Sean's Waterbox 130.4 Mixed Reef Build

Nice build. Way to follow the playbook on quarantine and taking your time!
 
Nice build. Way to follow the playbook on quarantine and taking your time!

Thank you! Definitely takes time. There are some vendors popping up that Humblefish from Reef2Reef pulled together selling prequarantined fish now as well. I’m going to give them a try at some point.
 
Rented an Apogee 510 from BRS to test the DT PAR. See results below from my initial test. My game plan was always to have the top, flat shelf be an SPS shelf so I'm working on testing / figuring out what settings are needed. Seems like most people are shooting for 250-350 for average SPS. What do you guys suggest and what have you seen success with overall?

DT PAR Testing Picture1.jpg
 
Last edited:
Depends on what your trying to achieve in terms of SPS. I have a quite a few pieces that like the 500+ range.
 
I'm still experimenting with my radions. Right now I'm trying the AB+ along with a short duration of 100% intensity for a few minutes in the middle of the day. I'll let you know how it goes.
 
After I finished my PAR testing at all the different levels, I decided to put some charts together for future reference of placing corals and working light levels up for the future Acro garden! Time to get some more frags going!

60% / 70% / 80% PAR
DT PAR Testing - 60%, 70%, 80% Comp Picture1.jpg


90% / 100% PAR Levels
DT PAR Testing - 90%, 100% Comp Picture1.jpg
 
Time will tell but probably going to start working up from 60% to the 75-80% mark to start and see where it goes from there.
 
It worked great for me, only thing is it killed my urchin as a heads up.

Awesome to hear. I’m almost two weeks in dosing it and I’m starting to see progress already. Heard it really starts working 3-4 weeks in.
 
Hi Sean, I'm looking to run my 130.4 sump in the basement and looking for the conversion plumbing parts. On one of your post (R2R) you said you bought (1) 25mm and (2) 32mm slip by slip unions and used only the bottom half of the unions to adapt to Waterbox plumbing. Where did you get the unions at? I saw that BRS had the pipe conversion parts, but didn't see unions. Thanks!
 
Hi Sean, I'm looking to run my 130.4 sump in the basement and looking for the conversion plumbing parts. On one of your post (R2R) you said you bought (1) 25mm and (2) 32mm slip by slip unions and used only the bottom half of the unions to adapt to Waterbox plumbing. Where did you get the unions at? I saw that BRS had the pipe conversion parts, but didn't see unions. Thanks!

You want these metric unions. They are the same unions used on Waterboxes and match perfectly. You will still need the BRS conversion fittings as well which will get glued into the new replacement half of the metric unions. You will then go standard plumbing from there. Let me know if you have any other questions and good luck!

 
Time for a little tank update video. I’ve been adding SPS for the past few weeks and everything is going well. The live sales for Jason Fox, Top Shelf and WWC sucked me in big time... but at least we have some sticks starting finally!!

 
Time for a little tank update video. I’ve been adding SPS for the past few weeks and everything is going well. The live sales for Jason Fox, Top Shelf and WWC sucked me in big time... but at least we have some sticks starting finally!!


Looks good, frag farmers market in a few weeks. 60 coral vendors, just saying.
 
Looks good, frag farmers market in a few weeks. 60 coral vendors, just saying.

Yes, I was looking forward to it but I’m going to be in Vegas for the first NXL paintball tournament of the year. Very disappointed I’ll miss that. Any other local shows on the books? Thanks!
 
Yes, I was looking forward to it but I’m going to be in Vegas for the first NXL paintball tournament of the year. Very disappointed I’ll miss that. Any other local shows on the books? Thanks!
We'll be having one in September.
 
I'm realizing it has been an awful long time since I updated the build thread with everything else going on so wanted to check in and give an update. The last 3-4 months have been crazy to say the least.

I have added about 40 frags, mostly SPS, to the system over the last 3-4 months and everything has been going really well. I am seeing really good growth on all corals and a steady increase in Alk uptake which is always a good sign. Making that Geo CRX reactor work finally!

I had some major fish disease hit which must have come in on a frag of some sort even though I was extremely careful to dip and not transfer any water when adding corals. My Whitetail Bristletooth started showed signs of small white dots on fins and was riding / scratching the glass. I noticed it pretty quickly but it spread very fast. I ordered a fish trap and moved my fish over to QT as soon as possible. After reviewing everything with the guys on the Humeblefish forums, it was determined that I was probably dealing with Uronema, Brook and possibly velvet. I tried a few different treatments but eventually went with a freshwater dip and 30 days of copper, prazi in water column every 48 hours and fed prazi / focus infused frozen twice a day during the month and it has cured all problems. Fish were moved to a sterile QT tank for 30 day observation after treatment as well. Lost a lot of my fish to this outbreak but was able to save my Whitetail Bristletooth Tang, yellow tang, (1) anthias and my bangai cardinal. All fish are back into the DT and doing very well. See link below for additional information.
https://humble.fish/community/index.php?threads/disease-identification-help.940/#post-14288

I am still battling the red turf algae. At this point, I had tried Vibrant for 3 months as step #1 with no luck against it. Water parameters are perfect and have stayed perfect throughout. Step #2 was to add (5) Mexican Turbo snails / restart refugium. Step #3 was to try Tuxedo urchins.

I have been working on setting up a custom frag tank that will be connected into the main display sump.

With all that said, I have been working on setting up and launching a YouTube channel called Hurdbird's Reef to track progress of the tank, build projects, etc and will be looking into expand some other areas as well. Stay tuned for more information on the channel and for some channel launch raffles over the next few weeks! Follow along on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram.

See below for a quick time lapse I ran on the tank last week. I have wanted to do this for a while. I love to see the movement of the reef and the lights ramping down.

Happy reefing!

 
Upcoming Events

April 21, 2024
Paul B
Club Meeting

Back
Top