Barebottom pico with weekly water change

[Oarfish]

Hi, I am a new member here. I've been a reader of sgreefclub, and I kept a 2 feet nano about 4 years ago, then gave it away to neighbor because of moving house.

I have read about the 100 percent weekly water change approach for pico tank done by Brandon429, and Ecoreef one, and decide to try it. I've bought live rocks, fill 1 gallon pico tank; it is bare-bottom with live rocks and airstone only. So far only kept easy stuff, zoa, gsp, one yuma, one coral banded shrimp, a porcelain crab, and red macro algae. It has been running for 5 months, with weekly water change, so far seems alright.

But now it seems a bit boring and visually unappealing and I want a slightly bigger tank and with more interesting corals. I wonder if the approach can be applied to shallow pico tank with small wave maker. I'm still looking for the right tank now. Maybe those who has experience in keeping pico can share some knowledge to me?

[DottyClown]

I started off this hobby with a 2.5G pico with a HOB filter.

Unless I interpreted wrongly, for your intended shallow pico tank, the only nutrient export is going to be 100% weekly WC.  Is that right?  Actually, I feel 100% WC is too drastic.  Your LS is being subjected to a stressful condition every week because of 100% WC.

Instead of a wavemaker (which in any case would likely cause a storm in a pico), I would suggest to install a small HOB Filter instead.  This way, you get some filtration for the water, plus the returning water will provide good water movement.  And weekly 20%-40% WC should be sufficient to keep the tank in good condition, unless you tend to overfeed your LS.

[Oarfish]

Thanks for the input. I did the HOB plus partial water change method on my last nano, (although in the end I added skimmer too). I know that it is a reliable method, but I just want to try something new, which I think is quite doable on tiny tank (hopefully not resulting in any casualties).

So far I don't detect any stress sign from all the corals, they open up fully again about 3-5 minutes of water change. I try to match the temperature, salinity and ph from before water change. 

However I might not notice subtle sign, or maybe because I only try on hardy types. 

This is how the tiny boring experiment looks like now... The shrimp has molted 3 times in the last 4 months, the crab molted once, the rock on the left turn more red, yuma has one tiny baby, and there are some cactus-look alike green algae growing (Halimeda?)

[Oarfish]

This is the part with the small leaves of green algae (among those hair algae which I coudn't pluck)