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

[Aquattro]

Personally, 300 pounds of rock is way too much. I use 1/2 pound per gallon, I'm pretty successful with it. Lots of room for fish to swim, lots of space to mount corals, and I have no measurable NO3. I'm also not a fan of dry rock, but it is cheaper, so think about mixing it up. I'm never really sure what pests people are concerned with, I've used 500 pounds of real rock over my time in the hobby and once got a worm I didn't like, I just removed that rock. Any crab that comes with it is still in my tank. The loss of all the good stuff isn't worth worrying about the bad stuff (that you could never ever get).

[BlueWorldAquatic]

Welcome to CanReef.

All great advise

The most important thing though, "Take it nice and slow", patience is a virtue. Will save you a h*ll of a lot of money too.

I converted my first tank from Fresh to Salt a few years back, and never looked back. I just added salt to my current water and ran it for a month. Didn't take too much scrubbing, as most of the algae died off anyhow.

Drop by anytime to the store, and we'd be happy to answer any questions you may have too.

Ken - BWA

[ALang]

Welcome to canreef!
Looks like you have tons of great advise to digest already, so no need for me to add any. There are already a couple of "newbies" just starting up, so read their posts as well.

300 gal plus sump, wow, you're off to a great start already. We only wish our tanks were that large. I can just imagine what I can do with 300gal, and HOW MUCH I can personally blow on my credit cards

Good luck.
Lenny.

[mike31154]

Ha, with a 300 gal to start with, the world is your oyster, pun intended. I went straight into a marine set up, no fresh water experience, but a few friends/relatives have FW tanks so I know a little about that scenario. IMO the things that are quite a bit different between FW & SW are lighting, flow & water quality in no particular order.

Probably the first thing on the agenda would be water quality, best to get a RODI system & use pure water to mix up your soup with from the outset. No unkowns getting into your system that way.

Next, I'd say flow. Even during the cycle you'll want good water movement, so look into getting some propeller pumps since they are better at moving water in all the nooks & crannies than the laminar flow from conventional powerheads or pumps.

Lighting.... at the start you won't need to worry too much about it. It's going to take some time to cycle that bad boy, so whatever you have now for FW will probably be ok. Then, once you start adding livestock, you can put together a lighting plan. Chances are you're going to add a fish or two first, so again, lighting does not need to be ultra bright for them. As far as coral, good idea to start with some easier softies & LPS, so now you can look at bumping up the light intensity a little. It will probably be a few months before you're to that point, so you'll have plenty of time for additional research. This will be one of the larger expenses for a tank your size, so choose well depending on what your ultimate goal is. LED is definitely poised to edge out the current MH/T5HO technology, but still quite costly. Either way, lights are going to be $$$$$ if you're thinking full reef with an abundance of SPS coral. With 300 gals you can cram a few critters in there. Best of luck.

[Hustler]

Here is a shot of my sump and tank, Its going to be a bit tricky getting a skimmer inside it and bigger chunks of live rock but there is plenty of room. I also have a secondary pipe right from the pump going back into the sump i may be able to tap into to run something like a uv or skimmer??? Also i guess all the bio balls and my pails and pails of ceramic rings will have to come out...


Its got 2 2" inch downpipes on each side in the overflows and 2 1 1/2" return pipes on each side that i will probably have to figure how to put loc lines onto with a manifold of some kind???, The pump is really large so it blows like crazy thus the dump pipe back into the sump or the fish looked like they were being flushed LOL
It was set up with tons of overkill as i used to keep asian arowanas so im hopeing i wont need much more current or pumps just better direction but we will see.

[Myka]

Nice Aros!!

Originally Posted by Hustler

Here is a shot of my sump and tank, Its going to be a bit tricky getting a skimmer inside it Yikes! How much clearance do you have under the tank? Only looks like 20"?

and bigger chunks of live rock but there is plenty of room. I don't like live rock in the sump...it just collects detritus down there and I think the added filtration is limited. I siphon butt loads of detritus out of my sump and overflow and there is no rock in there.

I also have a secondary pipe right from the pump going back into the sump i may be able to tap into to run something like a uv or skimmer??? Also i guess all the bio balls and my pails and pails of ceramic rings will have to come out... the skimmer doesn't get tapped in. It sits there and is independent and does it's own thing. A UV needs to be plumbed into ALL return water to be 100% effective. That means if you have a Y in the return line you need to put the UV before the Y. If you have two return pumps you need to put one UV on each return line. Ya, take out all that biomedia stuff.

Its got 2 2" inch downpipes on each side in the overflows and 2 1 1/2" return pipes on each side that i will probably have to figure how to put loc lines onto with a manifold of some kind???, They sound fine the way they are. Be careful with loc-line that you don't end up directing the return line too far under water so that when you have a power outage the backwash doesn't overflow your sump. The pump is really large so it blows like crazy thus the dump pipe back into the sump or the fish looked like they were being flushed LOL Did you check the GPH on that puppy yet? Even a brand/model would help.
It was set up with tons of overkill as i used to keep asian arowanas so im hopeing i wont need much more current or pumps just better direction but we will see. Are there any powerheads in the tank? In a saltwater system you only want about 6-10x turnover through the sump. The majority of the flow comes from powerheads in the tank. Look into a Tunze Wavebox, on a nice long tank like yours it would make a sweet wave!

[Hustler]

Well the pump (rebuilt) is from a display rack filter system, Its .25HP to 1.5HP..... and from what google says up to 68GPM

Ive got it on the lowest setting and it still dumps the 90 gallon wet dry in a few min....