Hi! New to Board
 

Hi All,

We've just moved to our brand new downtown condo a couple of weeks ago and are online for the first time in several months. Our one and only reef, in a six month old 7 gal bowfront, took the move well as did our other pets - an aviary with ten finches and our ball python, Sid, who's as cool (maybe cooler) as our reef.

Once our server gets setup and we borrow a camera, I'll post a few photos.

Take care,

Welcome to Edmonton and to Canreef. It is nice to see our Edmonton club growing.


Patrick

Hi Patrick,

Nice to have the welcome to the board, but no need to welcome me to The Big E. I've lived here all my life :-)

I'd be interested in knowing a little more about the reefs that others on the Edmonton Canreef keep.

As I said earlier, ours is a 7 gal bowfront. It has about a 4" sandbed, maybe 10 lbs of rock, a few lps corals, a big chunk of large-leafed halimeda, a cleaner shrimp, a grey brittle star, a 1.5" orange starfish, a clownfish and a yellow fish with black dots along its dorsal fin (don't remember its name right off hand). We finally found out what happens to the yellow fish whenever the tank is disturbed for cleaning and at night - it burrows into the sandbed.

A couple of unusual hitchhikers, a 1" long orange lobster and a quarter inch white crab, came in on a porous rock that was bought for its purple macroalgae. The two HH are doing well, though the MA hasn't.

Lighting was upgraded to power compacts to support the lps corals. An AquaClear Mini supplies circulation and filtration. During the weekly 15% water change, I clean the living heck out of the foam media after gently turkey basting the sandbed, rock and corals. A lot of grunge is exported this way as we have no skimmer. Without a doubt, the key to the success using the AquaClear Mini is the weekly maintenance.

Anyway, take care.

hey bev, welcome to canreef. i'm near red deer, so i consider myself an edmonton and calgary member. next time you're on your way through let me know and you can check out my system, give me another two months or so to get it going (150 gal reef). :)

Welcome to the board, you have the same tank as i do. 8) You can see mine here http://www.canreef.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3757 It will be no more by the end of the month as it will be going into my new 40 gal cube. You should read through some of the posts in the nano tank fourm as that's were you'll be doing most of your posting. :wink:

Clinton

Nice little tank and great photos :-) I can see your soft corals growing like mad soon and overtaking the 7 gal. Too bad there wasn't a way to keep the 7 going along with the 40 cube. Maybe if you got some slow growing sps corals, you could keep the 7 going ;-) BTW, where are you getting the 40 cube?

I've had all sizes of tanks in our house in Laurier from a 5, 10, 15, 33, 75 and to finally the 180. The 180 was the best one we had up until setting up the 7 gal bowfront. By now we've learned all kinds of things like how to get rid of cyano, not to put in calurpa or other small-leafed macroalgae(which spreads like h*ll under upgraded lighting), and that weekly maintenance is the way to go to keep all kinds of problems from getting a toehold.

Now that we live in a smaller abode and now that our funds are going to be a little tighter for the next year or so, I've come to believe the 7 gal is the just the perfect sized tank for us. Plus maintenance on a 7 gal takes less time and money (ie, for salt) that on a larger tank. One pail of salt will last us almost forever :-)

I continued reading the thread at the url you sent and was interested in the AC 500 idea. Not that I'd add one because we view our tank from the front in the dining and living rooms and from the back in the kitchen. The AC 500 would obscure the view of the tank from the kitchen and make maintenance a little harder. But maybe an AC 300 might be another option ... Hmmm ....

Thanks for the url and for the discussion.

I was wondering if it was you Beverly W from RAMR ! Boy, you have certainly downsized :shock:

Welcome to Canreef !

Deb H.

[quote="EmilyB"]I was wondering if it was you Beverly W from RAMR ! Boy, you have certainly downsized :shock:


Yeah, Deb, c'est moi. We downsized a lot of things in our overly busy lives. As a result, though, we have no more mortgage (!), but have a few bills from upgrading some extras in our brand new condo. Love the new condo, too. No more snow shovelling and it's close to everything we'll ever need being in the west residential part of downtown. Besides, it's that time in our lives to get serious about saving for retirement, so I doubt we'll get too much more into reefs even though we really, really like our 7 gal :-)

How are you outfitted for tanks these days?

Only four SW tanks.... :roll: :wink: 155g, 120g, 15g, 10g.....(oh, and the little azoo...)

Two mortgages however.... :shock: :lol:

Yeah, if I remember correctly your 155 had a decorator crab that you named Martha :-) You were always great naming critters.

What the heck is an azoo?

http://www.canreef.com/phpBB2/viewto...t=3689&start=0

I'm waiting on a better heating option.....but it is a neat little thing... :D

Liked the photo of the covered grey tank, but when I searched a couple of engines for Azoo, all I found were open acrylic tanks in unusual shapes. Is yours one of the covered type? Is it acrylic? (I hope not but think the answer is yes.) Where'd you buy it?

Oh, oh, I think I might have to hit the west end lfs for a look around at their little tanks again :lol: Had once thought of doing a large glass fish bowl, but couldn't find anything that I considered good lighting for it. Better find a place for another nano on the bar shelf between the kitchen and dining room before going shopping. Husband's been in Vancouver on business since Monday and may be a little hot under the collar when he finds out I've found this board with all these ideas ....

Oh, oh!!!

If your going to look for another tank or pumps/powerheads, try Trident Wholesale Pet Supplies. Address is 11228-163 Street, i've bought most of my powerheads/pumps and a few tanks and all my frozen foods there. About 25% cheaper than anywhere else.

Clinton

Wholesalers generally don't sell to the public. How'd were you able to buy from them?

Tey are a mail order type place, and will sell to anyone that walks throught the door. :D Just thought i'd share the cheapness<- is that a word 8)

Clinton

Just thought i'd share the cheapness<- is that a word 8)

Clinton[/quote]

It's probably in the same linguistic league as cheapivity :wink:

Thanks for the name of the place. They're in the phone book, so give them a call to find out their hours of operation.

9-5 monday to saturday.

Clinton

Thanks for the tip. Went there this morning and was mainly looking at their tank, hood, stand setups in a hex design. Their products are mainly All-Glass with pressboard stands and plastic hoods with little room for lighting upgrade. Too bad, though, because their prices were pretty decent.

Went to Petsmart and Super Pet in the west end. They have all wood stands, though the prices are substantially higher. I'd rather go for quality and pay the extra $$ for something that'll keep it's looks longer than buy something of a lesser quality for a lower price.

With a 42 gal hex, we could put a single 175W 6500K halide unit that J&L has at the bottom of:

http://www.jlaquatics.com/cgi-bin/st...d=9778442_1832

(J&L will ship lighting at half price all of March, and will ship other dry goods totalling $100 or more for free.)

That is if we decide to go forward with a larger tank at all. The right sized hex will fit nicely in the dining room near the east windows. I took a few measurements of an Oceanic 42 gal hex and will make a template of the base to see if it indeed will fit into the spaces we have in that location. If it won't fit, well, at least we had a dream ;-)

Take care.

Never bought a hood from them, always make my own. Thae tanks however are way higher quality than Petsmart or Super pet. Holy expensive light setup. I'm putting my 175 watt 10k MH together for under $200.

Clinton

We're not do it yourselfers much anymore, except for small stuff like retrofitting existing lighting setups to powercompacts or something like that.

Petsmart and Super Pet carry Oceanic tanks and IME, these are great tanks. The stands are solid wood and wood veneer as opposed to the presswood and plasticized coatings at Trident. I guess we want to have a work of art when we put together a reef javascript:emoticon(':)')
Smile

Anyway, I made the cardboard template of the base of a 42 hex and put it on a small table in the place where we think the tank might go. Then came the calculation of how much the entire setup with LR, livestock, a 3" deep sugar-sized sandbed and other equipment. Now we're taking some time to decide if we will go ahead with it. And it always costs more than initially calculated, so we have some hard thinking to do.

Take care.

you know, you could go with the PFO system at the top of that page and upgrade to a 175watt 10000k and it would be cheeper than getting the reefsun set up you are talking about.

just a thought.

Jeff