Inocense's Bio Cube 29g Thread

I

Inocense

New member
12/30/13
I found a used 29 Gallon Coralife BioCube.

Upgrades
-RapidLED Coralife Biocube 29 Retrofit Kit (24 LED) (non-dimmable)
-Coralife S-1000 265GPH Pump

I brought it home along with some established aquarium water (parameters checked good per LFS), live rock and live sand from previous owner.

I completely emptied the aquarium and cleaned it for 4+ hours (ugh).
*Before and after photo's shown.

I purchased CaribSea Arag-Alive Special Grade sand & 20 pounds of CaribSea South Seas Base Rock from DrsFosterSmith that will be going into the tank with a couple pieces of previous owners live rock. (I will not be using his sand because it is very fine.) Although I have been throwing the idea around about purchasing a bag of the Fiji Pink Carib Sand and mixing some in with the Special Grade.

Previous owner spliced into the Coralife wiring with the RapidLED wiring and the standard light switches on the top of the aquarium no longer work.


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01/10/14
I did the pre-maintenance on the SpectraPure unit last night and within no time I was running water through it. 150 on TDS meter out of tap, 008 on TDS meter through RO and 0 TDS all the way through RODI!.. I am pretty happy with that!..

Although I did find out that my water pressure is less than optimal but I am still within the "green" on the pressure gauge. Gauge is at about 40-42 which means I am not pushing as much water out of the system, not as efficient. But I am not willing to spend another $130 on a booster pump, so 40-42 it's going to be!

01/14/14
Looks like I have my very own Feather Duster!!!!..

That is the only thing that I can see that made it through, that and a couple tiny snails.

I put the rock in while the tank was half filled and completely cloudy so I have to rearrange things quite a bit..

Here are the new pics!..

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01/17/14
Found a couple Aiptasia on my LR, killed two using hot lime juice.

Newest pic of tank...

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02/04/14
Here are some update photo's of the tank that I took today.. I purchased a CUC from reefcleaners and had some issues.. Many of the snails were DOA. Probably half or more.. About a million tiny tiny dwarf cerith's lived I think, most don't move much so I am not sure if they are going to make it or if they just like to lay around in the sand..

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As you can see, I bought some Red Gracilaria to add a little bit of color and some flow to the tank. That is about all that is new aside from the clean up crew and obnoxiously large bristle worm that I spotted some time ago.. (It grew... a lot...) The blue legged hermit's are doing ok. I purchased 6 and a week or so later I can only find 3 or 4.. I found one in the tank dead, he was out of his shell floating around and another I found running around without a shell.. This only lasted so long apparently because I came back to find him dead also a couple hours later.. One of my hermit's traded up today and found a new larger shell from one of the snails that died.. So that was interesting to see.. lol..

Still no ammonia spike and today is 3 weeks up and running.. Hmmm.. Did I get lucky?.... Nitrates, Nitrites & Ammonia are all at 0.

My favorite thing in my tank is still my feather duster and I am STILL fighting tiny aiptasia nems that keep popping up.. Never ending.... ugh..

Will keep testing my parameters.. Maybe in a few weeks I will add something that can swim if all goes well..

02/10/14
Alright.. Red Gracilaria is gone.. It bleached out on me and when I attempted to move it to a more shaded spot to see if my lights were the issue it broke apart into 30 pieces.. So I pulled what I could out while it was floating around..

So my next main question is this.... And this may be for those people running LED's in their cubes...

This is the LED retro fit that I have in my tank and it is NOT dimmable...
http://www.rapidled.com/coralife-biocube-29-retrofit-kit-24-led-non-dimmable/

My tank is 29 gallons.. When I have my white's on it is a mix of blues/whites.. (8 white LED's and 4 Blue LED's)

So my question is.. How long do I leave the lights on being that I cannot currently dim my LED's?

What schedule should I try and create for my white's to be on and then for my (only) blue's as they are on separate plugs.

Right now I only have snails, hermit's and rock in the tank. In the next couple of days I will put a few peppermint shrimp in there and then try some Zoa's eventually..
 
03/09/14
It's been awhile! A few changes have taken place which include me pulling two of the peppermint shrimp out of the tank. They were just too aggressive and crazy for my liking. They not only ate all my feather dusters and anything within tubes, but they also constantly attacked my nassarius snails. There are a couple in my tank without "noses"... :-/

On 02/25 I added a Neon Dottyback. Very cool pretty fish with a great personality. He has taken up architecture.. lol.. He is digging a little cave for himself under one of my pieces of LR. He grabs a couple pieces of sand from within, turns around, swims out and spits the sand outside of this cave. Call me crazy but he doesn't seem to like "getting caught" doing it.. If he notices you watching him, he quickly stops and swims elsewhere.. lol.. I took a short video of this digging behavior...

http://youtu.be/pHuWQM0T3LI

Btw.. Everything to this point seems to be getting along, including the peppermint shrimp, the dottyback the nassarius snails and the bristle worm... :-/ Odd...

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..........
Fast forward to yesterday...
03/08

I went to purchase a Tail Spot Blenny at the LFS today which are almost impossible to find btw. And I came home with not only the Blenny, but also a Falco Hawkfish. The Hawkfish sold himself because he seemed to be "breaking up" some conflicts in the tank he was in and I was a little worried about the Dottyback and the Tail Spot since the Dotty is listed as semi-aggressive and most people say they can go either way. Can be a nightmare of a fish or can be completely well behaved..

Fish added.. Within 3 hours.. Carnage.. Thankfully the victim was NOT one of my fish...

http://youtu.be/vB1OxFuwa7s

Now, down one peppermint shrimp which is fine by me because I was planning on pulling them out within the next couple of weeks anyway. I am worried about them once I add coral to the tank which I am going to do within the next week or so. The Hawkfish doesn't seem to bother the "other" Peppermint shrimp, thus far anyway..

The first day with the new fish aside from the shrimp issue... Went OK.. The Hawk chased the Dottyback around a bit when the Dotty got near a certain rock that the Hawk seemed to favor but didn't seem to do any damage to him.

Then, the odd behavior began...

Tailspot which is listed as PEACEFUL everywhere you look slipped into his hole in the rock with his head hanging out and every single time the Dottyback passed it he nipped at him pretty good. Enough to remove scales.. And the odd behavior is that it seemed like the Dottyback liked it, he would torment the Tailspot by swimming and stopping directly over his head until the Tail Spot snapped at him once again. The Dottyback did this for HOURS. I tried to chase either of them away with a net, no dice. I also went in there and moved the rock all around hoping that the Dotty would just leave him be, nope, didn't work either. Same thing, over and over and over.. Mind you, when the Hawk goes near the Tail Spot's hole, Tail Spot doesn't care.. Those 2 get along brilliantly. As a matter of a fact, when Hawk sees Dotty over by the Tail Spot's "den", the Hawk will swoop in and move the Dotty along.. Almost as if protecting the Tail Spot..

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All my water perimeters have been good. I did notice a rise in ammonia slightly today. Probably due to the two new fish..

I still haven't worked out my light situation. I am planning to get a little manual plug in timer for the "blue circuit" and I will plug that into the power strip.. This should work and solve my issues for now. I definitely want to do this BEFORE I put the coral in there though as I want to have a steady photo period for them.

I had tons of temp swings with my Jager heater and I was sick of adjusting it constantly so I decided a new heater was the way to go for me. The dial on the Jager was just a PITA.

I decided on the Cobalt Aquatics Neo-Therm 100w heater and over the past couple of days it has held things nice and steady.

As you can see from the photo's, my rocks have greened up quite a bit with some nice coraline spots. No algae issues so far. I did have a run in with some Colonial Hydroids and Aiptasia! Mind you, the shrimp seemed to eat EVERYTHING but the aiptasia.. Just little ones sprouting up every couple of days, after the introduction of the shrimp I seen another one creep up a week or so later, I left it in there for a few days and the shrimp didn't touch it, they didn't touch the hydroids either mind you... I pulled the rock out with the hydroids and I super glue the heck out of them, so far so good. It has been a few days.. Will keep an eye on the area.

Thanks everyone for all of your help and thank you guys for putting up with me in chat.. :P
 
Looking good! Tailspots are weird like that. Eric (Poidog) had one that wanted nothing more than to kill his Helfrichi fire-fish when it first got introduced. All the fish will get used to each other though and be A-O-K! Sweet hawk too!
 
Thanks Slimm!!!...

Skull, yeah it is just odd since as I said, Tail Spot's are listed as peaceful.. Well when it had the dottybacks face in it's mouth, it didn't look too peaceful to me!!.. heh..

Tail Spot jumped over the rear wall this morning.. I found him in the rear pump tank chamber.. ugh.. I seen him fly across the tank startled about something and then I didn't see him anymore.. Ten minutes later I looked more thoroughly for him and he was in the back, thankfully he didn't swim down to the bottom where the pump is at. I have a cube and I wouldn't think that this would be an easy thing to do since there isn't much of a gap between the light fixture and the rear tank wall which sits about an inch or so above the water line..
 
Inocense said:
Tail Spot jumped over the rear wall this morning.. I found him in the rear pump tank chamber.. ugh.. I seen him fly across the tank startled about something and then I didn't see him anymore.. Ten minutes later I looked more thoroughly for him and he was in the back, thankfully he didn't swim down to the bottom where the pump is at. I have a cube and I wouldn't think that this would be an easy thing to do since there isn't much of a gap between the light fixture and the rear tank wall which sits about an inch or so above the water line..
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I bought a TINY snowflake eel once that did the same thing. Managed to make it through the tiny gap where the light cord comes over the back wall. Ended up catching him with a size 0 barbless fish hook and some krill. If the tailspot is in one of the small chambers you can stick a 1/2" siphon hose in there and just suck all the water (and probably the tailspot) into a bucket.
 
SkullV said:
Looking good! Tailspots are weird like that. Eric (Poidog) had one that wanted nothing more than to kill his Helfrichi fire-fish when it first got introduced. All the fish will get used to each other though and be A-O-K! Sweet hawk too!
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Haha. I remember that little bastard.
 
Hawk is still beating up my Dotty.. Not horribly but he needs to chase him every single time he sees him. The hawk also got a hold of my last peppermint shrimp and ate em.. So clearly, no more shrimp!.. heh.. Came home and caught him swimming around with a shrimp leg sticking out of his mouth.. Quiet comical I must say.. !
 
Update.. A couple days ago I decided that it was time for my Hawkfish to go unfortunately. Although I LOVED his personality, he was just stressing out my dottyback too much and I was not sure how he was going to react towards future fish. Thankfully the LFS I purchased him from bought him back and offered a partial refund because I didn't purchase him that long ago.

I decided to finally get a couple clowns.. :)

I also have a few new additions to the tank thanks to my very generous "reefer" friends here!! THANK YOU Tinman, JayJerk, Slimm & Mai!!!

Here are a few updated photo's:

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This following one was taken just before I pulled Hawk out, so you can still see him in the photo but I wanted to add the pic of my hammer.. :)

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Thanks Ted!! :)

I got them from Ocean Design Aquarium when I returned my bastid Falco Hawkfish.. lol.. He had a few different pairs. I ended up breaking up a couple pairs for the two clowns that I wanted.. Now I am dealing with the dominance issues.. Heh.. But hopefully will pull through!.. :)
 
SkullV said:
I bought a TINY snowflake eel once that did the same thing. Managed to make it through the tiny gap where the light cord comes over the back wall. Ended up catching him with a size 0 barbless fish hook and some krill. If the tailspot is in one of the small chambers you can stick a 1/2" siphon hose in there and just suck all the water (and probably the tailspot) into a bucket.
Click to expand...

My Bluespot Jawfish jumped into the third chamber with the pump in my BioCube. Luckily I got him out without any problems and he hasn't done it since.
 
TangPolice said:
nice save on the Jawfish
Bob

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N900A using Tapatalk
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Definitely! He is my favorite fish and I would hate to lose him. My most amazing save happened a few weeks ago in my 100 Gallon tank. My Flame Angel had jumped and when I found him he felt dry so I was going to dispose of the body but I decided to put him in the water on the off chance he was OK. He didn't move so I took him out and was walking towards the trash can when I decided to try one more time. The second time in the water he slowly started to breath. I was shocked but happy. I have to admit I still didn't expect him to make it though as he was in bad shape and swimming sideways. I put him in an egg crate enclosure so that I would be able to find the body when he died. I went to work bummed out for the day. When I got home I was surprised to find him still alive. A few days later he was 100% back to normal and you can't tell he ever had anything wrong with him. At that point I renamed him to Chuck Norris.
 
Thank you Ed! They are a pair of weirdo's thus far.. Very odd behavior.. Normal for a clown I suppose.. :P

They should put a warning label on em though!.. heh
 
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