[Arok3000]

Andy's 65 gallon reef

Hi! I'm Andy.
A few of the local guys will know me from picking up supplies or buying/trading/selling frags or equipment, but I never really got around to posting anything about my tank.

I'll start with a little background.
I had kept freshwater for a while, and still have a 75 gallon on the go. I had always wanted to start a reef but I'm one of those people who needs to research something so thoroughly that I could write a book on it before I actually jump in head first.
So I started small with a few different tanks, some of which even carried over to my current tank.

The 20 gallon long

This was my first attempt at actually putting saltwater into an aquarium. This actually lasted with me for a couple of years. I actually used a standard tank at first, and then swapped everything over into a newly built, rimless tank with overflows in the back. I was pretty happy with this tank, except that my little 10 gallon sump would overflow about ½ gallon in the event of a power outage. I was fixin' to fix that eventually.




The 5 gallon pico

I'm also a member of Nano-reef, and participated in a year long pico-reef challenge in one of the forums. It was an interesting experience and a very fun little tank. In the end I had to take it down and merged everything into my 20 gallon.





The 65 gallon

...and then, I moved into a new apartment.
I had automated much of the 20 gallon as much as possible to alleviate the stress involved with my work schedule and the necessity to be out of town/province for extended periods of time.
This compounded ten fold when I moved. I had a few tanks strewn about my living room with some miscellaneous equipment around. I had only been in my new place 4 days when I started my new job.
Unfortunately the first thing I did at my new job was spend 2½ weeks in Ontario, a week in PEI, and followed immediately by a week in Saskatchewan. My girlfriend helped out all she could, but I came back to a terrible mess, with many corals in bad shape, severe algae outbreaks, a few items perished and a couple pumps had even failed on me. All this and I hadn't even gotten the tank onto the stand.

So I figured it was time to step into a slightly larger tank.
In retrospect, I would have liked to have gone to a 4 foot tank, like a standard 75, but for space concerns I decided to get a 3 foot 65 gallon.
I am excited however to finally have a tank that is starting to become quite stable, which until this point I always seemed to struggle keeping some parameters in check. I have a bit of diatoms outbreak still, and that might continue for a bit since I added 20 pounds of dry rock, but it is receding and I hope things start looking quite well soon.
It's a work in progress now, and it looks very much like a spread out frag tank at the moment, but I'm patient enough to see it fill in.

A couple of the corals in there and some full tank shots.






And this is how I'm going to do all my full tank shots now, just for fun!