Waterbox Reef Tank Tour - 3 Month update

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Reef Dudes is sponsored by Ecotech Marine and BulkReefSupply. Today we're getting an update on the Waterbox 7225.

[00:00:11]What's going on guys? Devon from Reef Dudes. So, we've been battling dinos, added a new coral, tons of new fish, all kinds of fun. So, I figured it's time to give a bit of a tank progress update.

[00:00:20]So, let's get to it. Now, on the initial front, we are past the dinos, which is always a big win. I am still having to deal with a bit of diatom. So, in the morning, my sandbed is nice and white, then I get the nice orangey dusty brown throughout the day and it kind of goes away.

[00:00:34]So, it is diatom. It comes and goes in kind of phases. But, aside from that, I'm pretty happy with the tank overall.

[00:00:39]Now, there is a few other stages of the uglies. Now, I have been dosing copious amounts of nutrients and one of the byproducts of that is a little bit of fuzz on the rock. So, there's little bits of algae growing. Some of the fish are picking at it.

[00:00:52]So, that's something I do have to keep an eye on. Now, contrast to that, we also have coralline algae starting to pop up, which is awesome. And coralline algae is always a good sign because if that's growing, it means corals are generally happy and growing as well.

[00:01:05]Now, we do have it in a few spots popping up on the rock, including on the back overflow wall. So, this is not something I added, something that snuck in on its own. But, it's starting to establish which is a good Now, another good news, the test corals that I've added have been doing very well. Uh this guy's rainbow loom. You can see it is budding out onto the rock and growing.

[00:01:22]So, again, fantastic sign for the tank.

[00:01:24]As you go around, you can see stuff is growing. It is encrusting. So, that does make me really happy. Now, it's not all fully sunshine and roses. Right beside the my little bicolor blenny, you can see a little bit of bubble algae just down to the right of him.

[00:01:37]And that's a bit of a pain. I do kind of want to nip that before it gets too bad.

[00:01:41]So, I am debating if I try and do a little water change and suck it out, or possibly, you know, my There's also a found two little aptasia. So, I'm going to bust out some of my aptasia and go over top of them.

[00:01:52]So, I might do that as well. And maybe I'll go over top of the bubble algae at the the time. And yeah, bit of not so much fun is that little bit of a fuzzy turf looking algae on some of the rocks.

[00:02:02]And it's not overly taken over, but it's definitely there.

[00:02:08]Um I'm If I find a tuxedo urchin, I may pick one up and add one just as preventative. But right in front of the might as well, you can see those little bits of fuzzy on some of the rock.

[00:02:17]Now again, it's not all of it, just certain parts. You know, come to other parts of the rock and everything's perfectly fine, but a little bit starting to pop up here and there throughout the tank. And looking at this one snail shell covered in green algae, I'm starting to think it probably hitched a ride on a snail shell originally.

[00:02:32]But not the end of the world, we can deal with that. My bigger concern is Aiptasia. And I've seen two of them.

[00:02:38]We've got one right there and another one right over there. So I think Aiptasia's going to be the play for this one is turn the flow off and I'll hit the few that I see just before they have a chance to spread too much. Now this also makes me think, you know, it might be time to get a copper band again, one of my favorite fish.

[00:02:56]Now in the past, I had a wonderful beautiful Acan garden and it was eventually taken out by my old copper band.

[00:03:02]So a little bit hesitant on that front because I have started a bit of an Acan collection and I do love them. They're beautiful and it is a slight risk with a copper band. So we'll see on that front.

[00:03:11]The Goni's that I've added to this tank seem to be very very happy. You can see they're very plump and plentiful.

[00:03:17]Lots of polyps all over the place, which always makes me happy. Huge fan of Goni's as you guys probably know.

[00:03:23]And on the dosing front, I've been using the X total, which is a Canadian brand. Has trace elements and everything in it. So so far that's been working very well cuz it's the only thing I've been dosing to the tank and stuff is very very happy.

[00:03:35]Nice and shaggy polyps and encrusting base onto the rock, which is again one of the biggest things for me. So it makes me happy, good sign that it's probably wouldn't hurt to start adding some more coral to the tank.

[00:03:45]But the biggest thing for me is just seeing corals puddling out is awesome and seeing those little bits of coralline algae starting to pop up all over my rock. So, the tank is maturing and it's maturing fast. Now, another interesting one is ozone. So, I'm using ozone on the tank and I was using UV for a bit, but my ORP was chronically low, sub-200s, which was kind of messing with me cuz using those it should be much higher. So, I finally decided it's probably due to replace the ORP probe.

[00:04:11]So, I did pick up the BRS ORP probe and popped it in and you can probably fairly easily guess when I added the new probe cuz you can see the massive spike up in the parameters from before.

[00:04:20]Um so, again, definitely bumped it up.

[00:04:22]If I look at my peak before, it was just over 200 and now it's, you know, popping up to 350, so and overall, [music] it's it does take a probe a few days to kind of settle in, but the nice big boost is definitely a good sign. When it comes to ORP, I generally tell people don't really worry about the number unless you're using ozone. Otherwise, you only really care about the trend lines. Is it going up?

[00:04:43]Is it tanking? Kind of gives you a sign something's off in your tank. Or if it's stable, you know you're pretty happy.

[00:04:48]Um but my case, because I am using ozone, it is nice to keep a pulse on it and just make sure it doesn't get too high.

[00:04:54]It's funny in the sand too, you can see the clean strips where the snails have been, so silver lining, they got lots of food.

[00:05:00]And my blue star leopard wrasses are out all the time now, which again, also awesome, makes me happy.

[00:05:05]Um super cool, beautiful little fish, love those guys.

[00:05:10]And I do have this trio of the scissortail dartfish. They kind of go in spurts of if they school together or not.

[00:05:17]Um usually around feeding time and nighttime they're usually there all together. Throughout the day it's kind of hit or miss if I see them. There's usually one always out and the other two, I think they kind of hide under the rock in spurts, so they kind of they hang out together, especially around feeding time. They disappear for a while and I see them again a little bit later.

[00:05:32]And there's the larger blue star leopard wrasse.

[00:05:37]I do suspect might turn into a male eventually since I have two of them, but we shall see.

[00:05:44]It'll be kind of cool if it happens just to have, you know, normal leopard wrasse, a blue star, and then they possibly male and a female.

[00:05:51]And the normal, I believe it's just called the ornate leopard wrasse, but again, love those patterns, super cool.

[00:05:58]And surprisingly, I really love the firefish, too. That's not something I've ever kept before, but it's just like a beautiful little chilled fish. So, I really love those guys. Springer damsel, he's kind of in there just pest prevention.

[00:06:10]Yellow chorus, always a solid option for tanks. And of course, all the fairy and fusilier wrasses, which definitely love those guys.

[00:06:19]Nice little Duncan down here.

[00:06:21]Uh over here, we do have the space invader pectinia. That was one that was saved from the prior water box.

[00:06:28]So, it's nice to see that guy reviving itself and coming back. My single token tang of the tank.

[00:06:34]And a couple of garnias got knocked off, so we'll have to fix those a little later.

[00:06:38]Now, if you guys saw my last week's video, then I asked there was potentially some picking having with my torches. I am actually debating taking a few more torches out and putting them in here, just so they'll be safer, quote unquote, and see how they do. See if they fully recover. But, I might sneak a couple more torches in later, which will fill up this island.

[00:06:58]And should look pretty cool.

[00:06:59]I think the next big thing for me is going to be ordering some more acros. I have all these spaces to fill still. So, that part's definitely exciting and fun.

[00:07:07]Stand-wise, nothing overly new and exciting inside of here, other than a nice fresh 2 or 3 probe.

[00:07:12]This was my just temporary setup I had when I was fighting the dinos. I popped the UV on just for good measure. Not turned on right now, not running, so I could probably take this out, but kind of just plumbed it on there with a little pump, so just recirculating within the sump. And honestly, that worked pretty well, just to help kind of kill anything that potentially water board at night.

[00:07:31]Skimmer-wise, again, this thing is still skimming like a champ. Um soda lime canister I made on top is fantastic for boosting the pH.

[00:07:39]Uh zipper we're good for a bit on reagent on the mini trident.

[00:07:46]There's my little DIY carbon reactor I made again when I was fighting the dinos for good measure. This is using a DI canister.

[00:07:54]Super simple effective way to do it. And the rest of my chaos, I got to clean out my stand and get her back to pristine, but got the Aquawiz testing every hour.

[00:08:00]This thing's great for that and I'd use that on top of the Apex. So right now sitting around 8.16, nice and happy.

[00:08:07]Uh, once I clear the rest of this out, temporarily have nitrate and phosphate on the doser, which still feels crazy to me how much I have to dose of this. Um, I think I'm currently at around 40 mils a day of NeoPhos and 5 or 10 mils of NeoNitro. So every 3 or 4 days I'm doing the nitrate and phosphate test, um, just with the Hanna and seeing where things are at and tweaking my dosing from there.

[00:08:28]Hopefully I won't have to do that forever. I do keep upping my feeding more and more and more.

[00:08:33]And on top of that, also added more fish. I have the the frozen feeder on there and again I had that on the low setting twice a day and I bumped it up to the next setting up. So just slowly plunking away at all these little things to help boost my nutrients up.

[00:08:47]That guy's starting to puddle really nicely, too.

[00:08:49]Thank you.

[00:08:51]So, overall, pretty happy with the tank.

[00:08:53]It'd be nice to have a white sand bed, but otherwise no real complaints. So, I'm going to get to a little maintenance. I'm going to shut off the pumps and I'm going to hit those two little aptasia with some F aptasia while it's fresh in my mind and they're semi easy to get to. So the main move of the torches turned to absolutely move the torches about 5 minutes later. So let's figure I'd do a quick little clip on that. I think it's looking pretty sweet having all those little staggered layered of torches in there. And you can kind of see little lack in flesh on some couple of those, so let me look at the other guy that was in there nice and happy. So hopefully they bounce back relatively quickly.

[00:09:29]But looks pretty sweet now.

[00:09:32]Come the other side, you can see the couple little heads there that are gone, the smaller ones primarily.

[00:09:37]And given how much of a healthy flesh band there the rest of them have, that's what kind of makes me think that they might have been munched on.

[00:09:46]So, again, don't know for sure, but either way I figured to move them in here. Makes like a really cool torch island.

[00:09:52]And yeah, hopefully they do well.

[00:09:54]I also did found one other aptasia in the one up there, so let's put a little bit of F-Aptasia on them as preventative.

[00:10:02]And same with that little patch of bubble algae. I just covered in F-Aptasia kind of encased it.

[00:10:07]It's kind of funny my little bicolor blenny still hanging out there. Hasn't moved from like an hour ago when I recorded that. But yeah, so overall, back to happy place.

[00:10:16]And I think that's looking pretty sweet.

[00:10:19]So, my main Goni air / torch areas over there.

[00:10:23]And I know earlier all my scissor tails were hiding I was filming and now look at that, we got four of them. So, they do kind of loosely shoal together, which I think is pretty cool. And half time it's either I see one of them or I see almost all of them out, which is kind of funny. But they're back in shoaling formation in a loose group.

[00:10:41]So yeah, I think next on my list is going to be start stocking up on more acroporas since they're crusting, [music] they're budding and stuff's looking good.

[00:10:49]And we'll go from there. All right, guys, hopefully you enjoyed this quick update on the Waterbox 7225.

[00:10:55]Again, pretty happy how it's all coming together. If you got any questions, comments, concerns, feedback, stuff that you think I should do, change, add, whatever, let me know in the comments below.

[00:11:04]And I will catch you guys on the next video.