Cagri Aksay

After keeping a 12G freshwater tank over a year, a 6G saltwater(SW) tank over 6 months, and a long time studying reef keeping online, I finally decided to upgrade to a new 20G SW tank.

I got my setup from a local fish store (LFS) in Bellevue, Saltwater City (Great LFS).  Gave me a very good price for a full reef kit (with 16 lbs of live rock(LR) and even 25G premixed SW).

I filled the tank and added Live Rock(LR) on October 29th. I went bare bottom for this tank, meaning no sand. Tested the water daily. No nitrite/nitrates. After 3 days, my Eclipse 6G SW’s pump broke down and forced me to transfer a clownfish, a red legged hermit, 3 cerith snails and 9lbs of LR. At first I was hesitant to put them in a newly setup tank but I guess it’s fine since I didn’t expect a cycle anyway, with the live rock coming from the 6G and 16lbs fully cured LR from the LFS. They seem to be doing fine after 9 days.

One of the challenges I faced was the high noise and vibration. My setup is in my living room and it is crucial that I have a silent tank. I have an AquaC Remora skimmer, a Danner Mag 3 pump for the skimmer and a Maxi Jet 1200 pump for the spray bar. I moved the pumps around a few times, positioning them in various orientations and padding them with sponges with no luck. Then I got some rubber sheets from Lowe’s and padded the two pumps and the other end of the spray bar. to my dismay I still got the vibrations even though there was no contact between the pumps and the glass whatsoever. I must have re-arranged the pumps 5 or 6 times. When I told Andy at Saltwater City that I was unhappy with the noise, he gave me a sure grip for the maxi jet, free of charge! That miraculously solved the vibration problem for the Maxi Jet, making it whisper quiet. Skimmer’s manual says that the noise level will decrease in a couple of weeks after it “breaks in”. Still, I wanted to muffle it a little bit and I placed a dry towel on top it. That worked and saved me from the noisy break-in period. The only noisemaker left in the Tank, Mag 3, was more challenging to silence. I placed 3 sheets of rubber under it and positioned the skimmer and the clear tubing to force it in place on top of the rubber sheets, which helped with the vibrations  a lot but didn’t get rid of it entirely. Still, it was way better compared to my previous attempts and I was out of ideas. So I left it like that and rearranged my LR for the last time, finally a silent tank.

My other problem was temperature which varied between 82F and 84F. Some say that 84F is not too high if you keep it stable and there are no big swings in temperature but it’s too hot for me. Chillers are very expensive, noisy and out of the question. I read people use cooling fans (those used for computers) to get the temperature down. The fans cause more evaporation, which cools down the water. I didn’t want the small computer fans though, I knew for sure it would have a lot of noise and maybe vibration. So I got a clip on fan, Air King 6″, and hung that on the wall behind the tank, blowing air directly on top of the water. That took the temperature down at least 5 degrees, at which point I could stabilize the temperature with the help of the heater. Since its blades are way larger than the small computer fans, it makes virtually no noise at all. I even turned the fan for the canopy off, since it gets some air from the Air King as well. A little warning about Air King though, its blades are 6″ and with the housing it is 8″ wide and there was no way to clip it on the tank, have the canopy in place and still direct the fan to water surface. It isn’t designed to be used for aquariums. That’s why I hung it on the wall behind. But I suppose this isn’t a problem for larger tanks.

Eggcrate close-up

Eggcrate

Latest full tank shot on October 9th.