Quote:
Originally Posted by kien
Thanks :-) It has seen better days but it's alright. Could be worse 
This tank has seen all sorts of maintenance schedules over the past 3 years. When I started the tank I was quite religious with the upkeep and would clean the glass every other day and do weekly water changes. I also emptied my skimmer cup every two or three days and frequently made batches of Calcium, Alkalinity and home made fish food.
As time went on I started to get really busy with other things and the tank maintenance took a hit. Everything got pushed back and some chores got skipped  The tank still hung in there but some of my more delicate corals started to go, sadly.
This past spring I ran into some equipment failures which completely demotivated me because I just didn't have time to fix or replace the equipment and so mostly all of my corals got nuked. My fish were all still fine though so I tweaked my maintenance down to the bare minium. 1. Filling my auto fish feeder, 2. refilling the auto top off reservoir, 3. Cleaning the skimmer cup every weekend. That's pretty much all I did for the past 7 months or so. All of my fish and invertebrates did just fine on just that schedule.
I guess the moral of the story (and the answer to your question is), it depends :-) That is, it depends how complex you want your system to be and how much time and effort you *want* to put in. |
Sorry to hear about all your corals... So I'm assuming you had an almost fish only tank for the past 7 months? And personally I'm hoping to have a very simple reef setup and not give in to buy fish or corals that might cause me to spend an hour or two a day on the tank. I'm expecting 15 mins everyday together with couple of hours of detailed maintenance/cleaning on weekends. Hopefully that'll suffice!
Btw, thats a very nice looking stuffed tang there! How do you treat for ich? Do you quarantine or just give meds in the main tank?