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December 2004 - Tank of the Month
Damon and Renee Weimer
Check out the PowerPoint presentation on
Damon & Renee's tank by clicking here!
1) Your name, location and occupation. Include how long you have
been an aquarist, how long you have been a WMAS member and how you
heard of our club.
Name: Damon & Renée Weimer
Location: 1043 Mountain Road, Ogden UT
Occupation: Damon USAF active duty, Renée DoD training
instructor
How long have you been in the hobby? One year
How long have you been a member of the club? One year in Jan
05
How did you hear about the WMAS? From Ryan at Aquatic Dreams
2) Describe your tank. Acrylic or glass? Size in dimensions and
gallons. How long has it been set up?
Acrylic / Glass: Acrylic main tank, glass refugium
Size in gallons: 225g main tank, 55g refugium
Dimensions: 8 ft wide, 29 inches tall, 18 inches front to
back
Age: (how long has the system been running) First “birthday,”
December 15th 2004
3) Describe your lighting system, including your photo-period.
Add what you would change if you could.
2 – 48” Aqua Spacelights with 2 - 250w 10k double ended metal
halides and 4 - 24w blue power compact actinics. Photo period:
Actinics come on at 5:30am and stay on until 9:00 pm, Halides come
on at 8:00am and turn off at 8:00pm
4) Describe your filtration system. Include: How deep is your
sand bed, plenum, your skimmer size and model and how long you run
it, your circulation pumps (how many and their size in gallons per
hour), your sump/refugium including Reverse Daylight, biowheels and
skilters, HOT systems, clean up crew.
4 inch deep sand bed in the main tank, 220 pounds of live rock.
Refugium has very fine sand Euroreef Skimmer CS 6-2, 28” tall
Return pump: Reefio Sequence Dart 3600 GPH attached to 2 SeaSwirls.
The sump is a standard 55g divided into 3 sections: Refugium,
Skimmer area, and pump return. The refugium is approximately
25gallons and runs on reverse daylight lighting system. It is
inhabited by 9 types of macroalge, mangrove trees, mysis shrimp,
pods, worms, Sea squirts, sponges, and many unknowns.
Clean-up Crew: About 100 snails of several types (turbos, Astrias,
hitchhikers), 1 sand sifting sea star, 1 collector urchin, 30 Hermit
Crabs (Zebra, blue leg, red leg), Pistol Shrimp, Peppermint shrimp,
Cleaner shrimp, 4 emerald crabs, 1 “Big Red” crab, 5 Acro crabs.
5) What are your maintenance techniques? Include water change
schedule.
Scrape coralline daily. Weekends: Try to kill aptasia, get new coral
frags, re-cement coral frags. Water change – hopefully have the
first one soon! Water top-off accomplished by an automatic float
controlled R/O water feed. We do our best to leave the sand bed
undisturbed leaving the cleaning of it to our clean-up crew.
6) What additives do you use? Kalkwasser, Strontium, Molybdenum,
Iodine, Magnesium, Other
B-Ionic (until we get the CA reactor tuned in)
Marine Essentials
7) Describe your feeding philosophy. Include your schedule, and
what you prefer to feed your system?
Keep ‘em fat and happy!
We feed once daily what they can eat in a couple of minutes. We use
flakes, home-blended mixes (ours and some from other club members)
brine shrimp, frozen mysis, etc. We also use Tahitian blend, golden
pearls, and Cyclop-Eeeze for our corals and filter feeders. As long
as the water parameters stay good, they get whatever they seem to
like.
8) DIY ie, Calcium reactor, stand / hood, skimmer, sump, ect. Any
Do-it-yourself items of interest? Web-sites that you may have
referenced?
We refinished the cabinet from 1970’s panel pieces to
tongue-in-groove pine. After our first move, we decided to split the
stand into 3 pieces (reinforced after reassembly). We chose
downspouts, removable backing, and aquaspace lights so that the tank
can separate two rooms in our future dream home.
9) Stand and Canopy
Wood: Pine
Color: Pine
Special Characteristics: We re-designed the main framework to
allow the 8 foot long stand to be broken down into 3 pieces for easy
moving.
10) Items of interest: Favorite or unusual Fish, coral, or
invertebrate
Favorite Fish: Damon: “China Doll,” the Mandarin Goby
Renée: Clown gobies (3 of them)
Favorite Coral: Damon: Peaches & Cream Acro Renée: Yellow
gorgonians & yellow sarcophyton (leather)
Favorite Polyps: Damon: Woods Polyps Renée: Pink star polyps
Favorite Sponge: The white stringy ones at the bottom, but we
also have clear, orange, and pink
Favorite Crab: Damon: “Gunny” the Hermit Crab Renée:
“Big Red”
Favorite Worm: Christmas Worms
Favorite Clam: Only have one, a Squamosa
11) Can you include a table showing your elemental levels of Ca+,
alkalinity, S.G., temperature, pH and other interesting testables?
Ca+ is 400ppm (not steady yet)
Alk is 13 dKh (not steady yet)
S.G. 1.024
Temp 81 day, 78 night
PH is 8.2 day, 8.1 night (not steady yet)
12) What experiences and challenges have you had with the tank?
Any lessons learned? Is there anything you do differently than
others (or differently than previously)? If so, why?
Alkalinity: did not know it was even important, and lost a
lot of life before sorting it out. If there was one thing I would
recommend, it would be to learn about alkalinity.
Skimmer: We run it at night with our refugium. Our water
parameters are good, so we hope this helps to maintain some of the
good things in the tank.
Support your LFS! One day, they might save your assets!
Spending too much money: an ongoing epidemic for which Renée attends
monthly WMAS
meetings! With that in mind, I do sometimes wish we had a Neptune
controller.
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