Nothing in specific is easiest in the tank for me honestly.
I have great luck with my nepthea (softie) but all my zoas and palys die off in the 5g.
I also have luck with the nepthea, but lost a rasta leather. Go figure.
I have great luck with acans and blastos (LPS) but my frogspawn frag I had died off.
It's strange. Some things love the tank, others hate it. But it either thrives, or completely dies in there. Regardless of coral class. Very strange.
Much of the stuff that didn't do well I managed to save and sell off before it was too far gone though thankfully.
As far as filtration, I use the live rock as main means of filtration along with the fact I have a 5-6" deep (no lie, lol) sandbed in there.
I have the stock pump that came with the tank in there for main flow and it's actually pretty darn strong for the tank size.
The stock pump is 80GPH.
I also have a HOB Tetra Whisper PF10 for surface agitation. It runs without any filters in it and was also bought as a means of having somewhere to insert my iceprobe chiller into during the summer months.
On occasion I have run carbon or a filter floss in there to polish up the water real nice which currently is what i've been doing the past few months is running a filter pad with carbon in it like the filter Tetra makes.
Works very well. I rinse out all the filters and pumps once a week and I mean I take apart the pumps and power filters down to piece by piece and clean with a tooth brush.
Then I take a plastic spatula and clean the glass along the sand bed and any hard to reach areas. Then I go back over the glass with a tooth brush to get everywhere else til there is zero algae on all 4 glass panels.
I also wipe the light once a week to keep dust from building up and potentially falling into the tank (though I know dust obviously gets in there from free floating particles anyways.
I only top off the water every other day unless it's summer months where I top off daily and I use roughly 1/4 gallon of top off water per week in the tank.
I do a waterchange twice a week at 1/2 a gallon. I'd do a gallon all at once, but it removes so much water that my corals and rock would be up out of the water in the process so 1/2 gallon brings it to just above.
I feed every other day. Switching back and forth between flake foods and frozen foods. Any uneaten foods get sucked up into the filter when I turn it back on, and I then rinse the filter a half hour later after its sucked up any leftovers.
I could go on and on and on about how the tank is set up, so if you have any specific questions, LMK and i'd be more than happy to answer any and all of them.
And for the record, my maintenance routine is WAYYY overkill, so if you ever consider a pico tank, don't think it's as much work as what I do.
I'm just obsessed... Hahaha.
