There's a new tank going up in my home office: a 60 gallon mangrove lagoon, mixed LPS and SPS. It's still early days. Right now it's mostly saltwater, rock, and patience while the cycle finishes, but the bones of the system are in and the stocking plan is set.
My cat Venus has appointed herself lead inspector. She's curious in the way only a cat can be about something she's not allowed to touch, and this week that meant standing on her back legs with one paw hooked over the rim, staring down at the rock like it owed her an explanation. For the record: the clownfish are perfectly safe. Venus has strong opinions about the tank but no actual access to it.
The build
I picked up an AIO insert from Fiji Cube for this one, which keeps the equipment tucked away and the display clean. That's the whole appeal of an AIO setup for a room like this: it looks like furniture, not a science project, even though a science project is exactly what's happening behind the panel.
The stand is simple on purpose. No cabinetry gymnastics, nothing to fuss over. I wanted the tank to be the thing people notice, not the box it sits on.
For filtration I'm keeping it straightforward: a 4 inch filter sock, carbon, and a beneficial bacterial media doing the biological heavy lifting. Nothing exotic. The plan has always been low maintenance rather than high complexity, and simple mechanical and biological filtration gets you most of the way there without a lot of babysitting.
Evaporation is handled automatically with an RO top off setup, so the salinity stays put without me topping off a lagoon by hand every evening. And since a reef tank without power is a reef tank in crisis, there's a 1kWh backup battery wired in line. If the power drops, the tank doesn't notice.
Once things are cycled and stable, I'll start dosing All For Reef to support the LPS side of the mix. No rush there. The corals aren't in yet, and dosing before there's anything to dose for is just chemistry for its own sake.
Who's moving in
The stocking list is short and deliberate:
4 clownfish
Yellow coris wrasse
Starry blenny
That's it. No sprawling community tank, no fifteen species competing for territory. A mangrove lagoon with a mixed LPS/SPS scape reads better with restraint than with crowding, and this stocking list gives everyone room to actually behave like themselves instead of just surviving in a bottleneck.
The budget line, because someone always asks
Total package, tank included, came in under $1,000. That's not a typo. Between the AIO insert, the stand, filtration media, ATO hardware, and the backup battery, it's proof that a well planned reef setup doesn't have to be a five figure fever dream. Most of the cost in this hobby comes from complexity you didn't need in the first place.
What's next
Right now it's a waiting game. The cycle needs to finish, the rock needs to settle in, and Venus needs to accept that supervising from the rim is as close as she's getting. Once the water chemistry checks out, the clownfish move in first, followed by the wrasse and the blenny, and then it's just a matter of watching the LPS colonize their new home.
I'll post an update once there's livestock to talk about instead of just plumbing. Until then, Venus has the watch.