Edmonton Freshie walking the plank, Any advice to ease the wallet/headaches :)

[Myka]

Originally Posted by Hustler

lol you are right myka I am being a bit ornery lol
Im doing my very best to addapt to the new school of thinking..... but even in my younger years i remember an old saying a gent who used to own his own pet store would say.... In salt the hobby is all about whats under the tank and not about whats in it.... I dont want all the bells and whistles under there I can do that with my back and arms bi weekly lol..... Im just trying to find a happy balance between toys and having actual animals in there. Of course i want to do it right the first time..... but I dont want to be the sucker that buys the fluval X5 right off the shelf for $500+ and see someone making an AC500 $42 outdo it with a few simple mods.... I understand the quality vs import and all that but there is a point where really its just a brand.... and your paying top dollar for it

Ok, here's the thing. A skimmer isn't "bells and whistles". Controllers, fancy powerheads, crazy lights with replicated thunderstorms...those are bells and whistles. There is a certain amount of bragging power with a Bubble King though, it's is not leaps and bounds better than other skimmers in its class when it comes to performance, but it is the type of skimmer that you will "never" have to replace. Bubble King makes huge skimmers...over $10,000. When a company is making $10,000 skimmers they know what they are doing.

I'm a cheap skate...I buy everything used. Although I did buy my last skimmer new (a SWC) after I looked for several months for a used skimmer of a better brand. I really wanted a better brand, but I'm happy with the skimmer I chose although I know I will likely be replacing the pump within the net year or two which I'm sure will really **** me off when it happens. I'm pretty patient when it comes to looking for used equipment, but my tank was really starting to suffer with just a small spare skimmer I had on it (an under-sized SWC) and a tank maintenance company that didn't clean it well enough to make up for that.

Doing physical maintenance on the tank is great, I'm big on that too. The trouble is that being a newbie you don't know what you're looking for and your problems will likely start to get out of control before you notice. I can tell you right now by looking at my tank that the alkalinity is somewhere in the 6 dKH right now because of the way the corals are looking. I better fix that right away. I haven't tested the tank in 2 1/2 weeks (bad on me).

Which btw, you need some powerheads! We haven't talked much about that either. You're going to be looking at adding 30-60x turnover in the tank by the use of powerheads. In order of awesomeness (and price!) check out Vortech ($$$), Tunze, and Koralia. Powerheads get the fish poop and other detritus suspended in the water column so it can go down the drains and into the skimmer. If the crap can't get to the skimmer then the skimmer doesn't do much good.