This tank was my first entry in to the reef keeping hobby and was started in March of 1998.

This tank has had many change over the years and has some of the same fish and corals that the tank started with. I started this tank with the following advice given to me by an LFS.

The tank was first setup with an Amiracle wet/dry filter, small Amiracle venturi skimmer, two 40 watt strip lights, crushed coral and about 35 pounds of live rock.

Per the advice of my LFS I added 4 False Percula clownfish and 2 blue Damsels. Little did I know at the time is that I could have cycled the tank with live rock only. Luckily I still have three of the four clownfish in my tank today and the one that I did loose jumped out of the tank about a year or two after it was setup. The damsels were moved out of the tank after they started harassing my other fish and I had to remove almost all of my live rock to get them out.

The first upgrade to the tank was an ETS ReefDevil skimmer. This was a huge improvement over the simple venturi skimmer and it started pulling large amounts of waste from the tank just a couple of days after it was installed.

The next upgrade was the lighting. I bought two 4 foot shop lights from Home Depot and installed them over the tank. This gave me a total of 160 watts. The lights were large and bulky and added a lot of heat to the water.

Finally I removed the shop lights and installed an Icecap 660 ballast and 4-110 watt lights to the tank. This made a huge improvement and the corals responded very quickly to the new bright light.

Live rock was the next on the list and every week I would visit my LFS and buy between five and ten pounds from their reef tank. The rock was expensive at $10 per pound but it was fully cured and covered with purple coraline and small coral polyps.

The tank did well even though I did not have any idea what I was doing. I would add fish and corals and at one point I had 18 fish in the tank which was much too large of a bio-load for a tank of that size.

After learning from my mistakes, and after loosing many fish because of my lack of knowledge, I started to learn that the tank needed to strike a balance between nutrient load and nutrient export.

Fianlly in November of 1999 all of the work and money payed off and my tank was featured in the on-line publication of Aquarium Fish Montly.

Click here to read the Article.

Over the next few years I did not do very much to tank but it did start to move some corals from it to some of my other tanks. Many of my corals grew at an alarming rate and the one in particular, my large finger coral, started out at a size of three inches wide by about 5 inches tall with about 6 finger and is now almost two feet wide and well over a foot tall with over 100 fingers.

After almost no upgrades or changes in Febuary of 2001 I added two 250 watt MH bulbs to the tank. I installed Blueline 10kk bulbs and the tank did okay but it did not seem as bright as when I had the four 110 watt VHO bulbs and the Icecap ballast in place. The corals did okay but not as well as I thought that they would have and the growth of most of them slowed or stopped completely. I did try to keep a couple if Acropora frags in the tank under the Bluelines but they quickly died from lack of light intensity.

In September of 2001 I changed out the Blueline bulbs for two Iwasaki bulbs that I had around the house. A few days after adding the Iwaski's to the tank I had a cyano outbreak. I quickly put the Bluelines back on the tank and the cyano started to die off after only a few days.

Since the Bluelines were not working well and the Iwasaki caused problems in October of 2001 I changed out the Blueline bulbs for Osram 20kk bulbs and a PFO dual 250 watt HQI ballast which looks much brighter and has given me much more polyp expansion only after a short time.