Welcome to my blog about my new aquarium an 80L fish tank that was originally full of guppies but i have decided to change into a salt water reef aquarium...
The purpose of this blog is to document my progress through the development from cycling to adding everything up to the last bit of coral... i expect this will take some time...
The reason behind my thinking is, that i have noticed durring my research that you always see the end product, never the bad points or the boring points, hopefully this will illustrate to people how long it takes to get a reef aquarium up and running - and also learn from my mistakes.
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the story so far!
A long time ago, my mother got bored of looking at the gold fish in a smaller tank and said "lets get a little salt water tank running" i was totally excited to do this, i had been keep fish most of my life, but mainly gold fish, guppies and the occasional cichlid. One month later and $100's of dollars down the tube my mother cracked the shits. she decided not to bother any more, we went through: a goby, a clown fish, a puffer fish, an anemone, various pieces of coral, a big lump of live rock and live sand, two packs of salt and new globes for our tank... not a cheap experience in failure... basically everything died because we went TO QUICK...
This time around im armed with knowledge experience and penitence (and not listing to my mother about adding 3 fish into a tank in one hit)
The new tank!
So heres what i've got driving this tank at the moment:
its roughly an 80L tank 60cm long, 30cm wide and 40cm deep.
I have attached an Aqua One Aquis 750 filter which capable of doing around 600 - 750 L of water per hour. I had great success with these filters (and its 1250 big brother) on my freshwater tanks. although, for the filter media i have in some parts substituted some of the foam or packed in more where possible with 'Polyfilter', this stuff is amazing it removes so much from the water (including tannin in my freshwater tanks with logs in it). Its a little expensive but TOTALLY worth it.
I've also put in a small air stone to help with circulation - note that with all reef aquariums need a fair amount of circulation, later on I plan on adding a power head with a product called SCWD to create some alternating currents and surges - but not until we go down the coral track (probably a couple of months)
10kg of live rock is being used to seed the filter and also because it looks nice
5kg of live sand is also on the bottom, this came sealed and is supposed to dramatically reduce the cycling time of the tank.
Cycling the tank?
if your new to this than cycling is the most important part of getting your tank set up!
cycling is the process of removing toxic chemicals from the water which are excreted by living organisms, mainly Ammonia.
There are tonnes of great articles out there on Cycling
Nano Reef have a tonne of information available in their articles section it is totally worth reading everything you can there, its nice and easy to follow as well.
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