thanks man. It had a rough year but things are looking up. I picked up a couple of Maxspect Riptides. Since my tank has awkward internal overflows and is open on two sides, it limited the places I could put the vortechs. It really messed with the flow pattern normal power head style pumps put out. It caused some aggravating growth patterns and dead spots in the middle of the tank. I put up with it because there was no other option until the riptides. In an ideal scenario I'd cut out the overflows and install a coast to coast or something, but that's more time and money than my better half will let me spend on it at the moment.
I used to run an external reeflo dart but switched to an Fluval SP6 a couple of months ago and couldn't be happier. It's much quieter and puts out more flow than I need so I was able to build a reactor manifold and get my reactors out of my sump.
And I run a Deltic SC2560. It's the only skimmer I've ever owned that's never given me a single problem, and is generally rock solid in terms of skimmate production. It was expensive as all hell, but worth it.
As for advice - stay away from internal overflows if you can avoid it. You'll hate them sooner than later. Also don't mess around with quarantine procedures for your fish. Getting fish out of a 90 gallon to treat them is hard enough, getting your fish out of a 300 gallon tank when they come down with ich or velvet is a 16 hour nightmare. I didn't QT with this tank in the beginning, paid for it hard, and now I wouldn't consider setting up an aquarium without taking the QT infrastructure into account again. I use the tank transfer method, so it's pretty easy to break it all down and put it away when I'm not using it, but it does take up storage real estate, and half my laundry room counters when I'm using it.
Also, sort out a system for doing large water changes efficiently and in a small amount of time, which hopefully you've considered. If your water change procedure takes you more than half an hour, I doubt you'll have the tank a year from now. Automate as much of it as you can, with equipment that needs to be moved as little as possible. Water changes on my old 90 gallon took 2 hours with all the buckets, hoses, mixing, hand balling water and cleaning up the massive mess it made, and after 9 months I wanted to put a sledge hammer through it. Water changes on this thing take 20 minutes, only 5 of which I'm physically doing anything, and are only limited by the speed of the pump that drains my sump.
Also, be realistic about your budget. I'm not sure what you're planning on putting in it or how you plan to source it, but I thought I was being reasonable budgeting $400/month to this thing when I first started. In it's first year of life, I realistically spent at least twice that on average, some months much, much more. Coral is expensive. Enough (nice) coral to fill a 300 gallon tank is a decent used car. My tank sucks back around $50/month in electricity, and I use reasonably expensive salt (H2Ocean), a bucket of which only gets me 4 water changes. At $80/bucket and the number of water changes I had to do in Feb, March, and September to stop the rapid destruction of thousands of dollars worth of coral, it's all added up.
If I were doing it all again, I also wouldn't allow a single inanimate object in my tank if it came from a system with aiptasia. No sand, no rock, no frags (unless it was SPS and it was broken off whatever plug or rock it came on), nothing. No matter how badly you want to "seed" your system with whatever nice things are living in their sand, it's not worth it. It's entirely possible to avoid getting it in the first place, but once you have it, you'll never not have it, and in a large system problems only become bigger, more frustrating, and more expensive to deal with.
And finally, make sure you love your sump. Not sure if you designed it or you're buying an off the shelf kind, but if your sump doesn't have the flexibility to do what you want it to do, you'll get very frustrated. I agonized over my sump design for months. It's one of the few things in my tank I've always been happy with.
Visitor Messages
Hi. You have an awesome tank! Im just setting up a 300gal w/a 100gal sump.If you wouldn't mind. I have a few questions
. I'm just courious what powerheads you are using now gotten rid of the vortechs. I've been considering Jebao RW-15's. Also what protein skimmer and return pump do you run? Do you have anything you would give for advice when setting up a big tank?
