The Minimalist Reef: Phase 2

I am moving from a large 340L oak tank with sump to a stylish, modern and minimalist UNS 90LA All In One tank. In my last post I talked about the steps I took to setup the new UNS 90LA tank to a point where the tank was wet. In this phase, I’ll cover moving livestock across — and what didn’t make the cut.

As anyone who has had a reef tank before will know, nothing good happens quickly and everything takes much longer than you expect.

Week 1 — Ghost feeding and bacteria dosing

A quiet week in terms of changes, I continued to test the water while ghost feeding a small pinch of flake feed per day. After speaking to my LFS I also dosed NT Labs Satus as per the instructions which is 5ml per 50L on the first day followed by a week of 5ml per 100L per day.
For this small tank it worked out at roughly 4 ml/day.
Now that I have the bottle I think I will add a tiny amount when doing weekly water change so that it doesn’t go to waste.
This was done to build up the beneficial bacteria in the water. Honestly I have no evidence that Satus did anything but nothing went wrong so maybe that it is praise in itself.

Week 1 was a fairly boring stage, I was desperate to put some fish and coral in the tank but managed to resist the urge.

Week 2 — Anemone first

Added a small anemone. I hoped that this would give the anemone time to wander around the tank to find its happy spot before adding anything else to the tank. For those that have not had an anemone before it may help to understand that they can walk around the tank using their one “foot” so if they are not happy in their spot they will walk around to find a better spot. In my experience they only walk around at night.
When an anemone walks around it can sting and damage everything in its path.
I hoped that doing this early before adding anything else will reduce the chance of my tank being ruined by an anemone that goes rogue. Full disclosure, this didn’t work because it’s still moving around a few weeks later so I am not putting anything on the rock structure where the anemone is placed.

Week 3 — Clownfish move + first corals

Moved the clownfish to their new tank with new anemone. This was nerve racking. I love this pair of clownfish because I have had them for over 6 years and really wanted them to survive the move.
Also moved a few corals across to the new tank……. kept far away from the anemone.
This won’t be everyone’s preferred method, but because temperature and salinity matched closely, I net-transferred to minimise time in a bucket. Drip acclimating is usually the best method to move fish\coral between tanks.
Before moving the clowns I checked salinity and temp to make sure that the new and old tank matched, this was done to keep the stress on the fish minimal, giving them the best chance of survival. I also used some water, rock and sand from the old tank during setup.

Week 4 — Full coral move (and the livestock-catching struggle)

Already a month in and not much has changed so it was time for some action! All corals that are being kept were moved to the new tank.
I also wanted to move the fish but after hours of trying to trick fish into the net I gave up. At this point there was still lots of rock and some coral in the old tank, giving the fish too waaaay too many hiding nooks that I couldn’t get a net anywhere near. Its amazing how quick a cleaner shrimp can move when it doesn’t want to end up in a net!

I couldn’t remove the rockwork yet because it was all attached together with reef cement. The old anemones were too big for the new tank and I was too scared to try and scrape them off the rock.

Week 5 — Trade-in day and teardown

Now things get serious, All corals and fish not being kept are sold/traded in at a local fish store. Last few fish are moved across to new tank. Old tank is broken down.

Kept and moved to the UNS 90LA

Fish & inverts

• 2× Clownfish
• 1× Chromis
• 1× Cleaner shrimp

Corals

• Torch coral (small/medium colony — kept)
• Ultra Candy Cane
• Ricordea mushrooms
• Birdsnest
• Stylophora
• Scrolling Pavona

Sold / traded (did not move to the UNS 90LA)

Fish

• Tomini tang

Corals

• Green zoa rock (large)
• Torch coral (large colony — traded)

Anemones

• 2× Large anemones (traded — too big for the new tank)

New Purchases funded by sales/trade-in

• Utter Chaos frag (large)
• Acan frag (small)

Note: Torch coral appears in both lists — I kept a smaller piece and traded the larger colony.

Packing up the stuff not being kept to be sold was very stressful, I don’t know how people move tanks when moving house!
Torch coral and anemones were put into bags inside a large polystyrene box. The large Zoa rock went into a bucket.
After packing them into the van I drove with the heating on max to make sure they were kept at a decent temperature….on a cold day I arrived ready to sell as a sweaty mess.

Running without an ATO (manual top-off)

Charterhouse Aquatics seem to be the main UK resellers of UNS kit and they seem to be struggling to get UNS stuff in stock. At the time of writing I have been waiting almost 3 months for the ATO to arrive and most stuff is out of stock on their website.
At the moment I am topping up the tank daily, this is getting rather tedious and not something I want to be doing for too much longer. I really hope the ATO arrives soon.
To keep salinity consistent, I made a small pencil mark on the return section and top up to that line twice a day.

What I’d do differently (so far)

Prepare, prepare, prepare.
I was not prepared for the day of selling/trading in the tomini tang and leftover corals. I suggest having everything ready well in advance. I had to run to my LFS to get bags the day before the big move.

Don’t agree early meetups on teardown day
I agreed to meet people early in the morning but breaking down the tank and packing everything up took much longer than I expected which meant I was late. Picking one anemone off a rock took almost an hour!

Testing, testing, testing

I did not test enough. Early on I was testing ammonia, nitrite, nitrate and phosphate two times a week but this quickly dropped to once every two weeks. I did install the Seachem Ammonia Alert, allowing me to be lazy.

Patience
Doing this again, I would wait longer between adding the anemone and adding anything else. Even a few weeks later the anemone is still moving around and I am petrified that it’s going to sting all my lovely corals.