Inspirational Office Aquarium

Aqua Medic’s office aquarium consists of a 225-gallon walk around center overflow custom reef. Today, the technology required to maintain a reef system is made to cater to those who want to keep it simple, low cost, and easily maintained using our standard products.

By removing all walls of the stand, the Turboflotor 5000 Shorty skimmer, the Blue Reef 2000 sump- that consists of a biological and mechanical filtration system, the OceanProp 1500 current pump controllers and other control systems are viewable from all angles. Sticking to all Aqua Medic products, plumping, connections, and controls easily tie together as if all products were manufactured as one single unit. It is nice to see people get a kick out of what is outside the tank as much as inside, including the Aquaniveau auto top off system.

One unique feature which stands apart from other systems is the refugium made of a small sleek tank plumbed into the sump but as a separate unit containing its own waterproof power compact lighting system. We added macro algae and chaetomorpha to the refugium to remove excess nutrients keeping our water algae free. The more complex but user friendly AT Control System allows us to monitor the water quality while away from the office, anywhere in the world. Although it is nice to have an attractive exterior, the focus and reason we all have fish tanks is to display what is inside the tank. We went with the lowest profile eight-bulb Ocean Light T5 lighting system on the market, hung neatly over the six-foot tank.

Enough about the outside, let’s get to the good stuff, the inside of the office aquarium. We filled the tank with 4-5 inches of Caribsea live sand, the whitest finest grain they carry. The 200 pounds of Florida live rock is full of life and naturally covered in corals, sponges, invertebrates, and a variety of plants. When the live rock was first added, everyone in the office stared at the life covering the rocks for much longer than the designated break times, but the total bliss of falling into the exotic micro world relieves the thought of any disciplinary action.

As the tank has only been set up for a few months, livestock is being added regularly but slowly and is at that exciting time where we all get to see how the new life interacts with the existing. Recently the “clean-up crew” was added consisting of trochus snails, nassarius snails, astrea snails, assorted reef safe crabs, and two great big abalones. Abalones, being greatly under rated, are amazing hair algae grazers. A pesky flatworm was spotted so we wasted no time in adding a Melanurus Wrasse which has been doing its job quite well and adds incredible color to the system. I even taught it to hang out on the side closest to the boss’ desk for his viewing enjoyment… or maybe I just got lucky.

Because it’s an office aquarium the styles and colors of corals need to be diverse so we added a nice combination of soft corals, and assorted stony corals alike.

An obstacle that we ran into setting up this tank was really my fault, when adding one of the specimens into the system; I added the water that it was bagged in. This is common mistake for beginners but I should know better. The bagged water had trace amounts of an aggressively reproductive photosynthetic dinoflagellates, a type of phytoplankton that hobbyist tend to avoid. Luckily being a manufacturer of one of the best UV sterilizers we were able to pull a properly rated Helix Max sterilizer off the shelf and fix the problem within only a couple days. If this were to be a home tank and a UV sterilizer was not as readily available, this could have caused serious problems. I learned to always have one on hand, if not running at all times as they can treat many “parasitic” problems before you know they exist including the commonly known ich parasite.

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Tagged as: Office Aquarium, Reef Aquariums