I've been in the fish keeping hobby since 2015. My 630ltr glass aquarium was the first piece of furniture that went into our home. Heck it was installed before the house plumbing was completed. Back then I kept malawi cichlids and early 2017 decided to switch to a reef tank.

Since then it has been a daily challenge and tons of research to get this tank the way I want it. Currently it's still far off my dream reef tank but it will get there given enough time and patience.

This tank was converted to a reef tank early 2017. The plan was and still is to have this incredible reef tank with many beautiful corals and exotic fish.

As per design there was never a real plan. The goal was and still is to have the least amount of maintenance possible. I have designs and idea for automatic water changes, automated light cycles, automated feeding, leak detection, automatic flow management, etc... Up till the day of writing most of this is still in the planning / prototyping stage but it will get there.

Lighting is one of my major goals for 2017. Currently it just has 6x LED flood lights that you would use in your garden and even though they are able to sustain my leather corals it's nowhere near good enough for the corals I plan to keep.

As soon I have the budget for it, I will go with 6 or 8 T5 bulbs and the goal is to have the reef look as natural as possible. I personally don't like the tank that very blue heavy it feels 'fake' I will go with a lot more whites and a subtle hint of blue just to give it that crisp look.

Apart from the T5 I plan to add 2 small LED lights which will have for moonlighting and sunrise/sunset these will be very small just enough not to shock the corals every morning with a burst of light from the T5s.

As per cycle I plan to have:
T5: 9hrs staggered
Led Sunrise / Sunset: 1hr
Led Moonlight: 12hr

Maintenance is key in any system. Think of your car... how long do you think it would last if you didn't change the oil? Probably not more than a year. Same goes for aquariums, as much as I despise water changes I usually do 10-20% weekly and hoping to be able to reduce that quite a bit as soon more filtration equipment is installed.

As per other maintenance it's not that bad, I have to manually top-off water daily, I have to replace filter floss and carbon weekly and then clean the glass & sumps somethings weekly sometimes bi-weekly.

Overall it's not that bad however it will get much better as soon I can get more reactors and automatic top-off installed.