alexpitcher alexpitcher
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  • Posted on: 28/5/2007 10:28
Your expertise and advice is needed! #1
Hi everyone and thank you in advance for any advice and tips.

After much deliberation and time spent with coldwater fish I have decided to step into the world of marines, or to be more specific a fish and invertebrates with soft coral reef tank set-up. At this time I have not purchased a single piece of equipment but I wanted to post this note on to your forum for you guys to check out and maybe give me some feedback as to whether or not the equipment, fish, inverts and soft corals listed would be suitable and harmonious for a reef tank.

I would like everything to be kept reasonably tidy with very little pipe work/equipment showing

Fluval Vicenza 260L Tank (approx volume 220L after live rock)
Fluval 305 External Filter (Included with the tank)
Twin T5 High Glo Lighting (Included with the tank) with 1x Blue Moon Actinic & 1x Daylight Plus Tubes (enough light?)
1 x 300W heater (Included with the tank)

Red Sea Berlin Airlift 90 Protein Skimmer Internal (ok or any suggestions?)
UV Sterilizer (Any suggestions?)
Aqua El Circulator 650 Power heads x 2 (ok or any suggestions?)
Marine Test Kit (any suggestions?)
Refractometer
RO Water will be bought (no room for an RO unit)
Sea Salt (have not decided on what make, any suggestions?)
25-30kg of cured living rock (will this be enough?)
Substrate Aragonite Sand

Have I missed anything?

Fish

2 x Common Clown Fish
1 x Pygmy Basslet Strawberry
1 x Manderinfish
1 x Royal Gramma
1 x Yellowtail Blue Damselfish

All fish above to be introduced over a period of time with only 1 or 2 fish to be added per month

Invertebrates

1 x Blue Starfish?
1 x Fire Shrimp
1 x Cleaner Shrimp
1 x Boxer Shrimp
5 x Blue Hermit Crab
5 x Various Snails (Turbo’s etc)

Option 1
Bubble Anemone for the Clown fish
Various soft corals : Assorted polyps, green and purple ricordea yuma, Purple Teal, blue, orange/green ricordia, orange, pink Zoo's, assorted disc mushrooms

Option 2
2 mushrooms, 2 bubble anemones, leather corals, button polyps, green star polyps, trumpet coral

For regular water changes I have a Rekord 60 with Juwel Compact Filter which was used for coldwater fish keeping. I am thinking of using it just to store and heat the Salted RO water. Would this be ok or do you guys have any other suggestions?

I know the post is long but as they say “fail to plan and you plan to fail”
Many thanks for any advice and please feel free to criticise

Alex
taziker taziker
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  • Posted on: 28/5/2007 17:55
Re: Your expertise and advice is needed! #2
just a few quick notes.

powerheads/pumps - you need at least 10x water turn over in your tank. add up the litres per hour of your diffrent devices, divide that number by the amount of water you have in the tank(220 litres in yur case)

live rock, minimum 1kilo per 10 litres of water, more if you want to keep a manderinfish............
manderinfish need matured live rock ot graze from. so yur tank needs to be 'at least' 6 months old before you get one.

mixing shrimps is not a good idea. putting those shrimps in, there will be a battle royal in yur tank.

research yur starfish, some eat corals, I know, I had a chocchip that ate a very large mushroom.

Anemones - they are very nice, but dont fair well in some tanks. give yur tank time to mature, and make sure yur levels are stable. they need near perfect water conditions, or die a long drawn out death.

my head hurts now...
TAz
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cmw328i cmw328i
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  • Posted on: 28/5/2007 18:18
Re: Your expertise and advice is needed! #3
my person rundown on your list...

I like the fluval filters, i have a 205 on my 60L tropical tank, but dont expect it to provide enough circulation in the tank, it will help but will prob be less than a powerhead would put out, i'd think.

I can't speak to the lighting myself as I'm not familiar with lumens and coral requirements, but I'd say that would be the right type of lighting, remember that it never hurts to have more light though! if you can squeeze another pair of what you have in there, i'd do it. Not sure what your budget is though.

Heater im sure is fine

Having a nano tank myself, I'm not very familiar with skimmers but I think someone else on this board commented that red sea skimmer was noisy.

UV... to qote wet web media... "The slower the flow rate, the greater the kill rate and number of things killed. Speed translates to contact time. It is comparatively easy to kill free-floating algae. The next hardest (requires more contact time) is free-floating bacteria and lastly is parasites" so you'll want something thats pretty intense if you're feeding it off your fluval because it will flow through pretty fast.

powerheads... you want any powerheads you have to do at least 10 times the tank volume per hour when added together... is thats 650lph, they're either too small or you need more of them.

Test kit... i think Hagen has the most inclusive test kit you can find. But either way, you'll need to test for ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, pH, calcium, water hardness, phosphate, and perhaps iodine, strontium, and magnesium... I dont have any of those myself yet.

Refractometer... you have a bigger budget than I ;) good stuff

RO water... try to make sure its RO and DI if possible, it will cut down on many bad things that way.

Sea salt... I'm urging everyone to try seachem reef salt. Its gotten GREAT reviews by anyone using it. Its relatively new so alot of people havent tried it yet. From what i've read, it keeps all the important parts of water chemistry extremely stable and has a great amount of calcium in the range of about 430-450 when you freshly mix it.

I think that 30ish would be the minimum possible amount of LR. Trying to recall the "formula" for it i think its 1-1.75 pounds of live rock per gallon, and converting to gallons you have 68.68 gallons and with 30kilos thats 66.14 pounds. That's close enough to call it one pound per gallon. Personally, i'd go for quite a bit more. Remember, the live rock is the basis of your biological flitration and the more you have, the more you can stock in your tank but on the other hand, the more you have, the less space in your tank.

Aragonite sand is good stuff. Personally, i'd do all live sand if possible because i really like the benefits of using it. If thats too expensive, make sure you get at least one bag. You also need to decide whether you're going with a shallow or deep sand bed. I like DSBs for nitrate removal and copepod population.

Be careful with the mandarin fish... They eat a strict diet of copepods and would eat your sand dead and then die of starvation from what i've read. Make sure you have the copepods to sustain it if you're going to get one. Also, almost any form of damsel becomes territorial and agressive as it matures, that may not be a good choice, but you'll have to wait for more experienced people to answer on that one.
I believe you can stock more in this system if you wanted to as well.


Starfish tend to have the same problems as the mandarin, if your copepod population in your sand isnt enough, they can starve.

I'd double the number of shrimp on the list and make them all one species, your tank is big. I have an orca nano with 58 litres and i keep 2 fireshrimp as cleanup crew... you would have nearly 5 times the tank volume as me so get more shrimps for sure.

Blue hermits are pretty, but the rumor i've heard is they tend to be more agressive and less reef-safe than red hermits. check around for further opinions though... many people consider NO hermits to be reef safe.

You'll likely need more snails than that. I have 3 astrea turbos in my setup as well as 7 nassarius snails to stir sand and eat detritius. Of course, it all depends on how much algae you grow, but you could potentially need more like 15 astrea turbos in that system.

Finally....

be careful with anemones, they sting and kill corals. The anemone will move itself to a place it likes and probably stay near it. I'd say if you're going to get any, get them before you have corals and let it pick its spot and make sure it doesnt want to move from there before adding corals. You should check out the pulsing xenia corals too, they're quite a sight.
flameangel flameangel
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  • Posted on: 28/5/2007 22:48
Re: Your expertise and advice is needed! #4
Hi,
So far you have recevied some good advice although some opinions will vary which is down to personal recommendations and own experiences, which is a good way to learn to be honest.
I do not want to add too much to confuse things but the only few comments I have are:

get as much lighting as possible if you want corals. T5's are good but if you can upgrade to halide lights (Arcadia units) then do so, even if it is one for the future.

Hermits are fine - I have loads! but...they do damage soft corals when they walk all over them.

Shrimps will mix and if you get a boxer only get one. If you have enough hiding places he should stay out of the cleaner shrimps way. Mine poses no threat to my cleaner shrimps but my tank is large.

I would not introduce starfish without looking in to them carefully. In my experience the prettier the starfish the more harmful they are to corals etc. I would recommend live sand although we didn't use it for one of our set ups. We also have a sandsifting starfish that we add no special food for and he has lived happily for over a year now.

I am a skimmer fan although many sdo not use them. I would also recommend an external rather than internal. Whe you start to use internal equipment the tank starts to look ugly. I also recommend V2 skimmers, stay away from red Sea ones they are noisier...

Everyone has their preferences for sea salt. I use Red Sea;'s Coral Pro salt and swear by it. I may try the other salt mentioned at some point, as it seems to be highly recommended on here.

RO units do not take up much room. Ours lives on a windowsill and the pipes attached out of the window, to the outside tap and the RO water goes in to a water butt outside. We go thorugh a lot of water so it is much more economical for us.

We have an external Fluval so I would go with that too.

Power heads are a must.

UV units are a very debateable subject. I use one on our large tank but not on our nano. They do have benefits and can kill many harmful organisms. Some say they also kill the benfical ones too, but my tank is running fine with the UV on 24/7. I would say buy one, others may say different.

Go with the advice you were given on the anenomes. Remember an anenome that constantly moves around is an unhappy one!