Jar Reef Maintenance

Now that you have your jar or pico reef set up, what’s next? The following are tried and true methods for maintaining water quality and animal health in a pico reef over years to come.

The first thing you are going to want to do before adding any livestock to your aquarium is to cycle it. The best way to cycle a reef aquarium is to get cured rock. Cured rock could be live rock from the ocean that you scrub clean, and then add to a container filled with heated saltwater and some type of circulation pump to encourage water movement, or it can be dry rock that was added to another aquarium or sump and allowed to age and cure there – the longer the better. Curing live rock should be done for at least a month. At least once a week, remove the rock, scrub it clean, and replace all the water. During the curing process light should be avoided so it’s easy to do this in a plastic tote or trash can – you won’t need a very large container to cure enough rock for an aquarium with a volume of less than five gallons. Don’t be tempted to overfill your small aquarium – a pound per gallon should be the most you will need to aquascape a jar reef and the small space fills up quick! After your rock has been cured in this way, you can scape your aquarium and safely start to slowly add livestock, starting with a cleanup crew, then fish, then corals.

Now that the aquarium is stocked, we’re going to be adding food for our animals. Pico reefs generally have a cleanup crew, and corals, but often do not have fish. If this is your first pico or jar reef, we encourage you to start with only a cleanup crew and corals. Every natural system requires an input of nutrients, and in the case of your jar reef that’s you feeding! The simplest form of feeding corals could simply be the addition of amino acids. Several products exist that make this easy. Start with their lowest dosing and work your way up. Amino acids can be absorbed directly from the water column by corals and might be all you need or work best in situations where the corals may struggle to eat larger, meatier foods (think SPS corals like Acropora sp.). For soft corals like zoanthids or mushrooms, feeding dried coral food that you mix with tank water might be the way to go. These foods don’t require refrigeration, and everything from softies to LPS (large polyp stony corals) will eat it. Its best to target feed and concentrate food where you want it (in your corals mouth) but with jar reef style maintenance, we can broadcast feed. As with everything, start small and make gradual changes slowly increasing food and watching for any issues that might pop up.

Water changes on a jar reef are easy. Heat and mix your saltwater to your desired strength and temperature to match your reef. Different salts mix differently, so make sure to follow the instructions as some require longer mix times than others. Enough water should be made weekly to change up to 80% of the aquarium, but no less than 40% of the total volume of the aquarium. So, a five-gallon jar reef would require a weekly change between two and four gallons. An easy way to make this very accurate is to measure four gallons of water using a measuring cup or other known volume container to fill the bucket you will use for mixing your saltwater. Then once the desired volume is reached, you can make a mark on the side of the bucket, and then later go over it with a permanent marker if you like so it's easy to see. In smaller systems you might be able to make two marks, one mark for your weekly water change volume, and another one for your monthly volume – more on that later. Then start weighing how much salt you are adding and over time you will learn the exact weight of salt needed to reach your desired salinity. Just fill the bucket with RO water to the line and add the right weight of salt! Once your saltwater is mixed and at the same temperature and salinity as the display, you can start your water change. Go over your rock with a small powerhead or turkey baster and stir as much detritus (organic waste) up into the water column as possible and then drain the water out. Worried that you might drain too much or too little? Repeat the process for marking your bucket on a second bucket so you’ll always remove the exact same volume of water! Once a month, you may want to do a rip clean. We’ve discovered that most marine aquariums build up waste in dead spots and substrate over time. Without changing the flow pattern or getting to these places (some of which might be under rock work) it's impossible to remove this waste and sometimes it can cause issues if for some reason it gets disturbed and releases that waste into the aquarium. In large reef tanks “rip cleaning” is still effective, but it takes a lot of time, effort and money. In a jar reef you can easily remove the rock, drain all the water, and clean the sand. RO water can be used to wash the sand clean like you did when you first added it to the aquarium. This seems counter-intuitive, but the process is tried and true and should be done at least quarterly to ensure that waste is not building up in the system, especially with the heavy feedings. If your feeding is timed right, you will give the corals just enough time to eat, create waste, and then you will be changing out almost all of the water, eliminating the waste and any excess food before it has a chance to negatively affect the habitat.

While most large aquariums rely on more expensive methods to control nutrients and replenish calcium and alkalinity, the jar reef just needs a couple gallons of clean water and a few cups of salt. Do some research into rip cleaning and jar reef maintenance and there are plenty of examples of long-term success. Stability is the key to success in reefing and if you do large enough water changes frequently the fluctuation in parameters becomes almost unnoticeable. Rip cleaning can also be done on larger systems. Just make sure that you remove all life from the aquarium before disturbing and removing the substrate to rinse it. You’ll be surprised how much waste there is trapped in rocks and sand – and getting it out will help the long-term health of your aquarium if done carefully and correctly.