IMMACULATE Saltwater Nano Desk Tank! Greg's Acan Oasis!

what's going on reefers Blaine here if you guys have followed along with our meet the team series here you may have heard about Greg our Dry Goods manager talking about setting up a tank I want to get another tank at home I'm actually going to start up one here on my desk you might be seeing some videos of it here soon but I don't have a tank anymore and I'm really excited to get back in here we are8 months later and today we're going to let Greg take over the channel and talk all about his desk tank let's Dive In [Music] hey there guys it's me Greg again our drag hoods manager over here at topshelf Aquatics 8 months later here I finally have the tank up and running and I'm really excited to show you guys what I've got done um the Tank's gone through a lot of changes over the last probably six months um we we sat dry for a long time but I finally got going and it's at a place that I'm really happy um originally this tank was going to be an aan only tank so kind of an a can garden aans are one of my favorite corals out there so that was originally what I was going to go for um but as you can see it's definitely become more of a mixed Reef now so I have everything from oh I guess looking at I don't have a lot of softies I have some zoas but all sorts of LPS and I'm really starting to get into SPS and that's because of the lighting that I have on here this tank is pushing a lot of power so at my lights are currently at 20% and they're pushing probably over 3 to 400 on Peak on pretty much any part of this tank so I'm definitely getting a lot of light output in here that being said my aans are super fluffy and at the heart of it that's still my favorite part of this tank is all of my aans you can see a bunch of different types from Japanese deep water all the way to aen Lord or hallow insus but there's a lot of things going on in here and I I really wanted to make this tank feel natural kind of mixed in um even though it's all kind of one type of coral or you can see groupings of certain types of coral I want to make it feel kind of natural and sprinkled so at the heart of it I am our Dry Goods manager and a big thing for me with my tank is having all the latest toys now if you look at the tank itself it's actually really basic it's only a 16g ice cap tank and it's glass only so there's no filtration built in it is just a glass box the first thing that we did was we put a vinyl just on the back of the tank and sitting kind of cadd corner on my desk here I almost wish I had done this left hand side as well just because you can just see the wall and the window that sits behind me now after that it's a really big no no in a reef tank I know but I'm running a canister filter and I actually really love it um my tank runs incredibly clean I'm going to flash the numbers up here a little bit later and I cannot get nitrat or phosphate in here I'm lucky if I have five nitrate and 0.1 phosphate so having an LPS tank has actually been kind of hard because I am constantly feeding this thing um but I'm running a CJ canister I really like it and then here's where the dragon manager part comes in so I am running equipment that is rated for much bigger than this tank I have two kessle a360 XS on here and as I mentioned they're running about 20% at Max maybe 30% I've had to dial myself back a little bit because I was starting to bleach up my acros and that's crazy to think but yeah I'm pushing over 400 par any moment which is nice because I can put anything in here that I want that's why I have a clam on my sandbed but it's definitely not the regular and in a nano tank it's definitely unheard of and then the other big thing for me is controllability so we like all of our controllers here at topshelf both hydros and Neptune this was my first time actually experiencing the hydro system fully and I went ahead and got the hydros minnow and an xp8 on here both are really great at keeping a really fine control over my tank now I'm not so worried about temperature and pH cuz I can test my water any time kind of the perk of being in a reef store but it's really helpful because I can dial in my calcium and alkalinity and keep my tank really stable so I do have the hydros controlling everything and then I have a tzi atto on here as well and a UV sterilizer and I think a UV is super important and it's normally overlooked in Nano tanks so as I said I think a UV is super important in all tanks but especially a nano tank and especially with all the man-made Rock and artificial sand that we have nowadays I went through a really bad diet homps Bloom at the beginning of my tank and the UV really helped me out so both with datom and doo it's been a lifesaver now I run my UV on a 12-hour cycle opposite to my light cycle and I find that to be more than sufficient for me and it is just a little aasi 9 watt UV so it works great it's efficient it's Compact and that works really well because this is on my desk so I don't want all of my equipment to take over my desk and that's a big thing for me I want things to be really clean it's another big reason that I use the Kessel as well because I can put the reflector cones on here and I get no really light spillage onto my desk since I'm sitting here at eye Lev with the tank every day I don't want to be blinded constantly by the blue light when I started out the tank I was using Marco Rock and carab live sand but for the most part I'd say this tank was started from a dry state so that marro rock was completely white when we started here I really took some time I wanted this tank to look really good from where I sit every day so if you view my tank dead on or maybe from the side which is more common when someone's coming in or out of my office it doesn't look maybe the best but where you're sitting or where I'm sitting really is going to be the best angle on this tank and tanks it's really hard to get depth so that was something that I really really tried for here and I also kind of taking a look at my Coral placement you can see that I try to put smaller corals up front where we kind of see first closest to me and then as we get further back I try to do larger Coral so like my eilia is all at the back of the tank I also have a nice gorg that's in the back of the tank that really gives some height and then looking at the overhang on my tank it's protruding out towards you again to kind of help that depth now this is kind of easy to do with the Marco Rock because I was able to sit here dry and I probably did this over the course of a week and I just angled The Rock in different ways it's two big rock structures now but this was probably made out of 30 smaller pieces of rock and we used a couple different methods of bonding it together we used a mortar that we use here in house we also used superglue and epoxy so we used a little bit of everything on this rock to make sure that I had a really good secure Bond but I was able to achieve that overhang and the caves and arches that I want wanted out of what was dry rocket and essentially flat dry rock at that so starting out I wanted fish that maybe you wouldn't think of for nano fish and again the really nice thing about working in a store like this is I can kind of cycle fish in and out as I need them so if you look at my fish selection right now it's kind of all over the place I have my stubby Lightning Maroon which is one of my favorite fish I really love lightning Maroons especially the original wild type and I was able to get a really nice stubby lightning so she stayed a little bit smaller so she'd be perfect for this tank she originally was part of a bonded pair from Pro Aquatics and if anyone has had lightning Maroons or really Maroons or even clownish in general you'll know that they don't always stay a mated pair and unfortunately I had to pull my mail out because she just she did not get along with him but I still really like her and she brings a really nice active part to this tank she comes up she sees me every day she interacts with me a lot it's really nice then my favorite fish is a blue star LEP ass now normally they get way too big for a tank this size but I was lucky the one I have in here right now is about 2 in long give or take when I got him he was about half an inch and again that's kind of a perk of working in a fish store is I can cycle through these fish and he's super active it's another great thing that we do our own pods here because I can fill this tank with pods so when I first started out that was one of the first things I put in was a batch of PODS and phto really Kickstart my tank now the strangest fish that you're probably going to see is my fox face and I know I'm going to catch a lot of slack for that one he's not a permanent fixture here we actually put him in last week I was having some issue when I first started the tank it was going to be kind of like a mangrove aan softy and macroy tank if you look at it now there's no macro algae anymore unfortunately fortunately that macro algae really loved this tank and it grew like crazy so it grew a little too crazy it was taking over my rocks it grown over my Coral I had to go through and manually remove it I took the toothbrush in did that good old manual removal and now for the fine details I have the fox face in here and I can say he's done a really good job this is probably the last day he's going to be in here though he's he's done his time and the Tank's looking great but he's got to go and then my other favorite fish that's in here is a Randall's GOI now it's R goby and Pistol pair unfortunately it's very hard to see the pistol from time to time he's a candy caned pistol so very small my rand's goby is fairly active though there's three different entrances that he comes in and out of throughout the day sometimes towards the front of the tank sometimes towards the back so he uses both Rock structures and then I do have one secret fish now I don't know if we're going to be able to get any videos of him in the tank so we might have to get some videos of other ones that we have here in the store so that is my geometric pygmy hawkfish now now he's super Elusive and I only see him once a week but really cool fish and the longer he's been in the tank the longer I get to see him so he went about a month to two months ago he's my most recent addition other than the fox a but he's not permanent and I get to see him mainly when I feed but really first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening so when the lights are first ramping up and ramping down is when I get to see it super cool fish a little elusive but a really great nano fish fish and that's probably something that I don't have a lot of here is really good nano fish so I'd love to hear your guys' opinions and see what your guys' favorite nano fish are so maybe when some of these things out grow my tank I can put some of them in to wrap things up for anyone who's trying to set up a nano tank the biggest piece of advice that I give is go slow it's probably the problem I had here at the beginning I'm very privileged because I can switch out my coral and switch out my fish but I also rush things at the beginning now the tank is looking great here like I said 6 to 8 months in but I definitely go a little bit slower moving forward now that's not to be said that you can't do things a little bit on a quicker speed like adding fish if done properly or starting off with like soft corals or things like that but the key to a really good established reef tank is taking your time and also taking the time to kind of plan out where you're going to put things in your tank and what they're going to look like maybe not now as Rags but when they're grown out in full-size pieces so again scale is a really big thing for me my rock might look a little Barren right now where my SPS is but I know in 6 months or so when it's starting to grow in it's going to look completely different so things like lighting flow frag placement and just kind of overall every part of your tank will mature with time and you're always going to have to make little changes to it so you might have to up or down your light you might have to increase your flow or move your power head and that's okay and it's something that you really have to think about more in a nanot tank than you do in maybe a larger tank say a 50 gallon a 90 gallon 150 gallon and that's kind of the challenge that I really love here is this tank is constantly evolving it's changing since it's so small I kind of get to see that in a rapid scale so what might take days or weeks or even months in a larger tank take minutes or hours or maybe days in a smaller tank here but it's been really fun showing you guys my tank it's definitely one of my favorite things here at topshelf and like subscribe and hit that Bell notification for other videos like this of tanks at top shelf and more [Music]