Help on some hardware decisions

[serratus]

Thanks for all of your contributions everyone. I'm learning a lot. The most significant thing to learn is that the trend now seems to be stepping away from canister filters. That's interesting considering the stores I've been too (including aquarium specialty stores) all say to use cannister filters.

There are a few immediate implications to not using canister filters that I am unsure of (eg. without mechanical filtration, what's going to take away the dust and carpet fibers that inevitably lands in the tank?), but I'll start a thread about all of this in a few days when I've read through more of the guides that Canreef refers to.