camnbron

Is this a dual effort with you LA?

Whadaya up to?

As a basic, modified aquaone tank it looks "ok". But you would still need to buy: a return pump skimmer stream(s) live rock fish corals. Plus if the lights are standard, they won't be sufficient for most corals and the hood will need modifying to add more. The sump will be limiting in what size skimmer you can put in it, the prior owner may be able to assist with what skimmer that they used.

Holy moley! Thats a healthy looking system. All you need now is some SPS colonies.

In general for Salt water reef aquariums test kits need to be more accurate. A lot of the generic test kits are not able to provide results accurately to the levels that owners of these types of tanks prefer them to be. Especially in the case of phosphate and nitrate. There is better methods of testing than the titration test kits available at the LFS, but they are more expensive (eg hanna phosphate meter) The preferred brand of test kits in use in NZ are: Salifert, JBL, Red sea. I use JBL, I'd prefer to use salifert but it never seems to be available at the LFS's in Tauranga or Rotorua and there is not an online NZ based shop that sells them. There are other brands but they are either not as accurate or are not as available as the above 3.

Cool, your new fish tank has a little TV for the fish to watch. Very thoughtful Gannet

Yes there is - have a reef tank as your screen saver!

Here you go buddy, Beananimal/herby overflow Have a read of that article. You'd have to scale it down to suit your nano tank, but its do-able. Gannets got that system on his 2 foot cube, looks quite smart.

Best practice for freshwater topup is to to automate it using a suitable pump operated off a level switch or a timer. Its especially important on smaller tanks to keep on top of parameters as in general they tend to be less stable - smaller water volume - hence the recommendation for people starting to have a decent size tank like a 4 footer. With the timer, if you know how much water evaporates each day you can spread the topping up over the day instead of topping up all at once to minimise the risk of causing damage by sudden salinity or temperature change There might need to be seasonal adjustments made a couple of times a year though. With the NSW, you just adjust it to suit what your desired tank parameters are before using it so its all good to go. You can guestimate to some extent, but the parameters in the NSW can be variable depending on what the weather has been doing etc,. The only time I've worried about the temperature of water going into the tank is in the middle of winter when its cold as outside where my NSW barrel is. In that situation I just replace the water in parts - 10% water removed, replace 1/4, monitor temperature in tank, not too cold then repeat process until 10% water replaced.

Anyway... I have 2 current batches of bangaii cardinals in the grow out phase, with another batch being held in the males mouth at the moment.. The more advanced batch of 29 exhibited the Sudden Fright Syndrome behavior a couple of weeks ago when I was cleaning the tank - water change and salinity adjustment. About 10 of them freaked out, went nuts and played dead in the water column for a few seconds before returning to normal. I had been feeding them exclusively BBS, and had been a little lax with the enrichment of the BBS. That with maybe a temperature change may have caused the freak out. All returned to normal and I've been attempting to wean them off BBS and onto other foods since then. For the 1st 6odd weeks after being released by the male, they were in a breeders cage in my reef tank and the first lights to come on over the tank were my T5's which are on are dimmable and mimic sunrise/sunset So for that time I avoided any sudden light change, after that they have been transferred to a grow out tank which has lights switched off a timer - this hasn't caused any negative effects. The second batch of 18ish is currently in the breeders cage in the display again and are doing fine. I don't know how many the male is holding now but his mouth looks more full than the second batch. Losses so far??? I am up to 4 batches including the one the male is holding now. The first batch I suspect died from lack of food. second batch - 30 babies, 1 Dead on release - fed to anenome, 29 in growout tank third batch - 18?? (hard to count), 1 dead on release - fed to goby forth batch - I'll find out in just over 2 weeks :bounce: Thats my experience anyway. If you are looking for more online information, try the International Marine Breeders Forum - MOFIB. It contains a heap of information provided by individuals, plus links to papers and articles that people think may be of assistance to other people trying to breed Marine ornamental fish and invertebrates Hope that helps.

But that link has a pretty cheap price. If you don't want to buy from overseas, your LFS should either have one in stock or will be able to order one in for you. Alternately I have seen refractometers listed on a NZ online store.

What it does Caper is provide you an indication of what the salinity of the water is. Unfortunately they are notorious for being inaccurate. What most people use is a refractometer, which is more expensive (isn't everything), but very accurate.

Maybe you could get your future inlaws to buy it for you as an early wedding present!

No you don't have to spend $2000 to set up a marine tank. It all depends on what you would like to have in your tank and how much work you want to do yourself. Some inhabitants of our tanks require good water quality, a good amount of flow and strong lighting, so we invest in bigger skimmers, bigger pumps and more watts of lighting. My advice is to have a read of the info in the stickies at the top of the section, trawl through the forum, go visit some people with reef tanks. With corals when they are in the right conditions they grow and require continual fragging (pruning), some people sell these coral frags to others.

Sumps aren't really that technical they can appear a little hardcore or intimidating at first but they are very useful. Have a look at the links in the sticky titled Links to reference sites at the top of the saltwater section.