Tank Of The Month - May 2005 - bunglehaze

[craigg]

UltimateReef.com is proud to feature its latest 'Tank of the Month'.

Bunglehaze's cube reef tank.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(19).jpg

Details can be found below.

Congratulations Leigh superb tank and thankyou for the fantastic write up.!

If you have any questions or comments for Leigh then please post them in this thread.

Craig

[craigg]

Bunglehaze's Reef Tank

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(19).jpg

Firstly, WOW… It is such an honour to have my tank featured as tank of the month, especially when you look at the quality of those that have been featured in the past. Although my little system is not millions of gallons or the most high tech, it brings me a lot of pleasure and I like to think I have finally got it on its way to looking nice… It is only a young system so from here on in I can only hope it matures into the setup I have visualised.

History

I suppose I had better start at the beginning, although I will miss off all the goldfish and tropicals :D

I bought my first marine tank as a second hand job lot out of our local admag about 7 years ago as a result of visiting an LFS and seeing a stunning lionfish and reminding me from my younger years how amazing a marine tank looked, it was a 4ft panoramic with (wait for it) a fluval 403 as its sole form of filtration and a powerhead to give all the flow I would ever need :P

The system did not have any liverock (what was liverock), and used a very course coral gravel and ocean rock. I cant remember exactly what my first fish were but I definitely remember a blue devil damsel, a sulphur goby, a Singapore angel (juv) and a clarkii clown. Along with the advice of my LFS I managed to successfully create a cesspool effect reef system – lets just say I cocked up! So then, after doing a bit of reading and a house move imminent I decided the best course of action would be to start from fresh, so back to the old trusty admag I went and found a lovely 4x2x2ft tank on its own. I set this up at my new house using the same system as before although this time I added an undergravel filter and a couple of powerheads. The whole thing was running with a basic 3 T8 tubes.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(10).jpg

As the system started to deteriorate again I knew there must be something I was missing so started trawling the net…

It was then I stumbled upon UR. After posting a little info on the board I got chatting to Darryl and Paul Everton who askd if they could pop round and offer their help – I accepted and glad I did, basically they ripped it to pieces and with hindsight quite rightly so too. They advised me to remove the UGF, increase flow and light and add some form of filtration in the form of a DSB and liverock, now at the time my tank was undrilled so I knew adding a sump would be tricky until Paul sold me a 5x2x2 panoramic tank. I soon set about building a stand for it.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(5).jpg http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(6).jpg

It was not all that long before I got it up and running, to be honest I had to rush the whole thing as my previous tank had been sold to pay for the new one, I had not really planned how it would all work but knew a lot more than before so set about it. I used a shallow sand bed in my main tank with a new load of liverock for aquascaping and my sump had a 5” DSB and my equipment. Straight away I could see the benefit and started stocking corals and inverts, I had uprated my lights by this point and had gone WAY overboard with 1600w of halide and VHO – the meter started spinning furiously.

All was well for around a year, all my corals started to flourish to the point where I had to give large chunks away just to tidy up. I was finally getting somewhere when, in typical me style, something HAD to go wrong. I had a system 2000 heater and module which I was quite happy with despite all the recommendations that I use a different brand. One day I looked in the tank and everything looked great – I walked away, made a cuppa came back and it noticed the heater had just exploded. I turned of the heater got in the tank and fished as much of it out as possible, there were little bits all over the place. Over the next few days the tank water went cloudier and cloudier so I set about doing as many water changes as possible, hoping it was just a bloom that I could overcome, this did nothing and I started losing stock. To cut a long story short over a period of 2 weeks pretty much the whole tank died, I still have no idea why, but I find it odd that the whole process began immediately after the heater exploded – I never did receive a returned phone call off the manufacturer either.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(4).jpg

After such a massive wipeout I had lost my interest in the hobby, I really saw no point in trying to rebuild and could not justify the cost to my ever patient other half. Also there was the fact that Katy got attached to a few of the fish and a couple were hers ( why is it that they always deny liking the tank but have a few of their own fish).

I kept the tank running on the little remaining stock I had, took some time to think about things and make a final decision. At this point I had become the joint admin of Reefpark with Nigel (Foxman147) and in all honesty it was him that convinced me to stick with it – along with the support of the Reefpark members, I had decided that to avoid any of these sort of issues in future I needed more water, more power, plumbing down to the cellar for all manner of sumps, quarantine systems, frag systems etc. I would need a big beckett injected skimmer and, and, and….. you get the picture im sure.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(8).jpg

I made my plans, it was going to be great! I could run the whole setup from my cellar and just have my main system on display – no noise – no mess. I added up how much this would cost, then added some more, then tried to add up how much things like liverock and stock would be and then included electric bills and other running costs. I had also started to get ill which made me realize it was a really bad move and that quitting had become a really good option again, just the maintainance on a setup like that would have left me neglecting it – it was about time I threw in the towel, there was no other option

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(15).jpg

But there was, just posted up for sale was a stunning cube system running miracle mud. I was not really into the MM system, but had a read, saw others accounts of the reduced ‘faffing’ time, the lack of skimmer to clean and decided it may be an option. The tank was owned by Des Ong of Underworld, so I assumed it would be setup up perfectly – and it was!

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(18).jpg

Setup



Here is a breakdown of my current setup



Tank - 26” cube made by Fit Filtration from 10mm glass, twin downpipes housed in a corner weir that set the water height in the main tank, surface skim and also feed the sump.



Sump – 24”x20”x18” partitioned 3 ways to allow for bio ball pre-chamber and feed pump for calcium reactor, mid section for MM and algae bed and final partition for skimmer and return pump



Lights – Giesemann Eco 230 plus, 1 x 250w (14kk lamp) and twin 9w actinic power compacts, sump is lit 24x7 with an 18w T5 power compact.



Filtration – Miracle Mud with dense algae bed, most caulerpa’s have been removed due to crashing. The main filtration is around 55kg’s liverock – Fiji and Tonga.



Skimming – Tunze Comline 235/2, added to remove the typical yellowing of the water found in most mud based systems.



Heating – My trusty System 2000 heater module is still in use to control lights and heater, I am using a 300w Schego titanium heater.



Calcium – Deltec PF509 calcium reactor, fed by a tee’d off maxijet and running ARM media




Flow – I have gone full circle in the flow department and currently have:

1 x Oceanrunner OR6500 6500lph return pump
1 x Eheim 1060 2400lph closed loop
1 x Tunze 6060 stream 6000lph
2 x Flowjet1800 1800lph powerheads, one on spraybar behind rockwork.

This gives me a turnover of 74x per hour – over 18000lph http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(11).jpg

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(7).jpg

System

The system has been running now for just a year, in fact it was installed mid-may last year so not even a year old. I have been very slow in stocking corals – partly due to the lack of decent shops in Sheffield and partly due to lack of money.

The only problem have with a tank this small is that you soon feel a bit cramped up and it is difficult to find places to put corals, I have found myself under attack from majano anemone’s which I just cant get to and then corals not getting on with each other ( mainly LPS at fault there though) but all in all I like the whole look of the cube and the possibilities it should bring as the corals start to grow.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(12).jpg

Stock

I mainly keep SPS corals because of the colors and shapes available, for me softies just don’t have the impact so its SPS and LPS all the way. I do have a couple of the usual softies though, a colony of clove polyps which survived the previous tank holocaust, some random xenia like polyps that encrust rocks, a couple of heads of xenia and a few types of buttons and mushrooms.

Where fish are concerned though, the tank is probably overstocked, there is something about watching a group of anthias chasing each other about then grouping together at feeding time(s). The 3 way hate relationship between my false gramma, flame angel and yellow tailed blue damsel is just comedy, if one picks on another the 3 rd comes in to sort it then gets picked on by both

My Fish list

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle.jpg

2 x Clowns, big buggers at that. – lost the little guy yesterday – now 1 x

4 x lyretail anthias

1 x vampire tang – yes I know……

1 x flame angel

1 x false gramma

1 x yellow tail blue damsel

1 x cleaner wrasse


Inverts



1 x large brown serpent star

1 x large Rose bubble tip anemone

Small army of assorted hermits

Not nearly enough turbo snails

1000’s of dove snails and stomatellas


Corals

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(1).jpg

8 x Acropora species

2 x Millepora species

2 x plating montipora (1 pink, 1 green)

2 x montipora digitata (1 pink, 1 mustard)

1 x hammerhead coral

2 x frogspawn

1 x torch coral

1 x large plating hydnophora

2 x trumpet coral

1 x bubble (large bubble's)

1 x pavona

1 x helipora (blue coral)

3 x gorgonian

Various Zoo's, xenia's and clove polyps

Maintainance

The tank actually needs very little in the way of maintaining, the algae gets scraped whenever it starts to look bad, the fish get fed between 3 and 5 times a day with a mixture of Prime Reef, Formula2 and a little frozen on occasion. Sometimes when im feeling daring I even go as far as to add Nori on a clip too...

I must admit to being very lax with testing, apart from checking the temp on my heater module I dont test all that often - mainly because it has matured and settled and in part because the MM system allows me to, this is not something I recommend to novice keepers though. In my old system I found a great deal fluctuated, in this one it is not all that often that anything happens. Topping up is courtesy of an auto topup unit and fresh water reservoir and water changes are done at around 10% every couple of months.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(13).jpg

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(2).jpg http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(17).jpg

Conclusion

There is not really much else to say about the system, I would like to than everyone on Ultimatereef and Reefpark over the years I have plagued you with questions, quite honestly without all the great advice I have received and the setups I have seen I would have been completely lost. It is all too difficult to forget that we had to start somewhere and that place was usually a really bad one, so it is reassuring to see the same faces that helped me are still around offering their advice to the newcomers. For all newbies at this, please remember that a lot of us have learned the hard way, if we give advice it is down to experience and is only meant to help. Some of it may not be what you want to hear, so stick at it take the rough with the smooth and help keep the reefing community growing from the position we are at today.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(9).jpg

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(16).jpg http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(3).jpg

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(14).jpg

Cheers Leigh

[fishman]

stunning leigh,congrats and keep it up, got some nice coloured montis for you ,drop me a line FISH...

[LTD]

Nice one Leigh ! :thumbsup:

[SuperBlades]

Nice 1 Leigh. Well deserved :dance:

:thumbsup:

Will

[Jordan]

superb !!

[fire999]

Lovely .......... :bow:

[Foxy1983]

Lovely :wub:

[mark-c-]

congratulations

looks fantastic :thumbsup:

Mark

[Philfish]

Well deserved. Very nice indeed!!

:wub: :wub: :wub:

:cheers:

[Gubs]

Neat!

[xxmattyxx]

At last a TOTM !!!!!!!


And a mighty fine deserving one too.

Lovely example of the vibrancy/colours and how successful a reef tank can be, you should be proud.


Matt

[lenny]

well done leigh. small can be beutiful, as shown by your stunning tank. takes dedication to overcome the problems of keeping reef systems. thank you for sharing it with us. :wave: lenny

[ahoy]

Well done, Leigh. Very impressive indeed.
S.

[bs0u20a2]

Fab tank, as ive said before, love those encrusting SPS on the glass on the right hand side.

Nick :thumbsup:

[Tunzeamoney]

Congratulations Leigh,

Great looking tank, proves it doesn't have to be large to look impressive.

:cheers:

Tunze :thumbsup:

[finfax]

An inspiration to all of us marine newbies....!!! Congratulations...

Martin :thumbsup:

[Deanobeano]

wow lovely tank and theres me thinking you need a big 6 footer to get a nice reef

i just hope my 25 gallon tank ends up looking a lil like your tank wow again

congrats matey

[coralbeauty]

fantastic :wub:

great tank, well deserved

congrats :cheers:

[Uneek1]

What can I say that hasn't been said already, nothing!
Nice one Leigh. :thumbsup:

[Suk]

Congrats Leigh, a lovely example of what can be achieved on a smaller scale.

:thumbsup:

[jamie reefer]

Well done Leigh,the tank looks amazing,excellent write up on the as well,keep up the hard work :thumbsup:

cheers Jamie

[Paul Everton]

Well done Leigh you finally got there mate :thumbsup: stunning.

[17000ltrs]

:thumbsup: what more need i say

[Big Cat]

Lovely tank mate, enjoy the prestige you have obviously worked hard for it.

All the best mate. :thumbsup:

[bob_d]

:thumbsup:

Awesome!

Interesting note on the 24/7 sump lighting........

Have you experimented to get here, or considered a dark phase?

I am just in the middle of spec'ing the latest greatest, and I am in the middle of thinking along the lines of lighting and phasing.

"A thousand opinions, only one wallet!"

great tank mate....

Bob

[bunglehaze]

Thanks for the kind words folks, as im sure you all know it is far from the picture I have for it but as I said in the article it is growing and maturing still so it can only get better.

I do feel a bit restricted with the smaller tank but it is so easy to manage in comparison to the larger one so the pro's outweigh the cons, it is not as easy to stock though which I have had a couple of problems with (mainly due to the majanos)

Obviously it is a buzz having it displayed on these hallowed pages, so thanks to all that have helped me over the years in getting it to the stage it is at today.... Now - where the hell is Fishmans feature????? Top tank there and well deserving

BTW Fishy.. I WILL speak to you shortly about some of them frags of yours!

Bob, I have the 24/7 lighting because of the algae bed in the sump. After the disaster I had with the other tank I am playing safe and not giving it the option to turn sexual and crash.


cheers folks


leigh :D

[wayne g]

looks fantastic....a credit to you leigh!
:wub:

[Jonesii]

Very nice tank. I really love cubes.

Nick

[dantheman]

well done, your effort, patience and persistance has been rewarded.

dantheman

[Yakdriver]

Congratulations :thumbsup:

well deserved, the tanks' features and layout look very well balanced visually... lovely.

Chris.

[trev]

congrats bungle :thumbsup: , little bit late i know but....

have to say im inspired though :idea:

[chris allsop]

great tank, well done :wub:

[grahamgraphics]

Originally posted by craigg@Apr 21 2005, 20:33
UltimateReef.com is proud to feature its latest 'Tank of the Month'.

Bunglehaze's cube reef tank.

http://www.ultimatereef.net/uploads/bungle%20(19).jpg

Details can be found below.

Congratulations Leigh superb tank and thankyou for the fantastic write up.!

If you have any questions or comments for Leigh then please post them in this thread.

Craig
:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Superb...it deserves all the credit its getting.

best wishes

Graham

[ADZ]

:o what a stunner! excellent read too!

Cheers

[wiggyuk]

Great setup but how big does the vampire tang gey I would of thought the tank was too small

[spawns]

sweet cube u hv there....enjoyed ur write up too! n congrads for hving a totm :P

[Projekct]

Stunning, some fantastic work done in there. Now if my master plan comes to fruition.. Muhahahaha

[andy c]

Hi all

Bulldog just a fantastic tank :bow:

shame about the owner :D :D

however now i know where all them so called "missing equipment and stock went"

Andy c

ps there is a great muddy feild on tonight

[bunglehaze]

:D Once again, thanks for all the compliments (apart from Andy C :lol: :lol: who seems to have picked the wrong thread)

It was nice having my setup featured, and I hope that it in some way inspires others who are going through the problems I had. It is always nice to give something back to the community as thansk for all the help I have had over the years.

WiggyUK,
The vampire tang will supposedly get big, in all honesty I would not have kept her as long as I have if I found somewhere nice for her to go - but the reason I have her is due to her nearly dying after I sold her on.

Basically I have had her since she was chromis sized, when I decided to downgrade she had to be sold on ( I do firmly believe in tangs in correct sized tanks ) so off she went. About 3 months later I went into the LFS that took her and she was paper thin, on her side and covered in whitespot so I got a net, bagged her up, told the LFS owner she was coming back and nursed her back to being fat and healthy... So she is much better off in my little cube being happy than being dead at an LFS. As said above, I do firmly believe in keeping tangs in 5ft plus tanks for their own sanity/wellbeing but in this case I dont want to let her go again.


cheers

leigh :D

[Ivane]

really nice tank :thumbsup:

[kjh]

bring on the clowns, love the the aqaurium

[craigg]

Thankyou