NateG Custom 60 Gallon Cube Build

If you haven't gotten any growth in that long of a time you must not be adding much to your tank? Are you maintaining you alkalinity? Calcium? magnesium? Obviously there's more but these are your basic necessities in a reef tank just for things to live let alone thrive and grow? Are you keeping your nitrates down?

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I've been wanting to post. But life and I wanted to do tests. I did 3 so far. Alk 8 cal 450 phosphate 0. More soon after my son gets born

+1 to the daily doses. My corals love it

I use Kent marine 3 pack you get iodine, liquid calcium and strontium& molybdenum.in one pack for 10$ and they last a good amount of time.
You can buy just the iodine in a bigger bottle for around the same price.

Ook until a few weeks ago it had been a while since I put some serious time into my tank. You know how it goes, high phosphates wicked low kh while ca and mg are fine since nothing was growing. I did a 15g water change a month ago, 15g 3 weeks ago, 10g last week and 10g today. Will be doing 10g weekly water change with reef crystals. Daily dosing with thrive alkalinity and calcium, brightwell iodine and trace, that is all.

I have a few paly colonies that have gone bonkers and im pretty sure are duking it out with their chems. That being said I've been running carbon in addition to phosguard and the sps and lps are looking much better.

I added a flameback angel and so far he is well behaved.

I mix my salt water in individual 5 gallon buckets with small pumps. I've been doing it with 3 different pumps in 3 different buckets and no heaters. In the summer months bucket temps are about 78 but this morning were 66 deg. And so, I'll be making a switch to using Sicce Micra Plus pumps in each bucket as well as a eheim 50 watt Jager heater OR Finnex HMA-50 watt heaters. The Jager would be simpler with just the one cable to drop in a bucket...but I will EVENTUALLY break it. Maybe I'll just spend a few extra bucks and go with Aqueon PRO 50 watt heaters. I have one in my 10 gallon FW tank and love it (though pricey).

I'm also upgrading the pump I use to fill my RO reservoirs. I cracked the housing to the Accella pump...I break shit, not sure how, but its broke. I would love a sicce syncra 1.5 but may be overkill...mag drive would serve the same purpose. I will be putting the same mid cord on/off switch i have on the Accella.

OH! Got rid of the halide, went with reef breeders basic led. It was a typical...i need to replace my halide lamp...time for led. I honestly have no place to complain about the fixture considering how affordable its retail price is...But having a 60 cube I would prefer a more square rather than rectangular fixture. The color produced is quite similar to the xm 20k with the reds actually looking red now. I did remove all of the 90 deg optics and their shrouds. I had the blues at 100% (10 hr) and daylights at 50% (6 hr) with the optics on. I then had to bump up the daylights to about 85% to have the same result.

At the end of the day the corals look great.

I'll be posting some pics soon.

I also overhauled the fuge, no idea what i was thinking but i had about 1.5" of seafloor special grade above the 2.5" of oolitic and nothing was able to dig through it and make my fuge much more than an in your face bio filter. My female mandarin looks skinnier than i would like. Im also thinking about making an eggcrate basket, lining it with mesh top netting, filling it with hydroton ie LECA, and dropping it in my overflow box -hoping to culture pods.

um...I made an acrylic platform/feed hole for eheim auto feeder...i do believe that is all for now

Here is the valve I made for the 1" return line:


And the valve with half the union to junk:


And where it will go:



Auto Feeder tray. The white on the meshtop is rustoleum neverwet. I wasn't sure if spray paint was getting into the water, now it wont: