Quote:
Originally Posted by FitoPharmer
If you ran a 100G and a 200G exactly the same additives, feeding, bio load, and maintenance wise the 200G would cost a little less then twice as much to run. But there is also the factor of your own personal time. In a larger system it seems like everything takes longer and when things go wrong they can be a nightmare to fix relative to a smaller system. You can cut down some of the work by installing equipment like a semi automated water change system or a algae turf scrubber. Also IMO QT procedures become more important the larger your tank is since starting over or catching a fish out of a 200+ gallon aquarium can be a tonne of work.
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+1 to everything you just said
On the one hand, bigger tanks are 'easier' because you have a bigger margin of error. Things that go wrong go wrong slower, and you have more of a chance to correct problems before they nuke everything. That being said, once a problem happens in a big tank... good lord. Getting my fish out to deal with an ich problem (which was caused by poor to absent QT procedures and is my own fault in every sense) was 6 hours to get them out, then another 4 hours to get my tank and dining room looking the way it did before I started. I was lucky I had an entire day available to do it. Also, without redundancies and emergency planning, a weekend away when some vital piece of equipment fails will nuke a 500 gallon tank just as completely as a 20 gallon, only with the 500, your total losses will be an order of magnitude or two higher. Redundancy planning is another place that equipment costs scale with a big tank
Another thing to consider is that the actual expense of setting up a tank is one thing, but your time has a value and it's not unlimited. The ongoing maintenance commitment can scale up with a big tank if it's not taken in to consideration from the start. Where is your supply of water relative to the tank? Are you using R/O water? if so, How are you going to store enough R/O water to do a water change? Where are you mixing the new salt water? How are you draining the water from your system, and how are you transporting the new salt water to the system?
As an example, my last tank was a 90 gallon that sat on the main floor of my condo. It wasn't possible to set up an R/O system in that house, or store any water long term, so the only source of water and a drain was the bathroom on that floor, 27 feet away. From start to finish, including set-up and clean up, a 20 gallon water change took just shy of 2 hours of my active involvement if I got the salinity of the replacement water perfect on the first shot, and involved a 50 foot python hose, a 20 gallon garbage can I had to store somewhere, lots of siphoning, and hand balling buckets of water in to the display (thank goodness for concrete floors and old towels). If the tank was any larger, or required more than a 20 gallon water change at any point, the whole system would have become so time-sucking there's no way I would have stuck with it long term.
If you are going to 'go big' make sure you take that in to account when you plan your new system. It would suck to spend 10 grand on something only to realize when it's all said and done that the "required" maintenance each week is 4 hours and the most you really have to devote is 2. There are ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to do things, but they need to be considered before you build the system.