Use Cases

The scenario Picture a 40 litre rimless tank on a desk in a Brisbane home office. The owner travels for work two weeks out of every six, loves the look of a small reef, and has exactly zero interest in topping up evaporation by hand every morning. They want corals that colour up and a tank that does not punish them for going away. This is one of the most common briefs we get, and the good news is that small tanks reward automation more than big ones. A nano evaporates fast relative to its volume, so a single missed...

It is 11pm in July and you have just checked the tank before bed. The lounge room feels cold, the AC has been off for hours, and you are wondering what the display looks like at 4am when the temperature usually bottoms out. This is the scenario playing out in a lot of Brisbane homes right now. Daytime highs sit comfortably in the high teens to low twenties, but overnight lows drop into single digits, and a single-story home with tiled floors loses heat fast. A tank that reads 25.5 degrees at dinner time can be reading 23 or lower...

Brisbane frag swaps come around a few times a year and July's cooler, drier weather actually works in your favour. Stable winter temps mean less algae pressure and calmer tanks, which is exactly what you want when you're growing out colonies for trade. If you've got three months before the next swap and a tank full of half-grown frags, the difference between showing up with sellable pieces and showing up with sad brown nubs usually comes down to the gear, not the coral.This is a solid build for prepping frags for swaps around South East Queensland. It covers cutting and...

You've got a rental in New Farm or a unit near West End with strata rules about noise and no room for a sump under the floor. You want a planted tank that looks good on a sideboard, doesn't hum through the wall at 2am, and won't need a trip to Bunnings for a new stand. This is a common scenario, and it has a straightforward answer once you stop trying to fit a full-size reef setup into a share house lounge room.A nano freshwater tank between 20 and 45 litres solves the space problem. The trick is picking gear...

Six months ago the tank was full of Kenya trees and toadstools that grew if you looked at them wrong. Now there's a frag of Walt Disney sitting under the light and it's already going brown at the base. This is the point every softie keeper hits eventually. The gear that ran a mixed reef tank for two years suddenly isn't enough, and the coral is telling you about it in real time.SPS corals are not more delicate than softies, they're just less forgiving of drift. Softies shrug off a swing in alkalinity or a dead spot in flow. Acropora,...