ever testing for nitrate or phosphate, so I didn’t want things to get out of hand. I liked feeding pellets and flakes to this tank, because it’s easy to be consistent with and is very healthy for the fish. PE mysis flakes and TDO pellets are my go to. As for the corals, I would put a dusting of reef-roids into the water column once a month.
