Hello world –
Finally getting around to posting a few pics of the Solana 34 gallon reef tank I revived about 6 months ago. This is a MAJOR budget effort on less than $20 every two weeks. But not bad, considering… 
Here’s the tank all set up. You can just make out the HQI metal-halide light above the tank. It puts 150 watts of bright, usable light for the photosynthetic corals in the tank. I’m told it is bright enough for hard corals, called SPS (small polyp stoney) corals. I just keep LPS (guess!) corals and softies, which lack a skeleton.
It is likely that I’ll need to redo the rockscape to make it more steady and to better accommodate new additions. But this is what it looked like about 2 months ago:
It has a protein skimmer, activated charcoal and bioball, biological filter in the back. The biological filter helps to clear the water of harmful ammonia and nitrites – all part of the nitrogen cycle that makes reefkeeping more challenging than freshwater tanks. After filtration behind the display portion of the tank, water is pumped back into the tank from the two nozzles you see above.
I do a 10 gallon water change every week and top off the tank with fresh RO/DI water daily. A fan is needed on the back of the tank. Before the fan, I was putting 1-2 frozen water bottles in the back of the tank, daily, to keep the heat down.
Here in this side view, you can see the powerhead, which increases waterflow across the corals in the back:
This is the obligatory clownfish called Hagie. NO NOT NEMO. He eats a LOT and will nibble at my fingers when I push food under the water’s surface. It tickles. Hee hee.
This is one of our latest additions, a banded coral shrimp, Drew. He likes to come out at night and eat mysis (like brine shrimp). He LOVES mysis. He has eight little arms/legs that he uses to pick up the food to put in his ugly mouth (worse than the movie Alien, trust me). In addition, he has those beautiful banded arms. He walks around surprisingly fast!
The pseudochromis, Lencha is a big bully. 
She terrorized our six-line wrasse. She swims so fast, I’ve yet to get a clear picture of her …
This was our sweet six-line wrasse, Ruffino. He was posing next to a trachyphyllia brain coral. Like Drew, he would eat brine shrimp. Unfortunately, he was too docile for the pseudochromis. And because he was so fast, I was unable to rescue him until it was very much too late for any hope of recovery. We will miss him.
Notice how the trachy has its little feeder tentacles out. Cool, huh? I put a small squirt of nasty smelling phytoplankton in the tank every other night. It smells like the offspring of a septic tank with a dumpster. :-p The phytoplankton comes as a thick, green liquid. Did I mention the stench?
Now for some corals. First we have a Kenya tree. They move around nicely with the current. Here they are pictured in their extended pose. As temperature and time changes, they will close up and look very strange. I’ll get a pic of that up eventually:
Next, we have our pulsing xenias. These guys randomly open and close most of the time. It is quite hypnotic. You are getting very, very sleepy …
These are called clove polyps. They have iridescent green centers. Like the Kenya trees, they open for light and nice temperatures (78-82) and close in the dark or unfavorable temperatures.
These are some zoanthids we got. They aren’t doing so good, since we’ve gotten a bit of hair algae since these pics were taken. I’ve moved them to a 3 gallon pico tank that I bought years ago for my office and never got around to setting up. That’ll be another round of pics. They already look better after 12 hours. Zoanthids need a bit of iodine in their diet. So I put a drop of Lugol’s solution in the tank twice a week. They come in a variety of sizes and colors. We have green and orange. But I’ve also seen magenta and yellow.
This is a fire coral that I’m struggling to find a good place for. He burned a frond on the clove polyp. More about that later. He is in front of a toadstool mushroom. The mushroom extends its tentacles during the day and they wave about nicely. Like so many of the corals, they retract their tentacles (but they do it completely) when its dark or cold. Or its hot. And sometimes just because they feel like it.
Finally, we have the mushroom. It is like a pancake and curls up into a ball when its dark. It attached itself in slight shade from the light and loves to spread out and sunbathe during the day. It is a spectacular iridescent green.
We also have a clean-up crew (CUC) that includes 6 tiny hermit crabs, …
along with 3 sand snails that only come out at night and a turbo snail. The turbo snail knocks over corals. But he’s an expert at keeping down the algae problem. He has a pretty green and violet shell. Behind him you can see several heads of frogspawn. The frogspawn is like an anemone. I bought it to host the clownfish, but Hagie wouldn’t go for it. The frogspawn is an aggressive coral in that it can burn other corals in the same way that the fire coral burned a clove polyp. So we’ve segregated the frogspawn from the softies.
That’s it for now. I’ll try to post again real soon.
Take care, all –
Hanz