Liquid's Coral Propatation Tank

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After my 40 gallon soft coral tank was setup for about 6 months I realized that my anthelia glauca and my shrooms were growing like mad. So much so that they could potentially run out of control if I wasn't careful. After viewing a friend's multi-system propagation tank I decided to build my own. I did mine on a budget, however, as I didn't have all the "toys" that he had in his posession.

My propagation tank consists of an 18 gallon Sterlite storage tub available at local Walmart stores. I added about 2" of dead sand (50% special grade Caribsea aragonite and 50% sugar sized Caribsea aragonite) and then added about 3 lbs of livesand from Tropicorium. I then added about 3 lbs of liverock rubble and a ton of cuttings of macroalgae from a friends tank. A 75 watt heater was added for temperature control and a MaxiJet 600 powerhead (160 gph) was added for circulation. I built a custom PC light canopy equipped with two Lights of America #9266 PC outdoor floodlights. The Lights of America #9266 PC outdoor floodlight was available from a Menards store located in Indiana. These lights are a 65 watt quad PC bulb and the temperature rating of the bulb is 6500 K. It puts out about 6800 lumens per bulb and my setup has two bulbs for a total wattage of 130 watts. Below is a cost breakdown for my small setup:

Propagation Tank Components	Price
18 gallon Sterlite storage tub	$4
Caribsea sand	$35
Tropicorium livesand	$12
Tropicorium liverock rubble	$20
75 watt heater	$20
MaxiJet 600 powerhead	$20
Canopy (made out of MDF board)	$5
Lights of America #9266 PC lights (2)	$60
Macroalgaes	free
Totals:*	$176
*total does not include RO water or salt

The nice thing about this setup is that it didn't cost me over $200 which was my upper limit on this project. And to be honest, I had a number of these things on hand so the cost that I had to shell out in addition to the things I had on hand was considerably less. I affectionately call this setup my "Ghetto" propagation tank as it looks soooo nasty and was made as cheaply as possible. My wife hates it btw... :)

You will notice that there is no skimmer on this setup. I am relying totally on the macroalgaes, sand, and rubble for filtration of nutrients which, based on what I have seen with similar tanks, has proven effective. I wanted this tank to be high in nutrients for the soft corals that I would be propagating before too long. I feed this tank 2x per week with about 1 tablespoon of frozen brine shrimp. The various critters in the sandbed seem to really like this and I have had no problems with this food source whatsoever. The macros seem to flourish under the high nutrient content of the water. I do, however, plan to add some carbon to the setup possibly in either the form of passive or active carbon filtration. This has not been done yet.

Looking down into the tank looks kinda nasty, but then again I have not cleaned the sides of the tank in about 1 1/2 months. In that time I've had a diatom bloom and a hair algae bloom. I really need to clean those sides up. LOL There are currently about 5-6 astrea snails roaming around the tank cleaning off what they can from the sides, but they can't seem to keep up right now. I plan to let the tank stabilize for about 2 months yet before I start to use it full-time. If I really have a nutrient problem, I can always hook up my POS SeaClone to the tank to export additional nutrients.

One of the chores that I *hate* to perform is maintenance and on this propagation tank I have to clean the intake screens on the 2 powerheads that I have running on the tank otherwise the circulation really drops off as macroalgaes and other krud build up on the screens. Currently, I have a MaxiJet 600 and a MaxiJet 1000 providing circulation to the tank. Without proper cleaning I would have to clean the intake screens on at *least* a weekly basis, if not more often.

One of the things that I have wanted to try for a while now is an airlift design that Tropicorium employs on their tanks for circulation. The airlift tube is nothing more than a section of PVC that is cut at a 45° angle at one end and the other end has a 90° elbow attached to it. A hole is drilled in the 90° elbow and then a rigid piece of airline tubing is pushed down thru it until it's about 1" away from the bottom of the PVC pipe. An airpump is then hooked up to this rigid airline and the resulting bubbles "suck" air up thru the tubing and out the elbow thereby creating a current. With enough air and large enough diameter PVC tubing, a large volume of water can be made to circulate at a nice velocity.

I took a couple shots of it with a handy digicam to show what this sort of setup looks like in my system. I've got two .mpeg movies of it in action. The first shot is from the top down on the entire 20 gal tank and the second shot is a closeup of a frag of anthelia flowing in the current.

Currently, the two outside airlifts are powered by a single 5 watt aquarium airpump and the middle airlift is powered by a single 3 watt aquarium pump. I have plans to add/replace one of the pumps with my more powerful Tetra Luft pump that is currently sitting idle. I feel that I do have a nice flow of water going across the corals at this time. I'll post more results as time permits.

The airlifts have been working so well for me in this particular setup that I decided to add two additional airlifts for added flow. Also, within the last 3 weeks my sinularia and capnella started budding like mad so I've had to greatly increase the number of frags in my prop tank to accomodate these additional buds. At this point in time, I'm growing out ricordia yuma, green star polyps, 2 species of xenia, anthelia, about 1 dozen frags of sinularia, a couple frags of capnella, various shrooms, and brown zooanthids. I feel pretty comfortable putting just about any soft coral frag in this prop tank, but I don't feel comfortable putting any LPS or SPS in this tank as the lighting is just not what it should be for these guys (not enough intensity).

I am using empty margarine tubs as frag holders and I am glueing all of my frags to liverock rubble using superglue gel. A little dab will do you... :)

The macroalgaes are doing a good job of maintaining the water quality of the tank. To date I have not done a water change on this system.

The ghetto was torn down about a month ago. It was getting to be too much of a hastle to keep it going as I found that to maintain water quality I needed to do biweekly waterchanges otherwise I had nutrient export problems (cyano outbreaks were the primary culprit). This combined with the problem that none of the stores in my area were interested in purchasing hobbyist frags (even for just store credit) made keeping the ghetto going not worth while in my book. In the future I may start it back up, but I will have to have an outlet for my frags before I attempt this again.