8 Things I will NEVER Use Again For a Reef Tank 

That's funny because I've also tried and discontinued using most of what seemed like trend items. It always comes down to good old-fashioned tank maintenance. Remember when sand reactors were the latest thing😅

I feel the same us you on all your points, this was a verry good video and I think it is of great interes for a lot of the new reefers out there

Thanks for sharing. Always interesting to hear experiences on equipment that works or does on work for someone.

Liferock was also a nightmare for me! Over the last year I've replaced more than half of it with live ocean rock and the tank is finally thriving!

Great video, showing how different processes and gear affected successful results in reef keeping.

you hit so many great points

Thanks so much for sharing. I stared with dry rock and have been having a struggle to get it balanced. It has been up and running for a little over 2 years and coraline is thriving but I had had every algae issue. I think it’s time to seed my tank with some live rock.

Top man love listening to you and always the truth 👍😀🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

I started with dry rock too, such a PIA to get it balanced.. took me months. I started it with microbacter 7.. then I switched to microblift special blend and night out. Really works wonders.

using the phyto to culture your own rotifers and pods to dose them weekly has shown me results but in a tank stacked of coral

I started with all dry rock and a established gravel seed... It took 2 years to BEGIN to mature...!

I agree with this list, however, I have always started tanks with just dry rock. Takes about 5 weeks for it to cycle after dropping food in to rot. I had Coraline algae, sponges, etc. Dry rock is best....won't bring in any bad stuff. My experience.

Thank you for sharing Keith! This is one of the most informative videos as I have had very similar experiences with the gyres, alga reactors and etc. Sometimes you start to think it’s just you since it’s working for everyone else. :-)

Same problem here with the Caribbean life rock. Non stop algae issues to the point I’m going to swap it out.

Got ya self a new sub dude from the UK

great video just set up a 20 gallon nano reef last sunday. Great insight thanks for sharing, wish me luck LOL

I just stumbled across your channel, holy crap that was cool. My mother got me your book for Christmas this past year along with some other reef books, Julian Sprung's among them. Amazing to see your experiences. I haven't started a reef tank yet sadly, still an unpaid Master's student in Marine Conservation, but it's a future goal.

I agree and have had lots of the same problems. I think the truck with starting from dry rock is getting a few small corals on live rocks or rubble or some very clean live rock and seeding your dry rock. The trick is it must be very clean mature live rock and you need to get past some initial stages of cycling with bacteria in the dry rock before micro fauna can take hold. It's definitely a process. I've had the Same issue with macro algea. I can't get them to survive that long and I've given up on cheato. The best way to do kalk is through a doser. I use a kamoer to dose continuously. It does a good job

it takes dry rock with bare bottom about two years to get mature imo. this is how i started my tank and It finally worked . i don't know if it was stubbornness or patience but hell yea i am going to do it again no problem . just keep the parameters in the good range all the time and enjoy the phases .

Dry rock is phosphate bomb 💣😂 my lfs has some aquaculture dry rock and that will be my go to even though it’s bit pricy

Great information on this video thanks! I definitely can relate to two of your points because I experienced it personally. One with the macro algae it gets super messy and died off on me randomly after a while. It was effective though. I will be trying a scrubber next. Can you inform which scrubber you are using? I find it to be much cleaner option. The next one I noticed was using amino acids I did notice my corals have a feeding reaction to it but colors didn’t pop more. I also have noticed cyano growing on my rock work… could also be a mixture with other factors though… and lastly just to give you insight on my experience with my current reef. I started my tank with dry rock. I let it cycle for about two moths before I used any lights though. Used the Dr Tim’s starter pack and tested daily. Luckily so far so good 4 years later. I was very consistent in the beginning though. I micromanaged everything and did water changes on a strict schedule for over a year straight (spent a lot of $ on salt) i was doing 40 gallon water changes regularly on a 116 gallon system. This was before I introduced any coral. I think that’s what helped me most on avoiding nuisance algae or maybe it was just the luck of the draw for me.

Same here I started with Marco dry rock. It was issue after issue finally swapped half of it out for live rock and after a couple of months all algae was gone and tank is doing good. I’ll never just use dry rock again.

I’m over here with a kalkwasser reactor, a refugium with 4 different macro algae’s, a constant dosage of three strains of phytoplankton that I culture myself, and gyres being my main power heads. Guess I’m not reefing the reef bum way hahaha. 😂

I've had issues using dry rock, I always end up seeding with live rock now. I find you can minimize the risk of pest by breaking it up or buying smaller chunks of it and also find oversized UV sterilisers do a great job at protecting the water column and fish from nasties. I had a massive outbreak of white spot many years ago. I tried QT with copper TTM and It always found its way back in. I'm not a quarantine pro and never will be I have accepted that. I chucked on a big well over sized UV the last time I had white spot ran it for a year and have never seen it again since I stopped using it, about a year since now. UV doesn't run anymore as I havent been adding any new fish since I took it off. The other thing I find is Kalk from vats works really well. I am currently experimenting and building a double chamber kalk reactor. One chamber for heavy mixing to saturate the kalk with the fresh water coming through as much as possible and then the clearer, not super clear still a bit cloud at the top gets pushed into the second chamber at the bottom were it will settle out and slowly push the clear kalkwasser through the top and into the tank. I will be also be adding TDS meter from the mixing chamber to the settle chamber and also a TDS from the settlement chamber effluent into the tank to monitor the potency. all airtight sealed. This is very experimental though, and waiting to finalize and hook up to the tank. but yes with kalkwasser I find my PH sits at a really nice 8.3 even with carbon dosing. The other thing I find that causes more trouble then its worth is sand beds! OMG tank is so much easier to manage without it and also some what believe what Jake Adams said its a nest for pests and white spot and I think it was possibly the combo of removing the sanded and the UV that helped me get rid of white spot without QTing. I'm not saying dont QT, its just if your not good at it like me, some pest will eventually find its way back in. buying from a good LFS will help as well that already QT fish for you :) As always thanks for the content, I like to see other successful reefers stories and methods

Great video, would love to see more content like this. Yup, I didn't like amminos either, hated gyres (blew flesh of LPS) and gave up on phytoplankton. I do love my cheato algae though, ive read that low iron can result in decaying and death in the the algae, perhaps this was your issue? One other side note, have you tried coral snow? That is one thing that I really like. Beautiful clean results, and nice to use when cleaning the glass.

Caribsea life rock was a nightmare for me. Had to do a tank reset because of this stubborn green algae. Only thing that got rid of it was 10 percent hydrogen peroxide. So I seeded my reset with live rock from Australia and some different type of dry rock I got from premium aquatics.

Need to try your kalk dosing method. I’ve been getting away adding kalk into the ATO that’s a disaster waiting to happen!

I am having a tough time Carib Sea Life Rock right now, redid my scape and added a couple of pieces which have been covered with some weird algae ever since

best advice

I’m 8 months in on a new mixed reef tank started with CaribSea Life Rock in a 1.5” sand bed and have had no significant algae problems yet, knock on wood, despite periods of elevated phosphate in the 0.2-0.4 range. I am skeptical of the benefits of phyto though. After I lost my batch to spoilage after daily dosing and it took over 3 weeks to get a new batch, I saw no change in my corals or my visible pod population.

I never used a reactor. My macro algae eventually filled up a 220. … almost completely. Tons of pods in there. Yellow Tang loved it. It didn’t need much food from me 😁

I have managed, in my opinion, success with dry rock, one of the few who seem to have. One thing I would never add to a reef tank again though is mushroom soft corals. They’re such a pest and sting SPS corals!

So back to the unbroken, undefeated Berlin method! I run 2-part dosing pump and a protein skimmer. That’s it.

I have found the all set rock method to be unstable. Been doing it for several decades to avoid pests. But it seems the systems never become stable until the aptasia and vermited worms move in. Ugh. Next time I'm going to try with dry rock and algae scrubber. Always used macro refuge.

I started my 135g tank with 100# CaribSea Liferock. The first 18mo I had TONS of coral loss and dinoflagellate issues. Now I'm two years in and the tank looks great but I've been doing Moonshiners and it's taking a huge amt of dosing to bring elements up. I suspect the rock is absorbing it!

Dry rock is tricky, I've mentored many people through the process of setting up this way. To be successful, a set of very specific actions need to be implemented at specific time periods. If you don't have the required knowledge, it is an absolute minefield. Dosing ammonium bicarb or chloride helps a lot! combined with ocean direct sand. In fact I dose ammounium in my established DT. It has so many benefits to corals and coral symbionts. If your microbiome is well established, there should be no need to dose amnios. Bacteria create these for free.

I dunno, I just don't find gyre pumps difficult to clean or maintain. Whereas I constantly had problems with Ecotech pumps, from power supplies dying after a few months, dry sides malfunctioning, etc

Match the fish stock to the coral stock and you can have fun with this hobby.

Great video but the KP aquatics site is sold out of live rock and has been for a while is this something they will restock. I love the idea of having a cryptic area in the sump to have it seed the tank.

Hi, Could be water circulation..maybe some dead zones so cyano grows. Try to work with your nozzle pointing to get flow. Some tanks are inevitable and even adding fans may not help depending on what you keep..such as coral bouncing mushrooms that don’t want much flow or it will get upset ☝🏻😂 Did you use live sand with your dry rock? You can also combine that with just a live rock from Petco to jump start a cycle and seed frat plugs with it so end up with heaps of copepods. When a tank is alive it makes a big difference to mature and get to being as close to bullet proof yrs later. You can also consider a conch to scoot around your dead zones and turn your sand bed when it drags it shell across. When you clean your glass you can leave the bottom perimeter along the sand and encourage or bait it to clean areas you want as it eat algae along the bottom and passes through. A hector goby can help with a little sand sifting if you’re interested in a worker/cleaner. It also eats pink slime algae and even green hair algae. Even picks off rocks. Just give it a spot to burrow out a home. Mine will go gobble heaps of red slime algae with bits hangs out its mouth. Overall a really nice fish excellent worker. It’s been around like I think since the 70’s or so with reef keepers. Good luck.. thanks for sharing video. If you do get hector..just consider vacuum the bulk of that red slime algae if it’s hard for it to break of bit size pieces. Once it’s broke up it’s easier for hector to sift. It will go after the bubbles too. When your sand bad can’t breath bc of that layer it can trap oxygen exchange so might even look like perling but not the kind you want tho. It’s a really small fish..minimum 10 gallon can even keep. You have a big reef tho. It’s not gonna sift like a diamond goby(yellow diamond). But some keepers don’t like them throwing sand on corals so depends on individual.

You have to put the chemiclean…. use on a regular basis very small amounts. Before a water change heavier doses to really clean it up. I have tried using vinegar very small amounts. I also use magnesium in heavy doses. No skimmer no canister. Just sponges in the return tank. Let them get dirty. When you see the salt start to accumulate clean one sponge per day. When you clean your tank…. TANK U Time. I know every reef tank is different. Simple soft animals will adapt to your lifestyle. I have lost a few heartbeats over my hard and soft animals. Now my garden is easy as I can get make it. We did just through Dino algae… N survived. The waving hand polyps not back to normal just yet.

When I use chaeto it always just shrinks, and doesn't grow.

I definitely had very hard time getting my 75 gallon going with just dry rock. It took me a year to get uglies out and get everything running good on it. You got 2 foxfaces in your tank that’s awesome. Are they good with each other?

I had similar issues with my Algae reactor and barely had the Chaeto growing. A few times it died off and leached phosphate back into the tank, so I gave up. I use GFO and have my reactor on a timer that I adjust depending on the phosphate reading. I use a Kalk stirrer and found that if you add a decent amount of Kalk in the reactor, you don't have the issue.

I purchased the Trident monitoring system and now I don't use it anymore. Too expensive. I also had a Refugium and don't even use that anymore since I started dosing bacteria. I also used a kalk reactor and now that is in the boneyard. I realized that it's better to keep it simple and use equipment essential for maintaining a healthy reef aquarium. This is my personal experience.

I dose Kalk the same way you do. However, my lid is sealed tight. Is it not supposed to be?

I’m ditching my Caribsea life rock tomorrow for some Gulf of Mexico live rock. It has been nothing but hell for the past year, constant algae of all types and not just a little bit it’s always a huge bloom of whatever algae.

Very debatable points you made, but you did mention it's something YOU will not use again.

I am long term casual hobbyist and hobby simply got hard taking away live rock and industry selling more gadgets. I could go on but mostly same experience. I have a junk pile of stuff but what works best is Ecotec MP40s, ATI dimmable T5s, Shuran BRS heaters, Danner Mag pumps (yep) , Tunze Osmolaor older model,, and ditching all chinese power suplies for a DIN rail power supplies and Marine batteries. Definitely simplified to ACI type kalk. No reason to change that!!! For whatever reason you frags asn WWC corals grew like gangbusters. Few other vendors did not.

Liferock has not been good for me. Not so much because of algae, but the microbiology in the tank is still chaotic after 18 months. I started with 3 different bottled bacterias and seeded the sump with live rubble from 2 different LFS. I'm close to throwing in the towel after cycling through diatoms and dinos over and over

I have no other experience to relate to with using both caribe sea and dry rock. I have 3 tanks now and its all I have ever used but makes me wonder if corals would grow faster and what the difference might be using live rock. When you speak of live rock do you mean from the ocean? Who can afford a whole tank of live rock or dp u mean adding just a small amount! I have never had algae really in my tanks since they have matured except for this hedge type stuff and for the life of me I cant figure out what the hell it is and no one seems to know either! Its flowery and grows like a short dense matt on the rock! I have crazy bubble algae in one tank and cant get rid of it so I am going to try an emerlad crab or two but scared it will eat my zoas! ! I took it all out and scrubbed it down and now its even worse!

what happened to all the corals

What’s happened to GHL? Have they stopped sponsoring you?

The dry rock is a long waiting game. lots of bacteria and carbon dosing.

Lots of data behind aminso being bad - article soon

Doing dry rock with bare bottom is a recipe for disaster, no wonder you're having problems.

No offense but your tank behind you looks empty. Kind of hard taking tips from somebody who looks like they're sitting in front of an u cycled tank haha