- New reef tanks are exciting!
Designing your aquascape;
thinking about the fish and coral
that you're gonna have;
new lights, brand new pumps,
it's all fresh and exciting and clean.
Nothing's got corroded yet,
there's no salt buildup
somewhere that you gotta get
a little toothpick in to clean it out.
All you have to worry about
is getting through your tank's initial cycling period.
Hi guys and girls, I'm ReefMan,
and this video is all about reef tank maintenance,
when you should do it, what you should do,
and really everything you need to know
for both a brand new reef tank
as well as an older reef tank
that you've had running for a while.
This is just an intro, of course,
as anything with reef stuff, you can go way in detail.
So this is just to get your ideas started.
And this is a long video,
so there are some time codes for chapters
down below in the description.
Feel free to skip to the part you're actually interested in.
So, your brand new reef tank.
For the next few weeks,
you're gonna be going through what's called cycling.
Really, all you're doing is building up colonies
of different species of bacteria
that are able to process ammonia into nitrite,
and nitrite into nitrate.
This takes a few weeks,
maybe six or seven weeks, to get fully set up and running,
but at the end of it, you're gonna have stable colonies
of both Nitrosoma and Nitrobacter bacteria
and those are the ones that process those chemicals.
At that point, you should be testing
your tank's ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate every day or two.
Keep track of the values that you see.
You're gonna see that ammonia will spike first,
and then it'll decrease and nitrite will be increasing,
and then nitrite will decrease
and nitrate will start to increase.
Once the nitrate has started to fall again,
your cycle is complete.
The goal here is not to have nitrate at zero,
but to get it close to zero.
When your tank is at that level,
you're ready to start adding fish
and other livestock, like coral.
It's at this point that you should also do
your first water change.
About 20% of your water every week or two
is a good amount to change.
If you do any water changes
before your cycle is complete,
your cycle's only gonna take longer,
so there's no reason to do water changes
while your tank is cycling
unless something horrible happens to your tank,
through power outage, something horrible like that.
If you want to speed up your tank's cycle,
you can add some sand or a piece of live rock
from an established tank.
Be careful though, that's a great way
to introduce pest algae, bristle worms,
all sorts of things like that.
So only take sand or rock from a tank whose owner you trust
and which you know to be clean & free
of those kinds of things you don't want in your tank.
You can also use a bacterial product
like Prod BioDigest or Microbacter Start
and those are just gonna seed
all the needed strains of bacteria into your tank,
but this really isn't required for success.
Some people also put a frozen shrimp or two
in the tank to decompose.
I've even heard of people peeing in their tank
to add nutrients up front, but again, not required.
I wouldn't recommend peeing in your reef tank
although there are people who do it.
So, to recap, if you have a brand new reef tank
all you need to do is use one of these little test kits,
this one is a nitrate test kit,
test for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate,
wait till your cycle is complete,
then start doing regularly weekly
or every-other-week water changes,
and maybe give your equipment
a good cleaning at the end there,
just to get any of the collected goo
that comes out during cycling out.
Once your tank is finished cycling,
you can add all the fish and coral that you want.
Remember, little by little, not all at once,
and then that will begin the maintenance
that we're gonna talk about for the rest of this video.
Since your tank, at this point, is done cycling,
the suggested care and maintenance
that you need to do changes.
You don't need to think as much about the nitrogen cycle,
and your focus should instead be
on the levels of nitrate, calcium, magnesium,
alkalinity, things like that, in your tank.
Other elements like iodine are also important,
particularly if you have lots of soft corals like zoanthids.
A lot of these trace elements
will also make your acropora more colorful.
Calcium and alkalinity are critical
in tanks with stony coral,
and you should test for those weekly, if not daily.
There are several products on the market
that can automate that for you.
Running a daily test for calcium
using this giant thing is a pain,
so pick up something like
the GHL Ion Director, KH Director,
Neptune's Trident, the Alkatronic.
These sorts of monitors are really the best way to go
if you want frequent testing
and you have lots of SPS corals,
because they can even be set
to automatically monitor all that
and dose them when it goes out of range.
So you can often hook up a dosing pump,
like I just mentioned,
and you can not only report the level
but keep it constant over time,
which is great, and ideal for a reef tank.
Using a system like this can automate
a lot of the work involved
in tuning a calcium reactor as well,
and products like the Alkatronic or KH Director from GHL
can even interface with your calcium reactor
to control how much calcium and alkalinity
is being dosed from your reactor.
There are lots of trace elements in our reef tanks,
trace elements that are hard, if not impossible,
to test for directly on their own.
That's where an ICP test, like those from Triton or ATI,
can be a huge help.
By shining light through a superheated plasma
of your tank's water, they can tell what elements
and how much of them are in your tank's water.
At the end, you'll get an extremely detailed look
at the makeup of your water,
and I think it's worth doing these tests
as often as once a month or so, if you can afford it.
This is gonna allow you to avoid
running so many manual tests,
tests that are just complicated, have lots of steps,
and you'll have all those reports online in one place
to compare changes over time.
Water changes on a tank that has been running for a while
are much more important than those
when you're just getting started.
Water changes replenish all sorts of chemicals
that your fish and coral need and give you an opportunity
to remove goo and gunk from your tank at the same time.
Most people are gonna recommend
that you change 10 to 20% of your tank's volume
each time you do a water change
and you should do them every week
or every other week or so.
You should obviously match the salinity
and temperature of the water.
You don't wanna shock any of your fish or corals
with sudden changes.
Smaller water changes more often are probably better
than one very large infrequent water change.
Most people, as I mentioned,
they're gonna change their water
every week or every other week.
I like to do it on the weekends
and just get into a habit.
Water changes replenish a lot of things,
but some other chemicals needed in your tank
might need to be dosed.
If you're battling high levels of nitrate,
you could be dosing vodka.
If you have acro, or acropora,
AcroPower could be an option for you.
Two-part calcium liquid alkalinity solutions,
those are all dosed independently
of a water change that you might do on your tank.
None of those, of course, are required for success,
so don't worry too much about them
if you're just getting started.
When you need something like that, you'll know.
If you need to dose things like that,
then a dosing pump is by far the easiest way to go about it.
Just set your dosing pump to run
for the required amount of time
and it's automatically gonna dose every day
the same amount, every day.
When you are doing a water change,
an easy thing to do alongside is to use a gravel vacuum.
These are just wide plastic tubes like this,
they're just wider tubes at the end of a tube,
that allow you to get into your sand bed
and remove the goo and junk that builds up there.
Believe me, if you haven't done this for a while,
or you've never done it,
you will know that you're getting stuff out
because that water is gonna be dark brown,
full of silt, and it's gonna be coming of the sand bed.
Most of us only have an inch or two of sand on our tanks;
a lot of people have even less.
For instance, I've removed almost all the sand over my tank
over the last few months.
An inch or two of sand is really not enough sand
to have any large anaerobic areas in it,
particularly if you have Nassarius snails,
starfish, gobies, things like that
that mix up the sand bed.
If you do have a deep sand bed,
then sure, don't vacuum it out
because that defeats the whole purpose of it.
But most of us really just have enough sand to look nice,
and those shallow sand beds
are gonna benefit from regular cleaning,
just like anything else would in our tank.
I would recommend vacuuming your sand bed
every time you do a water change.
It really does get a lot of stuff
that's just gonna decompose out of your tank.
Every few months, it is a good idea
to clean the inside, the impellers,
the magnets in your pumps
and other equipment like your skimmer.
Hopefully you've designed your tank's plumbing
with valves and unions in it
so that it's easy to remove the return pump
and all of the other equipment from your sump.
Pumps can then be disassembled for a soak in acid,
the link above, and before doing that,
of course, give them a good scrub
with a toothbrush or something like that
to remove anything obvious that's built up.
Some pumps collect algae,
goo and just grime from your sump
will be in your return pump.
And it's a good idea
to even think about cleaning out
your skimmer body every few months.
It gets quite dirty just in the normal use of it
and they work better when they're clean.
So that's really about it.
That is the maintenance plan
that I've found works best for me
and you're gonna develop your own personal schedule,
but you should plan on doing regular water changes
on some schedule, and at least every few weeks,
you should also be testing for some elements
depending on what you have in your tank.
If you have Acropora, stony corals,
of course, keep an eye on calcium,
alkalinity, and magnesium, and if nothing else,
just get a Triton test every once in a while,
or an ATI ICP test, and just do them every so often
on some schedule, whatever fits your budget.
It'll really just sort of fill in the blanks
for what's going on in your tank.
It's really not that hard to keep a reef tank healthy.
You can do it!
Hopefully this video gets you started.
Let me know if you have questions;
I'll try to do my best to answer them.
Just leave them in the comments down below.
Good luck!
If you've made it this far,
take a moment to subscribe to my channel as well.
Stay safe, coronavirus is still out there,
and have a fantastic day!
Bye!