Convict27

I guess I will finally make my first post here on Reef Addicts as I have been lurking around for a week or so. I am currently living in Okinawa Japan where we have some of the best diving in the world with all the prized fish and corals. After diving for the last 2 years here, I finally decided to get back into reefing after a 3 year hiatus. While I was in California I had a 125 gallon reef and a 60 gallon reef. I never could get up the nerve to actually do a sump or refugium so I always ran canister filters. Well being as I was starting again from scratch I decided I was going to go all out so I went and built a sump and refugium out of a 15 gallon glass tank. I took all the information that I could get from Melvesreef and now here on Reef addicts and went to work. All of the main components that I am using are made here in Japan so picking up some good quality stuff was very easy and fairly cheap, but the hard part is that I can not read Kangi. Luckily for me there are some great translation software here on the intardweb, so figuring out the instructions was just a mouse click away.

The tank is a 157 Liter Kotobuki rimless Le Glass sitting on a Kotobuki solid wood cabinet/stand. The quality is just phenomenal on both the tank and the stand. The price was really cheap in comparison to what I could have picked up back in the states. I am running an ADA Solar I 150W Metal Halide 8000K HQI and 2 Aqute LED lights. I am not sure what rating the LED lights are but they can be adjusted color wise through the full spectrum from red/green/blue/yellow and everything in between. They seem a little bright to be used as a moonlight so I just use them to suplement the metal halide. For water movement I am using 2 Eheim 300 compact pumps which each move about 80 gph and 1 Newave rated at 800 gph. These 3 coupled with the ADA Lilly pipe return coming from the Kotobuki corepower 220 which pushes 22L a minute gives the tank a good amount of flow.

Underneath I am running a 15 gallon glass sump with the water from the tank flowing down a 3/4 line from the weir overflow box which I made from the directions on Melvesreef. This overflow works great and by adding a flexible airtube down the middle and attaching panty hose to the end to catch detritus, has completely silenced the overflow. The overflow line enters the sump through a 3"x4"x9" tall area filled with live rock rubble. from there it travels into the main sump/ refugium which has about 25 pounds of live rock and Macro algae. I am going to put a 3 inch sand bed in as well as soon as I can get over to the beach to get some new sand. that section is about 12"x 9" which then travels through the bubble traps and then into the main return chamber that has the corepower 220.

In the main display tank there is a 2 inch LS bed and another 30+ lbs of live rock straight from my local reef. I was able to go out at low tide and pick some good pieces that had a ton of good growth and natural caverns for the fish. Everything that is in the tank except the fish was hand selected from the local reefs including. I am also using all of my water straight from the ocean as well. By doing this I did not have any cycling at all and within a few days after setting up the tank, I was adding corals and fish. The tank as you see it right now is only about 2 and 1/2 weeks old. Ammonia 0, Nitrates 0, Nitrites 0, PH 8.2 with the salinity right at 1.025. I dont have a more detailed test kit to be able to test with.

The livestock that are in the tank are 3 chromis, 2 ocelaris clowns, 1 pixy hawk fish, 1 sixline wrasse, 1 twinspot wrasse (stupid impulse buy which I cant get out), 1 purple dottyback, 1 fire shrimp, 1 starfish, 1 sea cucumber,and too many snails and crabs to list.

I hope to get as much information from here and look forward to participating on the boards!