Congratulations to Antoni Martinez on winning TOTM for October 2009 with his colourful reef garden!

Antoni is known as busterant on the RTAW Forums and you can read more about his tank in his Tank Journal .

Introduction

The history of Fish and me began with a small 80L Jebo Tank in which I kept a Ghost Fish and few Small Chichlids. My Unfortunate luck with Chichlid breeding led to upgrading my Jebo tank to a 3 x 18 x 14 which was a breeding ground for Chichlids. Every time I would go into the aquarium shop to buy stock I was amazed at the Marine section but was always put off by the time and dedication that was involved in maintaining such a tank. After growing tired of cleaning algae and hundreds of baby fish out of the tank, I decided to give Marine a go. A close mate had already taken the plunge and gave me some of his hand-me-downs to make the initial cost not so painful. My first tank was a 4 x 18 x 16 sumpless pain!
 
Once I started I couldn’t but help wanting more space and more equipment. 16 months into my 4 x 18 x 16 I decided to upgrade to my current 4 x 2 x 2 which has been running for close to 2 years now.

Current Setup

With cost always a concern, I decided to upgrade to a 4 x 2 x 2 and build my own stand and hood and sump from my old 3 foot Chichlid tank.
With a whole bunch of hints from RTAW and great advice from my LFS, I went about setting up my current tank with centre overflow. There’s nothing too flash about my tank, single Durso with split return. It has never missed a beat besides having a snail shell stuck in it!
The tank was made high enough to make viewing easy from a standing position. The stand is just over 1m tall and is made out of Treated Pine and MDF. All areas have a minimum of 3 coats of undercoat and up to 6 coats of high gloss, Ivory White acrylic paint. Piano hinges where used on both the hood door and cabinet doors.
The original setup consisted of an RO NW100 Skimmer which did fit within the Sump! I no longer have that luxury since upgrading to a Turbo Beckett Skimmer which now sits outside the tank.
The sump does however allow plenty of room for Media Filters and Reactors, as well as Refugium with DSB and Algae.

Equipment List

Eheim 1262 (Main return)

Laguna 7500 (skimmer pump)

"Turbo" - Becket Skimmer (900mm Tall)

2 x Lumen Bright Mini Reflectors

Tunze TS24 kit with 7095 controller

2 x 12,000 Reeflux 250W Halides

1 x Aquamedic Sulphur Reactor

1 x Aquamedic Hydro Carbonate Reactor

1 x RO Phosphate Reactor (Running Nitrozorb and Phosban)

1 x Jager 300 watt heaters

1 x Tunze Osmolator 

1 x Aqua Flow RO System

Filtration

Heaps of Live Rock! Lost count but most of the tank is full of rock!  There’s a 3 chamber sump with the first chamber housing the skimmer pump, then bubble trap, into refugium, into return. A small RO pump feeds the Phosphate Filter, which also supplies the Sulphur Reactor which in turn feeds into the Hydro carbonate Reactor. This has a drip rate of about 2 drips per second. I change the filter media once every 3 months.

Maintenance

Clean glass 1 or 2 times each week.

Empty & clean skimmer every 1-2 Weeks

30% Water changes with NSW every 3-4 Weeks

Fill up Top Up Bin with RO once a week.

Lighting

So I get to see a little bit of my tank between my work hours and travel I have all my lights set to come on at once.
 

12:30pm Metal Halides ON

8:30pm Metal Halides OFF

12:30pm Sump Light ON

8.30pm Sump Light OFF

(Tunze Pumps also set to Night Mode)

Fish

Yellow Tang

Blue Tang

Purple Tang

Powder Brown Tang

Foxface

1 x Perc Clown

Mandarin

2 x Coral Gobies

Magenta Wrasse

6 x Chromis

Sailfin Tang

Inverts

Heaps of mature Acropora crabs and shrimp

Trochus snails by the hundreds!

1 x Coral Banded Shrimp

5 x Peppermint Shrimp

Turbo snails

Burnt Sausage

3 x Anemones (Bleached/Red/Green)

Corals

4 x Acans (Orange/Green/Pink/Purple) 

Hammer coral (Euphyllia Ancora)

3 x Clams

1 x White Tip Leather

3 x Pocillopora (Pink/Purple/Green)

5 x Montis (Superman/Green/Purple/Multi)

Green Dallas Stag

Blue Acro Stag

Purple Acro Stag

Purple with green polyp Acro

MORPHS BY THE HUNDREDS (Green/Purple/Orange/Blue/Purple with blue dots/Blue with orange dots/Dark green/Red)

Rhodactis (Multi colour orange/Purple/Bright orange/Bright green/Fluoro green/Yellow rims)

Ricordia (Fluoro orange/Green/Blue/Purple)

Pink Birds Nest

Flower Coral

Zoos (Fluoro green/Teal/Orange/Khaki/Pink/Purple with yellow/red/green/bright pink/multi)

Fluffy (Purple/Multi)