Reef!
This weekend a pump went out on our fish tank so we made a (well, three, but we’ll get to that later) trip to the fish store. With the first trip, I was sold a pump that we didn’t think would work. The pump we needed was a vacuum pump that takes the air out of the siphon overflow for the filter. The pump we were sold was a submersible pump that most people use in their sump to move water. We couldn’t figure out how it would work because the attached hose contained a cap to sit outside the tank to pull in air.
So we trek back to the fish store to find out the cap is removable and it would pull air. We put it in the tank and it was slightly quieter because it was submersed. The problem was that it was a venturi style pump which has a needle wheel and creates micro bubbles with the air it pulls in from the hose.
For trip three we said we didn’t care that this one was quieter and moved more water, we simply wanted a replacement for what we had. We were going to get a store credit so we looked at fish and coral. We decided to get a piece of pink star polyp coral. We’ve heard that the move to a reef tank can be a hard task because it requires good water conditions, but we’ve had our water tested in the past and it’s been excellent. The acclimation for coral is typically done using drip, not float so this was our first attempt at that as well.
Here’s our siphon drip setup:
Here’s a couple pictures of our fish and new coral:
