- Hi, guys and girls, I'm Reef Man and I wanted
to show you all about my tank.
I have a custom built AGE aquarium.
It is seven feet long, three feet wide, and two feet tall.
And it's, of course, custom built by AGE.
What is it, Acrylic and Glass Exhibits, in Texas.
They crated it up and shipped it to me to where
I used to live, and then we crated it again and shipped
it to where I now live in Southern California.
Takes about six, eight guys
to really move it,
and even then, you know, it weighs almost 800 pounds,
so it's not so easy to move.
It is an AGE tank, and so it has the metal banding
at the top and the metal banding at the bottom,
and it also has a PVC, gray PVC bottom on it.
Which helps with the weight, but, you know,
it's a big tank so it's super heavy.
A couple people have asked about my tank:
what it is, what it looks like, how it's set up.
So I wanted to show you all what I do and how it is.
So hopefully this'll be interesting for everybody.
So this tank is full of Marco Rock.
And Marco Rock, if you're not familiar,
is a artificial rock, it's, well I think it's
actually a real rock but it's mind in Florida
instead of coming from the ocean.
So it's a little more sustainable.
But I do think that I would, if I was starting again,
at least get one piece of real live rock just to sort of
seed the coral and algae and that kind of stuff.
I took an awful long for coral and algae
to really start to grow in my tank.
And even now you can see there's not that much.
Now, when I recently switched on the allergy reactor,
which, of course, now is not on the tank anymore.
I'll post about that soon.
I decreased the vodka dosing quite a bit,
and that actually led to a sand allergy in my tank,
you can see some of it on the sand here.
Not too worried about it, not going to do any specific,
I think it'll just kind of take care of itself
as we get the new allergy reactor that I've ordered online.
Other things that I'm planning on doing,
I do think that really stability is the key
to having good success with coral.
Not chasing an individual parameter, you know, it's great
if your alkalinity is nine, let's say.
But if your alkalinity is seven or 11,
I think you could do just fine at it.
The real problem happens when you're like, oh, no,
my alkalinity is seven and a half and I want it to be 10.
And so I'm gonna add a bunch of stuff
and suddenly change it to 10.
And that's where you get into trouble.
If you are just consistent about whatever level you're at
and you just let your tank sort of be, I really think
you're gonna have a lot more luck
rather than chasing any specific number.
And so with that in mind, I think that's why people who use,
like, ZEOvit or Triton have the success that they do,
because all of their parameters are
going to be nice and stable.
Those systems are sort of designed to replace any
extra nutrients that are being used, keep everything stable,
and just not have anything change.
And that's really gonna be key to growing coral
and having your coral be nice and colorful.
So with that in mind, one of the things that
I'm planning on doing is actually
starting the Triton method here.
Still kind of thinking about exactly how I want to do that.
But that's sort of next on my plan for my tank.
So this is my sump area.
It is a custom acrylic sump that I got with the tank.
And I didn't clean it up at all so you can see
exactly how it looks in the day to day operation here.
I did just empty the skimmer, it fills up pretty quick.
So, what we've got here, we'll start at this end.
We have some Radion ballasts.
I bought the gen three Radions, which have those
giant white ballasts, and then I have
two gen fours, which are much simpler.
You can sort of see them on the bottom there,
the two black boxes.
The gen threes work just fine,
there are gen three pros who don't really
see any need to replace them with gen fours.
I do plan on adding a couple more gen fours, though.
Behind that we have the Apex.
I really like the Apex.
I am a programmer, it's fun to be able to customize
everything, and it's certainly nice to be able to see,
like, what your PH is or what your temperature is
from afar when you're on vacation, say,
and make sure everything's still good.
So that whole rat's nest of wires needs to be cleaned up,
but I think a lot of us have that.
On the far side here I did have a, a sort of good idea
from somebody on, I think, Reef to Reef.
What I did was I bought some plastic sheets of,
just a plastic sheet of material that has holes in it,
and all this stuff is just zip tied to that sheet.
And then you can see it's just
zip tied to the frame of the aquarium.
We have our vodka bottle, the cheapest vodka
that you can buy is fine for that.
And then moving over here we've got some filter socks.
They're needing to be replaced, you can see the water level
is very high there, it's not going through the filter socks
it's just overflowing that section of the sump.
So change your filter socks every couple days, but I was
on vacation so didn't get a chance to do that just yet.
You can see the empty place where my allergy reactor was
hanging down there, but obviously that's not there.
I have this other video that I'm gonna shoot about the
AR Pro allergy reactor, had some trouble with it, so,
I'll let you know about that when it's up.
We've got the skimmer itself, it's a Vertex skimmer.
Really like this skimmer, it works really well.
Pulls out a lot of junk.
You can see all the foam that's coming out of it already.
Cleaned it out this morning and it's already going well.
I would strongly, I would highly recommend
the Vertex skimmer line and the pulp line as well.
I used it for tax return pump.
Then we can move over a little bit further
and we have in the back there, I have a 300 watt heater.
Which you can't see, 'cause it's behind the skimmer.
And then that's also where the probes for
my PH and temperature are.
Some miscellaneous wires that need to be cleaned up.
Good stuff, good stuff.
And then we have the top off water.
I use these five gallon tanks of water,
just bought them, I think, on Amazon.
Pretty cheap little containers that you can use for water.
And then I use a Tunze Osmolator.
It's a really nice optical top off sensor that detects
when water evaporates and remember, you should maintain the,
or put that sensor in your return section, so behind that
bottle of water is my return section.
And that goes back up to the tank.
It's a Vertex V 6 pump.
I'm not sure if they still make 'em anymore.
I think it pumps about, oh, what is it?
Maybe like 1600 gallons per hour or so?
Something like that, 1600 gallons, 1700 gallons,
somewhere in that range, up to my tank.
So that's doing well and getting
some good turnover in my sump.
You can see my Vortek hang, or controllers.
I don't have a good way to mount the Vortek hangers,
because the wires for them are not long enough
to reach all the way around my tank.
So I just kinda drape 'em over the side.
I'll show you, you can see,
it's kind of not the best setup here.
They really are just draped over
the cross bar here of my sump.
Now, my tank is, I am tall, I'm six two.
And I wanted to be able to look in my tank
without really having to bend over.
So normally that would be a problem.
But, since this is a custom tank, it's a custom stand,
and I had them build it 40 inches tall so that I can
just look into the tank without really having to bend over.
But, you know, getting a 40 inch tall thing
through your door is not gonna be so easy.
So they built in these two sections
and then it just comes apart into these two sections.
So the lighting on my tank is done with
gen three and gen four Pro Radions.
I have six of them, four gen three and two gen fours
set up right now, and I use the Radio rails, because it just
gives a nice clean sort of spread to the light.
And it's easier than hanging it from the ceiling, I think.
It also lets you do things like angle their lights.
You can see on my tank I have some that are horizontal,
some that are perpendicular, and some that are a mix
between the two, and that's because my tank is three feet
wide and it takes a bit of light, or a bit of thinking
to get all the light through all the places.
I do want to add two more lights.
I think maybe two more in the center here.
I do have where there's no light here,
you can see, like, between these gaps
there's actually a metal cross brace on the my tank.
And I was afraid that it would kind of shadow.
In fact, you can see, it does shadow, the way it is now.
You can see that vertical line of light, that sort of, like,
diagonal line, sorry, of light going down into my tank.
That is because right up there
is a metal cross brace on my tank.
I don't really have any, like, obviously you can't
shine light through steel, but if I can come up with a way
to get rid of that shadow, I'd like to.
You can also see, right up here at the top where it's,
I don't know, some really huge number of par,
I haven't even really measured it, but I'm sure
it's over a thousand, my fried rack is.
And I've really found that in my tank, you know,
people will say, oh, 200 par is great.
I say as much as par as you can get is gonna be fine,
just don't go from 200 to a thousand overnight,
and you'll be fine.
My lights are all running about, I think, just because
of the way the color is set up, about 74%, 75% intensity.
Because, you know, to run 'em 100% you would have to
be happy with just the spectrum that that gets you.
And I like to use the
coral lab spectrums that EcoTech Marine
provides for this, which ends up
netting out about 75% intensity.
Overall, really happy with the Radions, I think they're
super clean, they're really nice, easy to program,
and it's really cool that they're quiet
and unobtrusive over your tank.
Certainly coral grows fine under them.
I do need to add a couple more, though.
They're just kinda expensive.
You can see the Vortex, again,
just a little bit better view here.
I have two of them on each side.
On this side I have the new style,
MP40 Vortex and on the other side
I just have the slightly older style,
MP40 non quiet drive Vortex.
The quiet drive ones are noticeably quieter, so I would
definitely recommend getting those if you're,
maybe that you're looking at some used equipment,
I would recommend the quiet drive ones over the other ones.
They also push a lot more water.
So hopefully that was interesting.
Let me know if you have any questions
about anything in the tank.
Anything I didn't cover.
Coral, fish, whatever you wanna know,
I'm happy to give more information.
So, till next time.
See ya, have fun, bye.