suphew

Thats just nuts. I'd assume they have no idea about marine tanks and thought you wanted to add tonic salt to your fresh water setup. Marine salt it quite different, drying sea salt makes it lose a lot of the compounds you need. When you are starting out any of the brands will do just fine, some have higher calcium etc but not stuff you really need worry about until your coral requirements grow.

You need to start looking in the pet area, none of these lights are water proof or even splash proof (accept the last one which is only T8). With your depth of tank personally I'd be looking for a metal halide unit, maybe with a couple of 150w bulbs. Something like this would be ideal http://www.trademe.co.nz/Pets-animals/F ... 904247.htm

Bet you feel a bit silly now that 1/2 million people are being evacuated and 3 reactors are melting down, bet they are feeling clean and green at the moment.

BTW I have moved this from the PT&E section because it fits better in this section

1) Fluorite is going to be far better for your plants, but remember your plants will only do well if you have there 3 requirements in balance (light, nutrients, Carbon). There's no point spending $$ on expensive substrate if you skimp on light and CO2 2) Yes you can DIY a better lighting (or at least as good) system as you can buy from a pet store. But not with tinfoil and a container for $50. 750mm is a very deep tank and it's going to take decent strong lighting to get any light to the bottom. Also remember that it is illegal to build your own lighting and your insurance wont cover it if your house burns down, water and mains power don't mix well so unless you really know what you are doing your better to troll trademe for some cheaper second hand lighting. 3) Sorry can't help here.

For a small tank like your's you are better off making up water, a large bucket of salt will cost you round $170 and makes up 600+ liters of water which should keep you going for more than a year. You would spend far more in petrol collecting NSW and there are risks to collecting it. Collecting can also be a pain because you have to wait for clear weather, right tides, etc.

Don't put sand in there, while the rock is cycling it will shed lots of dirt you don't want this in your sand. It's also why I recommend leaving sand out of your display for at least the first few months

Yep you will need salt water, a heater will also help to speed up the process.

To judge if your feeding your fish enough you should start looking at the shape of your fish, testing for nitrate, and develop an eye for how a healthy tank looks. How often and how much depends on many things as you can see from the variety of reply's so the question on it's own is meaningless.

Just a starter. No worries TTT your more than welcome.

Reef posted it, I have no idea if he actually wrote it, but since he has had fish approved even if he didn't write it he knows what is required and would be showing this as an example. Given how governmental agency's work I'm surprised at how short it is. What would be the point in reef doing all the paper work then handing it to the fish committee to submit? It just another layer of paper shuffling, and looking at the posts that have been directed at him in this thread would you really expect him to put in all that work and then just hand it over? As I said Reef only imports salt water fish, I'd assume it's fresh water you would be interested in. Reef imports as a side line business because he is interested in the hobby and since he needs to work full time besides importing fish I assume doesn't make huge amounts of money from it. You would be better to hassle the large importers that do do it for a living yet have no interest in helping at a hobbyist level like Reef does. If half as much effort was put into getting some fish added to the list as is put into pointing the finger at Reef and bickering, the fish committee might have managed to make some gains by now.

As far as I know Reef is the only one that has managed to get new fish added to the list in recent year's (happy to be corrected if I'm wrong). Obversely this is the sort of work that is required to get stuff added, good on him for doing the huge amount of work involved and good on him for showing/helping others how it's done so we can get more added. Reef only imports salt water fish, since Tateurndina ocellicauda are fresh water I'm not really sure how money could have been a motivation

Generally with the electronic ballasts if one isn't working (for what ever reason) they both don't, they have to be wired differently for a single tube to work.

She is bringing it in for me to have a look at tomorrow, I should be able to get it sorted.

Even when I was in IT (7 odd years ago now) bigger 'charities' like schools didn't want old warn out computers, I tried many options because we had to pay for them to be scrapped. When you are getting rid of hundreds at a time that all require hard drives wiping there are aren't many options.

For $60 odd I think your far better off with the fluval system, DIY is a painful option that IMO only became popular cause pressurized CO2 used to be so expensive. DIY needs constant watching, has inconsistent output, is messy, risky, ugly to look at sitting beside your tank, and if you add up all the bit's you need and consumables will cost you just about as much anyway

There's not much point trying to take old water, it will just be dirty old water and water doesn't hold very much of the bacteria you need. Moving them will be no different to doing a pond clean out or when you take fish home from the LFS. Plastic kids paddling pools make good temp ponds

We just brought a brand new laptop for under $800 not the highest spec but at 2 years newer than your HP it's properly a higher spec. When I worked in IT we had a 3-5 year write off, after that time it went in the skip.

I thing what Phill is alluding to is the tax gathered on horse race betting rather than the sale of horses. Race betting amounts to 1000's time's more tax income than ornamental fish imports. Another interesting area to look at is how much the dog traveling restrictions have been reduced in recent years, I know of two lady's that regularly take their dog's on holiday to Aus, you can't tell me that a dog which could be spending it's holidays on farms in Aus then coming back here to run round farms is safer to allow free entry into the country than a fish which has been kept in a holding tanks for weeks observed by experts that likely know more about diagnosing and treating fish disease than most vets. But of course dogs are cute and fluffy so must be safe.

Yes it's quite likely they will. You are better of using coral rubble if you want to harden your water.

Consider what bio media in a canister filter is like, and then think about what live rock is like. They are both large surface areas for bacteria to live on/in, your tank is the filter.

Lucky I gave myself a disclaimer!

The requirement and type of test kit depend on what you plan to do. If your going to only keep what you say what are you going to need to test? Ammonia maybe, but the tank will cycle no matter what you do, then the ammonia will be gone. So you can spend $40 on a test or you can just wait 3-4 weeks and know that the cycle will have happened. If you worried get your LFS to do a test for you, you'll only need to do it once or twice (or most fresh water ammonia tests work for saltwater). The other one you might be interested in is Nitrate, this one could be handy, but really in a marine tank the state of your rock and amount of algae will give you a better idea if your nitrate is getting high. If you decided to keep hard (LPS/SPS) corals you could start monitoring Magnesium, Calcium, and kH, but with regular water changes these levels shouldn't drop much anyway.

I have a marine tank so can talk from first hand experience, and have been successfully keeping for marines for a number of years. The smallest tank I have run was about 50liters, my current tank is round 700 For what you are doing your best bet is to keep it simple. Clowns are pretty hardy and some corals actually do better in less clean water. Firstly forget about using the cannister filter, you don't want/need to use it fas a biological filter, you can't use it as a return pump (and even if it worked it would be a waste of a $100+ filter when you could buy a $50 pond pump that would work 1000x better). The only thing it could be used for is holding chemical media, PO4 remover, carbon, or zeolite, for example. For what you are doing there is no point at this stage. Also don't worry about deep sand beds, macro algae filters, refugiums, algae turf filters, etc etc, think of these like you would CO2 in a fresh water tank, they do do a job but are not needed for a simple starting out setup. A sump is an option, but my advise is that for a little tank the extra complication, risk, work, cost, etc etc just isn't worth the gain. Save the sump for when you have bit more experience and are ready to move up another level. All you need to succeed is live rock and a skimmer (and to be honest in a tank that small even a skimmer is just a nice extra). I've actually helped a couple of people setup Fluval Edge tanks (20 odd liter), one has a pair of black clowns and the other a small damsel, neither have skimmers, both have been running for over a year with no problems. On the subject of live rock, there is a lot of confusion and mis-information about live rock. Live rock is live because of the bacteria on and in it, no other reason, if you put dead coral rock into water very quickly if will become live rock. It take a bit longer for it to become mature live rock and start processing nitrates but most shops that sell marines will also sell you rock that they have had in their tanks long enough to be fully live and mature. The next stage of 'live' rock, is live rock with stuff on it, again a lot of shops will be able to sell your rock with at least some extra life. In a lot of ways you are safer to start with dead dry rock, while it's cool to get all the good extras with your rock there are also a lot of bad extras that will have you pulling your hair out down the track. People generally either must have sand or don't add it, my suggestion would be to leave it our for a few months at least, there are many plus and minus's to having sand, but it's a lot easier to add it later than it is to take it out. Have a look how much dirt gathers on the bottom of your tank before you commit to not being able to get it out cause of the sand. In priority order of spending I would buy (Sure I have missed something, but it's my list so..) Tank Salt Coral rock (Either live or dead) Refractometer (this a must have in a small tank) Filtered water Circulation pump Fish Lights (You don't NEED light until you have corals) Corals Skimmer (cause you can make up for a lack of skimmer by doing water changes) Test kits (Maybe)

With a depth of 600, you would only just get away with 250's but 400's would be better. Planning on having high light requiring corals only on the top of the tank is a mistake, for starters they need room to grow so need to start at least half way down the tank, then there are things like clams and fungia that need high light and topically go on the bottom, and also anemones need light and you don't have control on where they go, lots of them like to have their foot in sand. Also from an aesthetic point of view tanks that aren't lit properly will always look like they haven't been done properly