Thanks for the complements. Here are the answers to some of the questions that have been asked.
The sandbed is about 5" deep and does not include a plenum. I did, however, bury a shelf made from plastic eggcrate about 1.5" below the top of the sandbed to keep fish from burrowing too deep and to support the rockwork. The eggcrate shelf does NOT include any screening so that worms and critters can easily move through the sandbed.
The sandbed comprises about 45% Home Depot sand, 45% ESV oolitic sand, and about 10% Caribsea Special Flor reef sand. It was seeded with about 30# of live sand from 2-3 LFS, and a sandbed fauna kit and "mud" from ??? (that mail order place in Indiana). About 1/3 of the sand was originally part of a deep sandbed in a refugium connected to my previous reef tank (which was a 2 tank system, a 65 gal display tank connected to a 40 gal refugium/sump).
Live rock is approximately 1/4 Tonga branch and 3/4 Fiji, which was bought at LFS's and Harbour Aquatics (in Valporaiso, Ind). The Tonga branch was added first by leaning pieces against the back wall of the tank every 6-8". The largest pieces of Fiji were then placed on the Tonga branch so as to span between them. Shelf rock would also work. This enabled me to keep most of the Fiji off of the sandbed, and to leave lots of areas below and behind the rock work for fish, critters and water circulation. The smaller pieces of Fiji and any remaining pieces of Tonga branch were then added to create some ridges and crevices in the rockwork.
As for filtration, I am using a Berlin style sump made by Nova (drilled and partitioned to my specs). An ETS 750 dual stack skimmer driven by a Iwaki 30RLT pump is connected to one end of the sump (adjacent to the input lines from the tank). 2 Iwaki 40RXLT pumps are connected to the other end of the sump, and serve as the return pumps. These pumps are turned down slightly because the 2 1" drains (standard on Oceanic reef ready tanks) cannot quite handle the full flow of the return pumps. The return pumps return the water to the tank through 4 return lines, 2 standard return lines at the upper rear corners of the tank, and 2 return lines that extend down the rear wall of the tank and exit at about mid-height so as to direct flow through the rock work.
I have recently added a couple of power heads at the ends of the tank for added circulation. As my sps colonies have grown, circulation seems to have decreased. In the near future, I will be adding a wavemaker to run these power heads.
I am also running a calcium reactor (Koralin 1501). The reactor was able to maintain cal and alk until a few months ago. It now is having a hard time keeping up with my growing sps colonies. Accordingly, I have been using Kalkwasser for all my top-off water for the past 2-3 months. Eventually, I will probably get a larger reactor (and put the Koralin on my FOWLR tank).
I dose Kent's Coral-vite, iodine, and strondium weekly.
To be honest, I only do water changes rarely (maybe once every 3-4 months). I don't like to do them because they expose some of the corals near the top of the tank to air. I lost a beautiful bird's nest because of this. However, to be on the safe side, I plan to do them more often. But they will probably be limited to monthly 15% water changes.
Mike Milz
