A Fascinating Journey Through Reefco Aquarium's Store & Coral Farm!
We recently took Lou from World Wide Corals (WWC) on a tour of our shop to show him the ins and outs of how Reefco Aquarium runs on a daily basis including an exclusive tour of our coral farm!
Inside our store, one of our highlights for customers is our display tank, where we have an array of corals like the infamous jawbreaker to popular fish such as bloched anthia, candy basslets, and yellow tangs. This display is intended to guide customers and demonstrate the latest and most efficient equipment.
Reefco Aquarium’s Display Tank
Our display tank is outfitted with lighting consisting of EcoTech MARINE Radions that run at peak for 8 hours daily in addition to T5s that run for 3 hours daily. We have a fairly simple filtration system that includes TideLine sumps and Reef Octopus skimmers, as well as algae scrubbers that are used once a week. We dose with two-part ESV and Neptune Systems Trident, with a UV on the Trident on the display tank.
We explained to World Wide Corals that this has been a transformative tool in terms of adjusting the dosage pumps, as we can make small adjustments remotely through our computer or phone, making manual dosing unnecessary.
Frag Tanks
At ReefCo Aquariums, we offer a wide selection of stunning corals, like WWC, across seven coral frag tanks, each with a capacity of around 100 gallons. All of these tanks have been built and planted by our team of aquarium specialists and host a variety of corals.
To ensure the frag tank corals stay happy and healthy, our team is dedicated to keeping water quality in check with regular water changes and maintaining a safe chemistry level. To ensure optimal conditions for our corals, we keep our frag tanks at an alkalinity of 8, nitrate between 10-20, and phosphate between 0-0.5. We do our best to avoid changing these parameters to ensure a healthy environment for our corals.
We have the same equipment in our frag tanks as our display tank, yet initially, we had a single apex controlling everything. However, to avoid a complete system shutdown, we now have upgraded to Neptune Apex systems on each system in the shop.
Feeding At Reefco Aquariums
We are frequently asked about the diet of corals and how we feed them in our store. We provide a wide array of meals, such as Frozen mysis, AmericanReef HPD, or LRS Reef Frenzy. We recommended that WWC provide a diverse feeding plan that includes switching between the three options and offering them three times a day, for example, we typically feed frozen food, then American Reef HPD, then frozen food again.
In addition, we add algae to our tanks and fish systems daily. As for the frag farm, we feed the corals individually, whereas, in the frag and display tanks, we usually broadcast feed.
Reefco Aquarium’s Coral Farm
Although we don’t generally take customers to our coral farm, we took Lou from World Wide Corals to check it out!
Our growth tanks (tubs) in our coral farm run on individual systems which allow us to prevent mixing wild and cultured corals. At Reefco Aquariums we have been culturing corals for years and are extremely conscious of mixing wild corals with cultivated corals. Therefore we must have smaller tanks in our coral farm to accept wild corals.
To ensure that our corals are as healthy as possible for the transition from our store to our customer’s homes, we practice dosing similar to our retail store, using ESV and a lot of alkalinity and calcium. To put it into perspective, in the coral farm, we go through more than 5 gallons of each water parameter per month.
We do water changes every fortnight, or sometimes even weekly. In the beginning, we begin with small water changes to remove the detritus. We lift each individual frag rock and suck out any detritus and empty snail shells. This is to prevent any further problems due to snails decomposing, as that can cause more issues than the phosphates and nitrates.
Coral shops like ourselves (Reefco Aquariums) and World Wide Corals recognize the well-being of farmed corals; corals need to be healthy and free of pests when they are farmed for our shop. The same dosing that we use in our retail store is used in the coral farm, with a considerable amount of alkalinity and calcium being consumed each month.
Additionally, Brian has some fish in the coral farm to help keep the tanks clean. These consist of yellow tangs, cardinal fish, foxface rabbitfish, and clownfish, all of which have the purpose of algae cleaners and also serve as Reefco's pets. In particular, the black tang which Reefco Founder Brian grew from the size of a quarter is now 6 inches long and is a source of pride for him.
Reefco Aquarium’s Service Van
In addition to our store, we are also proud to provide customers with our Reefco Aquarium’s Service Van to give them a helping hand in servicing their aquarium and performing high-quality installations.
We install Neptune control systems on the majority of our systems and are proud to be platinum dealers for many years now. The Neptune systems are epic pieces of equipment and can save an entire aquarium system.
For example, we recently had a case where a customer was away on vacation and got a notification that there was an issue with his system. We got into contact with him out of hours and he agreed for our service team to go check it out. His GFCI (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupt) had tripped and thanks to the Neptune system we installed, his entire system was saved!
All of our products mentioned in this blog can be found in our online store.