WHY WE QUIT REEFING

[@danhogan7321]

Yeah it's brutal man. What ive realized is I just dont have the time and drive to do tests every day and dose. The only thing I can get to grow easily in my tanks are softies like toadstools, GSP, and zoas. Everything else just melts and dies after awhile. If I was to redo I would just get a FOWLR and not waste money on all kinds of fancy equipment for corals.

[@prestonrabe]

Duncan’s seemed to grow well for me but everything slowly fades away. It’s way too cost & time consuming to be so fragile in my opinion. I’m just a lot better at keeping and raising reptiles. I think my equipment wasn’t good enough and can’t justify shelling out the 1000s needed to do so lol.

[@prestonrabe]

Got to the point I was doing so much maintaining and stressing over keeping everything going I couldn’t even enjoy my tank

[@parkycod]

NOOOOOOOO!!!!! NEVER and I mean NEVER stop reefing! YESTERDAY YOU SAID TODAY!

[@prestonrabe]

sorry to disappoint parks :/

[@swizy8.8.8]

Your not running your tank right that’s why you keep having problems

[@prestonrabe]

Good thing it’s sold

[@SnipeEasyC2015]

Do away with the freshwater filtration. Bubblers and sponge filters are not really the way to go for saltwater. Especially a reef tank. I pat your nitrates and phosphates are off thr charts. Too little rock, not even real aragonite sand. I bet your tank is very young. A saltwater tank is immature under 1 year of age. And isnt fully mature till around a year. But this tank lacks proper filtration to even mature. Do more research before trying again next time will be more successful.

[@prestonrabe]

It’s not a sponge filter but an AIO. Ill honestly never try again this hobby is way too frail and expensive for my liking.

[@prestonrabe]

I was also told the sand didn’t matter

[@karma307]

​@@prestonrabe When you educate yourself about the hobby it becomes easy to maintain it, you don't have anything that could be called difficult, having only fish, soft corals is easy and of course with 500 dollars you don't do anything, but from experience I have an 800 liter reef fish tank and practically alone I add amino acids 3 times a week and feed the fish, everything else is automatic and currently for me it has become something easy because until you are a year old your tank will not be stable and mature, when it is it becomes easier to maintain it, too Sand does matter, I mean in reef only aragonite is used if you are going to use sand.

[@prestonrabe]

i actually started off with a full reef tank, i invite you to go watch all of my reef content for more context so you can understand what happened! in my opinion this hobby is way to expensive and fragile, like stated above. i don't have the time for constant maintaining and nor do i want to shell out a full cars worth of money on equipment to run the tank for me. its all way too much for fish, coral and a tank that could crash and die due to anything. if sand matters how do bare bottom reef tanks work?

[@karma307]

@@prestonrabe That's why I said that it matters if you want to apply it, I say it because aragonite is the natural sand on beaches, when you put sand that is not in accordance with the hobby you can contaminate it with elements that you don't want, but of course it works well without sand, that's better. You have to put one that is not aragonite, on the other hand, bare tanks have a lot of rock or have an advanced filtration system in the sump to compensate because otherwise you would have less surface area for bacteria and that translates to more nitrates and phosphates, in my opinion. In this case I prefer a combination between a modern tank and an old school tank, that is, I have a lot of rock, aragonite sand with no more than 5 cm, a lot of flow that removes all the dirt and below I have some special rocks called matrix for the bacteria and algae refugium , also a large skimmer, a carbon reactor and I use a foam that is used to fill pillows for mechanical filtration that I change weekly or twice a week. I have 15 fish and many corals, everything translates to that I have nitrates at 3 and phosphates at 0.02. In fact, in my project I focused a lot on biological filtration so as to avoid using phosphate and nitrate resins, which is an additional expense that I would not like to have. Such is my filtration that once I went on a trip for 4 days, the fish did not eat for 4 days and I did not dose amino acids, when I returned I saw some resentful corals, I measured and saw the nitrates and phosphates at 0. I have to feed a lot to Avoid that and my fat fish are happy. Fun fact I have a quoyi parrotfish that is very rare to find in stores, it is the only parrotfish that is reefsafe.