suphew

My old marine tank is for sale, in the T&E section, is all ready to go, including some soft corals, just needs fish. Cheap easy way to get started.

Rule of thumb I have been told and use is one MH every 2 feet, plus your tank is quite deep. I was buying from scratch I would go 3x250w but since you already have the lights why not try them out and replace later if you find they aren't enough. Also I wouldn't try and compensate lack of MH by spending $ on T5's, they take up too much room for too little light output, IMHO are best used for adjusting the colour, i.e. running blue tubes.

That sounds like a really good idea, I have tried using soapy fingers and it never seemed to work very well.

scoria (sp?) is another option I have used, but is a volcanic rock as well so guess it would have the same issues as pumice

They look kind of un-natural to me, how do they get 'new' species, does anyone know? Is this done by line breeding mutant fish, cross breeding different types of clowns, genetic tampering?? Not my cup of tea sorry.

Mine has been running for well over a year now, switching off/on every 15 minutes, cost me less then a 10th of the cost of a stream, so to get equal time/value dollar the stream would have to run with-out fault for 10+ years and still counting :lol:

Are they nice french doors?? Do you know they could be worth heaps at a building recyclers? A friend and I purchased a plain old normal door from the recyclers and it cost about $90, was the cheapest of the size we could find. I also sold them my old kitchen cubboards which were like 40 years old and had been sitting in the rain for a couple of weeks, got $100.

Dont forget you will need to leave a hole to let the air in. Which of course is going to let the noise out to

A T8 will make very little difference to your light compared to the 150w mh you currently have. If you do use fluro just use them for blue tubes, and if your buying units get T5's.

I used to have plans for a thing called a spider, which was for filtering ponds and large tanks. Really simple but a good idea, basically a bunch of lengths of pipe with end caps on one end, and joined at the other end so to made a star or spider pattern, holes drilled down the lengths for water to enter, connect the pump to the center and dump gravel over it all. Works the same as a UGF but with out all the mucking round with panels, and the biggest bonus is you can remove it for cleaning then just sink it back in the gravel.

that load doesnt seem to high to me, are you feeding much?? all those fish other then the gourami will feed themselfs on algae etc so you only need to add a tiny bit of food

Pies has yellow and sailfin tang, plus a bunch of others as well. They all got on ok, but it is a big tank. I'm thinking about getting one now, got big valonia problems.

I tried a 20,000k bulb and found it far to blue, also they arn't as bright, I had a 14,000k and 20,000k going one at each end of the tank, there is a lot of differnce in brightness. Not saying it wont be fine in your tank, just letting you know, esp if you are planning on going 250 cause you need more light.

Sorry dont have a link, I put two holes in the middle of the tank going to each end. Plumbed using 32mm pressure pipe and reduced at the pumps to suit. For the ontakes I used 32mm with an endcap and drilled a ton of holes, for the output I reduced it to 20mm (I think?) so that it had some "blow". I used 32mm so that I could upgrade the pumps and so that there wasn't too much suck at the intakes. The problem I had with the anemone was I think because it was weak from being new to the tank and tried to get right into the intake, it has settled down now and is sitting only an inch or so away from the intake with no problems.

I quick dip in bleach and water mixed should do the trick, make sure you give it a good rinse afterwards, till you can't smell the bleach anymore.

Never know you might end up with two, I had one go through my closed loop intake and the two largest chunks have survived and are looking good now. I wish now I had left the other small bits in, I vacuumed them out in a panic thinking they might pollute the tank.

How big are your tanks? 8x 1 foot tanks is a bit different from 8 x 6 foot! lol

So you would have a total of 4x800 + 2200 or so from you return? So 5400lph in your 400l odd display, so this will give you a bit over 10 times, which is the minimum and ok for starters. The thing to remember is once the corals grow bigger they will block the flow therefore reducing it to other parts of the tank, so you need to allow for adding more flow later.

I have done the same, currently using 1060 for each loop, but one day planning on freeing up the UP7 running my skimmer and using this, 7000+lph closed loop!!

I find if I manually add fresh water top up mine does this? I also added sand to my tank the otherday, it was very clean there was no dust or anything but my skimmer went nuts as soon as the sane went in.

I wouldn't worry about adding flow to your sump/return because you have enough for your sump size, and there is a limit to much you can push through your sump before you have problems with micro bubbles, and flow if you use it for refuge etc. I think you do need more flow than 5 times in the display, you should be looking at closed loop (s) or streams, power head etc.

Buzzy, go the closed loops, if you want to add a bit of randomness put them on timers. To me the advanges are, cost (assuming you have or can get second hand pumps), being able to hide all the in/outlets and not have ugly pumps in the tank, good flow is under the rock work, and streams can be added later, closed loops are a bit harder to add. The down side is there is a limit to how much flow around the corals you can get, once my SPS corals get a lot bigger and start reducing the flow I'm expecting to need to add some streams. Interesting that most of the posters suggesting streams own or work in shops, lol, sorry guys had to say it. Duke, for this type of movement it's all about the flow round the corals and rock work so you only really need to consider the volume of the display, it's a just rough number and normally people go for far more than 10 times, so it doesn't matter about the rock or if you count the sump or not. Just a comment about your sump size, I'm using the same return pump and have a standard 4 foot tank as my sump (about 200l if it was full) I have problems with micro bubbles because the flow through the sump is so strong and will be going to a bigger sump once I get round to working it out. The L7 would empty my sump in about a minute if the downpipe was closed.

I don't know that Pies is ready to sell rock yet, he is planning to do a whole bunch of jobs at once, change the bulbs and reflectors (I have just this week finished the reflectors), remove a large leather coral (it is a couple of feet across!), remove some rock, and redo the rock scaping. It's going to be a huge job and I'm guessing it will happen on one of the long weekends coming up.

I run miine in an old fluval cannister filter, zoelite in one side carbon in the other, the baskets hold the carbon so don't need bags etc, seems to work well enough.

No worries Chris, your always welcome to come over