Hmmmm, OK I have a 75g tank that has been up since the night before thanksgiving. It has a
4"+
deep sand bed and over a hundred pounds of live rock and concrete based base rock.
Granted I did move an existing setup into a bigger tank but I added 60 pounds of new sand to supplement the old sandbed. I have a small patch of diatoms in one shaded corner and ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate have been undetectable. This tank is lit by 440 watts of
VHO lighting 2 03 actinic and a 50/50 and a aquasun, all URI bulbs. Between the power heads and the circulation pump water flow is in the area of 700 gph, soon to be increased substantially. The only filtration besides the DSB and the Live Rock is a wimpy skimmer.
My original 29g that evolved into a reef had undergravel filter and coarse grained crushed coral(yup I started out in the seventies) and with 3 small fish fed sparingly mu nitrates were always at least 20ppm even with weekly water changes. Now I feed the snails and a few crabs in the tank a chunk of reef mush dailey and phyto for the corals. FWIW this is the third evolution the reef has undergone in over three years so there is a certain amount of stability and maturaty to build on, but at this point I am trying to resolve all the hardware issues and leave it alone to settle down. By summertime I should be ready to add a few carefully selected fish. My tank is by no means state of the art not do I infer that theres only one way to set up a tank, I learned the method youve been taught 25 years ago when I was a new SW freak. I like the newer approaches better,
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I thought I was me, but we were wrong
email: geeflipr@internetcds.com
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