I think the beauty of this hobby is that a person can be successful (with work and research) in any given "morph" they decide they are comfortable with. Comfort equating to money and time.

And I don't know if I am like others but have found that once you get into multiple tanks then you can have more than one type of system and that is probably what I enjoy the most.

The big tank is as Deeeelux as I could afford, toys galore and all about SPS. I travel quite a bit for work and since that is where most of the $$$$$ goes It just made sense to me to try and protect it. Not doing so equates, in my mind at least, to buying a brand new car and never doing an oil change.

The mandarin cube is lower scale because that is what I set out to create from the beginning. Tank, open sump, no skimmer, no dosing, softies & LPS etc.

QT is simple and as basic as can be and the frag tank is plumbed into the big SPS so piggy-backs off that.

The hubby is the "design-build" department and he simply needs to over build, to consider it properly built, so I sometimes have a hard time keeping things simple. There are a few "rules" however i won't compromise on. These are just my personal rules and help me sleep at night &/or concentrate when at work or out of town.

It will be Bean Animal
It will have an internal C2C
It will be B.B.
No equipment purchased can start with HOB:lol:

But that's just me:lol:

I think I'm simple w RO. Lol

Tank, sump, skimmer (nac),4 korilla power head, 2 reactors (mr1) one for carbon one for gfo) Metal halides, and i use prodibio which I love, I still check the big three weekly and water change RO biweekly

I keep 8 clams and 93 pieces of coral. 80% of them being Sps

I was using tap water up until this spring and to be honest I'm glad I switched. I've noticed less algea on glass. Though it was minimal before and tap water p04 was at .24

I get fantastic growth from coral. But do plan on mp40s and ca reactor in near future. I can't ever see me running a controller though.

But who knows.

http://i1217.photobucket.com/albums/...1/1444e5dd.jpg