About a year and a half ago I set up a little 40 gallon reef tank with some soft and LPS corals. For the first year, I didn’t do any water changes and as an experiment, I only topped it off with dechlorinated tap water. My equipment was extremely bare-bones. For the first 6 months, I only had an air stone and two power heads.
At first, as expected, the algae went absolutely nuts but after about two months, it settled down and started to recede. I dialed in the lighting. The soft corals started to win out. We lost a couple of the LPS, but the ones that survived started to thrive.
This year, I stopped doing the tap water and changed back to RODI water, and funny enough, this resulted in some algae again, although that too is starting to subside. I also recently got to try out Hygger’s marine LED lights (look for a video on this and their freshwater plant lights soon), and that may have contributed to the algae as I had to sort of experiment again with the timing and strength of the lights.
In any case, if you want to make a reef tank, you might not necessarily need top of the line filtering or water quality equipment if you pick your corals wisely.
Leave a Reply