Did anybody here start out with reef?

[phi delt reefer]

i've never had any pets or even a fish tank growing up.

i did buy my daughter a betta tank to keep her happy while i spent a year building my reef system.

i went live in july 2011 and am already keeping sps. My advice, wait the 6 months like everyone says before getting into sps. I put SPS in like 2 months after my tank cycled and it barely grew. Now its finally taking off but my tank went through some disgusting algae outbreaks and two serious month long dino blooms. If i wasnt so deep into my tank financially i would have tore it down but i am glad i kept it.

I dont mess with my tank too much now that i have it dialed in. I have lots of live rock/bio media - filter socks - powerful skimmer and lots of flow. Lots of fish help as well for SPS love to eat fish poop. I only do a 10% water change once every one or two weeks and havent had a nitrate or phosphate issue. And i feed heavy and my tank is heavily stocked.

stick with it - like Mike said - Rome wasnt built in one day

[Reef Pilot]

I inherited a reef tank, when we moved into a new house just over a year and a half ago. I made the usual rookie mistakes early on, and have now learned to have more patience.

The old display tank, though, is very, very mature (like been running for 10+ years), and was very overgrown with softies and LPS, and algae and aiptasia.

I set up another big tank downstairs, (and have a couple spare QT/refugium tanks, too. So now I am moving my upstairs livestock downstairs, so I can clean the sand and live rock. My plan is to convert to SPS in my upstairs display tank once everything is set up and working properly.

Right now am still battling high nitrates (around 20 ppm) even after cleaning the live rock and sand. And this is despite running bio pellets for 6+ months.

I actually got my nitrates down from a peak high of 100, to about 20 just with the bio pellets and MB7. Really cleaned up all the algae too. Then I worked on cleaning the sand and rearranging the live rock (and added some new rock too after curing), but the nitrates are persisting at around 20. P04 is hanging around .2 or .3, too. Still not running GFO though.

I think it would have been easier and faster for me, if I had started with a new tank. I think my live rock has a big build up of N03 and P04 which is taking a long while to get down. I have not actively rinsed my live rock (didn't want to kill it). But my sand is pretty clean now.