Consider my system simple although I have three rather costly MP40WES gadgets moving the water. Other than that, sumpless & DIY almost everything. I even purchased the system used from a lady in Richmond & transported the whole works back to Vernon in the middle of winter (early January). The skimmer that came with it is an old school, wooden air diffuser driven counter current which certainly looks like someone's DIY project. I added a few of my own mods to the skimmer & it works great. Also cobbled together the light fixture consisting of two MH 250 watt lamps in DIY Lumenarc reflectors & 2 retrofit T5 tubes overdriven by a Workhorse 8 ballast. Currently in the process of building a LED fixture using 10 watt LEDs. My ATO is a glass wine carboy pressurized by an air pump on a timer. No controller, just timers for the ATO & lights.
Livestock includes two sizeable BTAs hosting a spawning Maroon Clownfish pair, Yellow Tang, Mandarin Dragonet, Yellowtail Damsel & Singapore Angelfish. Then there are the miscellaneous critters like snails, hermits & a Tuxedo Urchin. Coral is mostly soft & LPS with a couple of small SPS frags. Everything's doing well. I'd love to keep a Lawnmower Blenny but I've lost 3 of them now, all due to different circumstances, so I'm giving them a break from my system. Dosing is sporadic. Whenever I do a water change, I'll usually test & if something's a little too far off, I add what's needed to the ATO without a lot of precise measuring. Despite this apparent lack of precision with regard to dosing, LPS such as my Hammer & a Chalice appear to be getting plenty of calcium, since they are among the fast growers in my system. Even the two little SPS frags are growing. Not sure what they even are, they're brown and are branching profusely. So my theory on that is, even if calcium levels drop to half of what they should be (I've never measured that low), it's likely that certain corals will find a way to extract enough of it to build. So unless you're farming coral for sale (or really have a ton of SPS), do you really need to dose like a madman & keep levels over 400 or are water changes at regular intervals sufficient?
I tend to feed heavily relative to the low fish bioload since I like the critters to be fat & the Maroons spawning. Consequently, I have a bit of an algae scrubber in certain areas of my display (read hair algae). I don't sweat it too much unless it starts crowding the coral & prefer to look at it as free nitrate export. After all I'm paying good money for all that light shining down into the tank, so that in combination with plenty of food fuels the process. Some day I'll have a sump and try to eliminate the stuff from the display. Being a previously owned system with very little flow when I picked it up, this could be contributing to the algae growth. I'm seeing a steady improvement with each water change, but looks like I have a ways to go on that front. Not sure any deluxe gadgets are going to help with that.
Crap, I wrote another freakin novel. Oh well.
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