extreme home makeover: fish edition

[boyesreef]

ok, as you all may or may not know, i moved back from vermont to michigan. along the way we got stuck in traffic. well that turned a 16 hour trip into a 20 hour trip. long story short i lost every living creature in my salty hobby. bummer! so i decided to do a little remod while i ponder my next move. the tank i started with was a 14 gallon biocube. i started by getting rid of the biocubes major issues back before the move, i ditched the all in one lid because the bulbs didnt really do what i wanted them to, the fans were always going out because of salt creep (3 sets in 1 year). i replaced them with a viper 2 clamp on pendent 70w MH. wow what an improvement! when i ordered the light i also ordered a koralia 1, and a smallish pump like the one the biocube comes with. i bought some aquarium silicone and a sheet of acrylic at one of the big box stores for about 30-35 dollars and started cutting, about a week later i ended up with one of those hang on back fuges that everyone seems to enjoy with a nano tank. another improvement!


it allowed me to have a 4" deep sand bed, 3 gallons of more water, a place for my skimmer, a place for my cheato and whatever the other micro algae was called, and a place to put more LR, all for $35! not a bad deal i should say. after this point this is what my biocube looked like.



so i let the tank run this way for about eight months. stuff came up and the family and i ended up moving back here to the town i grew up in, Milford, Michigan. as stated above nothing made it. i was crushed. i had my mated clowns for three years, and some of the coral longer than that. ah well, live and let die i guess. so i figure it was time for an overhaul to make the biocube what it was intended to be... a monster. i started by taking the biocube base as it sat

and started to cut down at a 45 degree angle between the 2nd and 3rd chambers at the divider, the 45 made the edge rounded when i was done, so i didnt have to do it later.

when i got all the way to the bottom i cut the silicone all around the first and second and removed the chunk of not needed plastic