- Today, aquascaping, what are we leaving on the table?
- We've got the 10 questions
that you never thought to ask until just now.
(upbeat music)
- This is BRS TV Answers.
If you are aquascaping a new tank,
want to re aquascape an old one,
or even add to an existing one,
these are the questions that today's reefers are asking,
and the answers starting with number one.
- I ran at a room for coral.
I want more, how do I add to my existing aquascape?
There's a few options that we would choose,
starting with a branch or branch-like structures.
You know, Real Reef makes some branches.
This stuff is really easy to kind of cantilever
in between a couple rocks.
And then, you know, it's,
one that kind of secures itself,
but add some glue to support it.
Instant real estate for more sticks,
more, you know, encrusting corals, things like that.
Also you could build a bridge.
You, you can build one of those archways
in between rock structures and then you have it again,
more real estate, just like that.
Go add some more corals.
Your favorite though,
- I think actually is adding islands.
So you can go build out tiny little islands
that are out in the sand.
They'd have all brand new aquascape.
You can actually glue a bunch of rubble together
to create like a little porous habitat as well.
But really one of the things that I think about
is trying to use this purple rock.
So it, it matches your existing aquascape.
So a lot of the stuff from Real Reef
kind of has this, like, you know, like used to look to it.
It matches the other rock that will be in your aquascape
and those branches, if you're like an SPS nut,
and you know, you're just covered in SPS everywhere.
Well, it might be kind of hard
to actually get a bridge across
because there's no more space for it.
But a little round branch that's just kind of sticking out
right here that comes up and then allows you
to grow a whole new garden off of it.
Totally different options.
So bridges, branches, and even building little islands
out into the sand, totally new places to add corals
and expand on an existing aquascape.
All right, number two, how long should it take me
to set up my aquascape?
And the answer is it varies, but also, the results.
So one thing to keep in mind here
is you could pile up the rocks inside of 10 minutes
and just kind of cantilever them together
and hope that it all just holds together.
But you can also build what is called an aquascape,
which is something that is visually interesting.
And keep in mind that for the first couple of years,
before the whole thing's just coated in coral.
- It's all you're going to see.
- All you're going to see is the aquascape.
So when people come to your house
and say, oh, that looks awesome.
They're actually talking about
the aquascape in most cases.
So a little bit of effort upfront,
making sure that you build something
really kind of cool and unique,
will pay off, not only in how much you enjoy the tank,
but actually how much everybody else
that sees your tank enjoys it as well.
- Questions number three,
which applies directly to me is what if I have the time,
but I don't have the skill to make
these elaborate-looking aquascapes that are gorgeous.
The answer is you can actually buy
some fully made aquascapes.
There's some people out there
that are building these custom aquascapes for people.
Other than that, there are pre-built ones.
Like Carib Sea has the tree.
There's some arches, there are some other unique,
weird shapes that I can actually use my skills in stacking,
but with unique shapes, it actually turns out pretty cool.
- I'd say Carib Sea is probably
the beginner's friend in this case.
- Ah yes.
- So if you are doing aquascape for your very first time,
you want it to look awesome, you want it to have
all of the caves and the openness
and the negative space and the habitat and all the things.
But this really isn't your skillset
and you don't want to spend weeks doing it
buy one of those pre-made pieces
that already is an arch, already is purple,
already can stack together.
Probably the best bet.
You can actually find people to build entire aquascapes.
I think I've seen them on Instagram.
You can see them all over the place,
but if you go out there, you can find them.
They're kind of expensive to buy
a totally done aquascape, all completely finished.
But the stop gap here is definitely
the shapes from Carib Sea,
which allows you to create archways and stuff,
So you're not just piling boulders.
All right, question number four, big one of the day,
should I stack or should I use adhesive
like epoxy or super glue to hold the thing together?
What if it just kind of seems
like it's leveraged all together.
What's the right answer?
And the answer is absolutely,
use the adhesive, use the epoxy.
And in fact, not just to kind of hold
all of that together just a little bit.
Use it so you can form one solid piece
in a smaller tank or even two or three
solid pieces in a larger tank.
Pieces that you could pick out of the entire tank
on their own and put back in the exact way
you took them out, all kinds of advantages.
- Yeah, this is one that we learned,
especially on the HNSAs,
when you were building the NSAs the HNSAs,
is, you know, someday I'm going to have to move this thing.
Your 360, we had to move,
there's three pieces of aquascape put together.
And we'll tell you this stacking of rock
and the day that you have to arrange something
or catch a fish that's pesky or sick or something like that.
When you have to rip all that stuff out
and try to put it all back together
with the corals in the same place
as they were before, headache.
Just make it one single or two single pieces.
- If you can say to yourself,
I am never, ever, ever going to have to
capture a fish and pull it out.
I am never, ever, ever going to move
or any other number of reasons
that I have to pull the scape out or re-do some work here.
Well, then just stack it, I guess.
But for a vast, vast majority of us,
it's way, way better if you glue it all into one piece.
And then like, if I need to get that Tang out,
cause it's bothering the other Tang, or it outgrew the tank.
Specifically, if you've gotten the Tang
as part of your chill-itarian cleanup crew.
You know you got it small, but you also know
he's going to outgrow it at some point in time.
Well catching it can be hard.
Unless you just grab it, pull the aquascape out.
Grab the fish, put the aquascape back in.
If I wanna move, I wanna move down the street.
I want to move across town, It doesn't matter.
Pull the aquascape, with all the corals on it,
put it into a bin of water, drive it to where we need to go.
Put it back in, look at that done.
It'll look exact same way
than when you had it before.
You will never, ever, ever regret
the time you took to use the adhesives.
Epoxy probably being my favorite on dry rock,
super glue being my favorite on wet rock, super glue gel.
But use it, create one aquascape,
and you'll be really happy.
- Question number five, should the aquascape
touch the back of the wall?
These days the answer is no.
It's all about flow and getting some of that flow
back behind the rock wall.
You know, gone are the days where you used to stack
a bunch of rock against the back
because those become detritus traps, uneaten food.
Maybe even a fish gets back there and you know, perishes
and you don't even know it's happening.
But all of that places for, you know,
these nitrate and phosphate factories to build up,
you can eliminate by bringing the aquascape towards,
off of the back wall, right in the middle,
and then adding flow behind there
to keep all that stuff suspended
and let your mechanical and other filtration do the work.
- I think this is actually an artifact
of the days of stacking.
You couldn't just stack rock for the most part
and have it not fall over,
unless it's resting upon the back.
So now that we're building more advanced aquascapes,
we're creating more open area,
which now the fish can actually go in front of and behind.
So all the benefits of keeping the pollution out
and flushing all the detritus, it's a better habitat.
And you know what?
It fits that new style of aquascaping,
which is just more artistic and more cool.
It has bigger open areas in it.
And that is why we're no longer, in most cases,
in fact, I don't think I'll ever do it again.
Just don't stack in the back.
All right, number six, we touched on this a little bit,
but there's a deeper look,
which adhesive should I use for my rock?
And the answer is, different ones for different solutions.
So if you're doing dry rock
and you followed any of Randy's Investigates,
then epoxy is your friend.
Epoxy is the thing that sticks to the dry rock,
it molds around it.
It does it quickly.
It's fairly inexpensive.
And it holds onto it structurally the best.
It is now what I use on any dry rock installation.
So if you're going to do epoxy,
sometimes I will glue it temporarily with some super glue
and some Insta-set and then hit the epoxy behind it.
However, if your rock is wet,
then definitely epoxy sucks.
So the proxy will just deteriorate when it gets wet
and it's not a good solution.
- It was a surprise when I found that
we had the rocks wet and I put some epoxy
and mortar and super glue on them.
And the only ones that held up through stress-testing
was that superglue.
And that's because it actually hardens because of moisture.
So it helps to keep that bond and hold that bond together.
Something that wet epoxy and wet mortar couldn't do.
But for the budget conscious,
there is an option as well too.
And that's a lot of mortar.
- Yeah, so mortar just as good as the epoxy,
just a lot more sloppy.
And a little harder to get into like vertical surfaces
and underneath overhangs and everything.
So epoxy though, a lot cheaper,
like a whole bucket of epoxy
is absolutely a lot cheaper than a whole bucket,
or a whole bucket of mortar is a lot cheaper
than a whole bucket of a epoxy rather.
So that is, if you're on a budget here
and you want to do something really cool
with your aquascape, mortar is definitely your friend.
One of the cool things about mortar too,
is you can take kind of this rough edge surface
of some of the like Marco Rocks, kind of smooth them out.
Cause it kind of fills in some of the holes
and you can kind of create like arms
and stuff with it, it's pretty cool.
I will say one other thing about super glue though,
is underwater, right?
So, you know, wet I could be doing super glue into wet,
like really quickly out of the tank.
I'm gonna use, you know, in this case quite a bit.
Cause it's kind of about adhesive together,
but also getting it and around molds
that kind of hold onto the chunks as well.
But underwater, do not buy this.
So if you buy a big tube like this
and you squeeze it underwater,
when you let go, even just for a half a second,
sucks water back into the tube.
- Yeah, that's why these little tubes, 20 gram tubes,
and there's some other ones out there,
when you squeeze on them,
it doesn't have that back pressure back in.
But I can make a ball under the water,
smash it into the place where I need the aquascape to bond.
And I don't sacrifice the rest of my tube.
I can continue using it.
- This is actually really easy
to get into the nooks and crannies as well.
It's a really small tube.
You can actually just squirt it
everywhere around it and then kind of mush it in there.
It's clear, so in most cases it will hide in your aquascape.
You can actually make it hide really well.
So wet, it's super glue.
Budget, mortar, but my favorite epoxy.
- Question number seven, for the newbies out there.
This is your first aquascape and you're asking yourself,
what color of rock should I use?
I've got bone white options, dark purple options,
lighter purple options.
The answer here for many of you
is if you're going to enjoy your tank,
the first couple of years, get the purple stuff.
It just looks established, day one.
It's almost like instant-tank.
And then when you add corals,
it looks like the tank's been up for years.
And it's actually a lot easier too,
when it comes to growing
some nuisance things on the bone white.
- I will say it's pretty generally true.
If you're new, your patience level is near zero.
And so in that case,
the purple rock looks established day one.
I often find this darker, Real Reef stuff
to actually look the most natural, day one.
And it will hide all kinds of things.
So the white rock will show little green films,
little red films, it will show
every last little bit of algae growing on it.
And for experienced reefers,
it's really not about where we're starting,
it's about where we're going.
And these tools offer different options,
like breaking it up and building
really advanced aquascape.
This stuff stacks really well,
allows you to do a lot of different things.
But if this is my first rodeo, it's all about,
I want it to look as nice as it possibly can,
as fast as it can, not show every last little misstep
that I might've taken as a new reefer.
Purple rock, Real Reef, probably the winner.
Number eight, this one's changed over time.
And the question is, should I cure my rock
before I build the aquascape?
And the answer is no.
You should cure the aquascape, not the rock.
- Yeah, this is, you know, as we're building
more of these elaborate, more advanced aquascapes.
You have the HNSAs, the NSAs,
it's taken upwards for you, a week or even more
to build a full scale aquascape.
In which case, you know, if you're worrying about
I'm taking my rocks out and am I losing bacteria
that I had when it was curing.
And do I put it back in while it's going?
And then that conversation that we had
about epoxy and super glue and mortar.
If you really want to build these elaborate aquascapes,
which a lot of us are doing these days,
build the scape first,
find a container large enough to house it
and then cure the entire aquascape.
- [Ryan] Turns out you actually have one,
it's called a tank. - Exactly.
- [Ryan] You can cure it in the aquarium actually.
- [Randy] You can.
- So it used to be that we were cycling in bins.
Like we would dump all the rock.
We would put it all in a trashcan.
We'd add some bacteria, a food source
and like let it soak for a couple of months.
But the problem with that is,
like, when I went to aquascape it,
I gotta keep it moist the entire time,
which can be hard if you're going to do something elaborate.
Better yet, when you have all that rock,
build the aquascape, put it in the tank
and let it cure right in the tank,
instead of in the trash can.
And that's true even if the tank
is actually just sitting on the floor.
It's a perfect place for that
while you're getting the whole thing ready and set up.
Just cure it in the tank.
And the aquascape, not the rock.
- Question number nine.
How do I keep my aquascape from tipping over.
The thing of the past was
you have rounded rocks with round edges.
You had to put a little piece of rock in
so you can stabilize it.
This has changed 100% over the last few years
and the answer is use foundation rock.
This Marco Rock was cut specifically with a flat edge.
It lays flat on your aquarium.
And then you build up off the top of that.
But guess what you don't have?
Is that, you know, in the back of your mind,
is this thing really stable ?
Or it is my Gobi or shrimp pair
going to knock my little piece out,
roll my whole aquascape over?
You know, thing of the past.
You don't have to worry about anymore.
Use foundation rock.
- Foundation rock looks like it's also like erupting
out of the bottom of the tank
rather than just a boulder sitting on it.
And these boulders are always just wobbly,
no matter what you do.
This foundation rock is not.
It's super machined, super flat.
And also, big long pieces like this
create a foot, like that lever that you're talking about.
When I build out of here, I can build out
and this weight will hold on here.
As long as the joints really good,
use that epoxy or mortar.
So again, for me, a, visually, it looks awesome.
Cause it's erupting out of the sand
out of the bottom of your tank.
It's super, super stable,
never worry about it falling over.
I will not build an aquascape that doesn't have these.
Even if I go for some of the purple rock
in almost every case, I will still get
some small foundation pieces to build it on top of
because that is what's going to give it
the most stability.
Number 10, probably the most commonly missed question,
who is this aquascape for?
And the answer is it's 33% for me,
meaning about one third of this
is just because I want to look at it
and I want it to look awesome. Right?
I want my friends to come over
and say, wow, isn't that cool.
I also want it to be 33% for the fish
and actually the coral.
But it's habitat for organisms that live in there.
So that's an important thing.
Think about this, what I'm building here
is where these organisms are going to live.
The fish needs swim throughs.
They need areas where they can escape aggression.
They need little overhangs.
They need different things for different types of fish.
You can have lots of little holes
for things like chromis to shoot in and out of.
So think about it as a habitat
and all the animals that rely on you will do better.
It's also one more thing.
One-third for the flow.
So having an aquascape, an epic aquascape,
meaning I did this level 10, it has been done no better.
If I hit the other two,
I'm still probably about a six or seven.
If I want to hit a 10,
it means that I've built this thing for flow.
It means that I don't have big detritus traps
all over the place.
I built it so flow can get behind it.
It can get in front of it, it can get over it.
And when these things meet, it pushes the water through it.
So thinking about flow, thinking about habitat,
thinking about making sure
that everybody that comes over
wants to give me that high five,
all of those things are the most important things
in who you're building the aquascape for.
Okay, the question we didn't answer today
is how do I actually achieve
all three of those things with an aquascape?
And the answer is our video on HNSA.
You'll see every last tip here.
You'll see actually how to create one
of the coolest types of aquascapes out there.
Everything you need to know.