After a rather disastrous incident during a house move a few years ago, my wife and I took a break from keeping a marine tank. My previous experience had been from a time where keeping marine fish meant big tanks, big costs and big commitments, and with two young children to bring up, this was never going to be that practical for us again. It was a comment from my wife on how she missed our old marine setup that made me look into the hobby again. That's when I realised that things had moved on, particularly with the genesis of nano tanks.
I was researching the options for a 24g nano tank when I came across an advert for the Red Sea MAX - a good looking package from an established and reputable manufacturer that seemed to sit between a nano and a small traditional sized tank, offering the best of both worlds. Furthermore, the integrated solution would limit the potential for me to overspend on fancy equipment!
We decided to buy the MAX and took delivery in December 2006, along with its stand and the Starter Kit. The tank itself instantly struck us as being of high quality, as suggested by the quality full-colour box it was packed in. Setting up the tank was very straightforward, even without the benefit of the excellently written manual. The self-assembly stand proved to be a bit disappointing, not meeting the high standards of the tank, but is nonetheless stable and up to the job, and complements the simple design of the tank itself. After a bit of levelling to compensate for an uneven floor, we filled the tank with water, and switched everything on.
As well as the Reef Base included in the Starter Kit, I introduced about 20kg of live rock to the system and left it for several weeks to start maturing. I've since added another 5 or 10kg, and whilst this is well over the 15kg that is probably needed for this type of filtration, it suited the reef effect I was trying to achieve. I was interested to see how good the MAX was, as its concept and some of Red Sea's claims challenged some of the conventional wisdom surrounding the hobby, particularly regarding lighting and water parameter stability in a 35g tank. As well as fish and soft corals, I was keen to keep some of the more demanding and sensitive hard corals, which often have specific requirements regarding water quality, flow and lighting. Although in my previous experience, before T5 lighting became available, this meant metal halide lighting was essential, I was intrigued as to how effective the MAX's stock lighting would be. Likewise, the MAX's filtration system, from which I removed some of the filter sponge that was prone to quickly clog, promised to be quite effective, especially coupled with the large amount of live rock I was using. The only area in which I felt that the MAX fell short of these more specialist requirement was water flow. Although the 10x/hr circulation provided by the MAX's filter pumps would keep most fish and soft corals happy, many hard corals rely on more aggressive water circulation, particularly to bring food to them. Also, because of all of my live rock, the standard circulation would be likely to leave dead spots, where dirt would build up and pollute the tank. I addressed the flow issue by adding a Tunze Nanostream 6045 pump into the tank itself, where hidden behind live rock it increases the circulation in the tank to over 50x/hr.
Because at the moment I spend most of my week away from home, stocking the tank has been a slow process (and rightly so!). Fish-wise, it now accommodates two common clownfish, a purple firefish and a yellow-headed jawfish. The fish are accompanied with numerous dwarf blue-legged hermits and snails, though I've tried to stick to small breeds of clean-up crew so they don't dwarf the tank. There's also a cleaner shrimp, 2 or 3 peppermint shrimps (who quickly got to grips with an outbreak of aiptasia), a purple urchin (who seems to spend more time out of the water than in) and two tubeworms. The first coral I introduced was a small piece of pink bird’ s nest coral, which unfortunately died soon after introduction, though the trauma of shipping and introduction could well be as much to blame as any possible unsuitability of the MAX. Since then I have introduced a number of sun polyps (which do not require the same high levels of lighting as most hard corals), and some porites rock with residents. Both of these have now been in the tank for over 6 weeks, and appear to be thriving.
Inspired by somebody else's project on the Internet, the one major customisation I have done to my MAX is to add a small sump. By adapting an old canister filter and inserting a submersible light, I now have an 11 litre sump containing a mixture of live rock rubble and chaetomorph, a macro algae which is an excellent remover of nitrate, and I am currently enjoying a nitrate-free system. I'm not sure that I can attribute this to the sump, as the in-tank filtration may be achieving this anyway, but I couldn't resist the temptation to try this. Another advantage of the sump is that it will hopefully act as a refugium where colonies of copepods can develop unmolested, occasionally being drawn into the main tank. One of my favourite fish has always been the mandarin, which is a very fussy eater and usually needs copepods or similar to feed on. Once the tank is mature enough to sustain an adequate stock of these, probably around the 12 month point, I hope to introduce a mandarin, and hopefully this sump will help this process.
So, what's gone wrong along the way? The filtration system is not without its faults, and can be prone to ejecting thousands of micro-bubbles into the tank for a variety of reasons, though hopefully these episodes are now behind me. Also, for the filtration to work at its best, the water level needs to be visible beneath the top rim of the tank, whereas I personally prefer to have it hidden. I've had a few specific faults/issues as well, such as a faulty timer, but Red Sea and Interpet, the UK importer, have invariably been on the ball and sorted these out for me quickly and effectively.
My MAX is still very much a "work in progress" (aren't they always!) As well as hopefully introducing a mandarin in the future, there's probably capacity for another fish or two if I choose. I'll add a variety of soft corals, but will chose these carefully, as many can either grow or multiply at such a rate that they would soon take over a relatively small tank like this. Although my experience with the MAX and hard corals has been mixed to date, I've had enough positive experience to suggest that carefully chosen and positioned specimens should be able fare as well in my MAX as well as in any other reef tank. That being said, if Red Sea were to market a metal halide lighting option for the MAX, I’d probably adopt this as it would open up more options and nothing can beat the dappled effect of metal halide lighting.
And after 5 months, what do we think of the MAX? We like it, and think we made the right choice. We're enjoying it as much as our previous marine tanks, and maybe even more. Maintenance is not a great burden, a 15 litre water change and quick clean of the glass every weekend takes about 30 minutes, and apart from a couple of general feeds a day with some spot-feeding of corals with frozen food twice a week, that’s really it apart from the hours of staring at it! I suppose the key question is that if we had to replace the MAX, would we go for another MAX or an alternative? And so far I have to say that it would be the MAX again.
