Saltwater fish tanks

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TheTecher

TheTecher

Evan the jeeper.
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Hey guys Im looking to set one up. Just wondering if anyone has one. Id like to see your setup.

Thanks
 
Always wanted to do a saltwater tank. At one time I had 5 fresh water tanks. Now I have none. No room.
 
At one point we had 4 Salt water tanks running. A little 1/2 gallon thing with a cow fish, a 40 gallon reef tank that had live rock, some coral and a few fish, a 125 bottom drilled fish tank and a 300 gallon sump tank. I kept the 300 gallon tank. Would strongly suggest staying away from a bottom drilled salt water tank. They have the plastic grates on the bottom that act as the bio filter. What a pain in the ***. Had to take it apart every 8 months or so to clean under the grates other wise the tank would stay funky looking. The 300 gallon tank had two sumps in the back of the tank these were filled with bio balls. You could read thru 8 foot of water. I never did a live rock tank/coral tank, other than the small reef tank. The swim tanks were easy to cycle and the variety of fish was incredible. Will try to put more pictures up later on......
 

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This was by far my favorite fish. A porcupine puffer. Meat eater. Knew when it was feeding time. If you stood in front of the tank with a plate in your hand and had the lid open you best feed him. If you did not, he would open up his gills and turn the pump on and give you a shower. I used to pet him....
 

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This is going to be kind of long, so let me apologize now.....
I know very little about using live rock as a bio filter, or reef tanks. My only experience with them was the little one I had, and I got it as running fish tank from the store I dealt with. But Reef Central is the forum to go to for info on reef tanks....more on my little set up later.
First thing you need, beyond the basic knowledge of how the nitrogen cycle works and the necessary kits to see that the cycle is happening is good water. My tanks were all started with just good old city tap water and they cycled with no issues but ro water is a much better bet. RO water will have a tds of close to 0, which for one will mean the water has no impurities in it. So the water will be clear, and have nothing in it that might harm your fish/coral. I used a Spectrapure RO/DI unit. With RO units one thing to be concerned about is the rejection rate. Good units, when the water temp/pressure is adjusted for, will have about a 3-1 ratio. For every 3 gallons of water thru the RO you have one gallon of "good" water, if I remember correct. Scott, the Spectrapure guy, is a great guy to deal with. His site has some info under the faq section that explains a bit about RO units.
My little set up worked very well. I do not know how it would have survived in the long term as I only had it for a year or so. It had some live rock in it, which acted as the biological filter and then it had a hang on the back mechanical filter. There are several things that turned me off of using live rock in my big tank, one of them being the smell. The live rock has to cycle with your tank. And it will stink, badly. When I used to walk in my friends store I could always tell when he had some fresh live rock.....from the parking lot. More later....
 
I used to have a 70 gal one for years. They're awesome to look at, very soothing but they're as big a money pit as your project car. I had at least 100lb of live rock in there at $10/lb. anything that looks cool costs accordingly, fish die quite easily so it never ends. Without a word of a lie I had $5000 into this thing before I gave up. There's also all the cleaning involved, etc.

Not saying I didn't enjoy it, just pointing out the dark side of it :D
 
Rob said:
I used to have a 70 gal one for years. They're awesome to look at, very soothing but they're as big a money pit as your project car. I had at least 100lb of live rock in there at $10/lb. anything that looks cool costs accordingly, fish die quite easily so it never ends. Without a word of a lie I had $5000 into this thing before I gave up. There's also all the cleaning involved, etc.

Not saying I didn't enjoy it, just pointing out the dark side of it :D
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That is a live rock tank for you. My 300 gallon one, other then the fish that gave up there life to cycle the tank, never lost a fish, other than the 3 that jumped out of it before I made lids for it. Sadly, one of them was the Barracuda.
 
Google lace rock, that is what I used in my swim tanks. It is just decorative, all my filtration was handled by a mechanical paper style filter as well as either bio balls or the pain in the *** plastic grates that go under the substrate.
 
Many years ago, I was a partner in a company that made and serviced custom designed, refrigerated, salt water tanks. Home tanks were 50 gallon, but we made commercial tanks up to 500 gallons, including one for an octopus that required complicated filters for the discs they shed from their tentacles.

Since we were the first company to do that, it was a frustrating and humorous experience while we learned that marine animals were real escape artists. Crabs were the worst, and we often had to search behind furniture in a doctor's office for missing crabs.

After a couple years in that business, I was very relieved to get back to fresh water tanks...as a hobby, not a business. Salt water tanks are beautiful, but far too much work unless you really love doing it.
 
Here's my two current tanks, a 46 gal. reef and a 75 gal. reef. The 75 has a refugium under the stand, while the 46 just uses an external filter. Both are beautiful to look at, although the 46 is battling an algae outbreak these days. If you haven't done marine tanks before, they're not cheap to set up or maintain. Figure about $30 per gallon to set up a basic tank. I spend about 15 minutes each day doing basic maintenance/inspection, and an hour or so one day a weekend doing water changes. The 75 reef is lit with four 130 watt compact fluorescent bulbs, and the 46 is lit with an LED canopy that I built using CREE XRE LEDs.
 

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GaryS said:
After a couple years in that business, I was very relieved to get back to fresh water tanks...as a hobby, not a business. Salt water tanks are beautiful, but far too much work unless you really love doing it.
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Depends on the tank & filtration. My 125, with the grates under the sand and a mechanical filter.....never do it again. Bi-weekly water changes, drain the tank every 6 months or so and clean up the goop from under the grates (was pretty much a bi-product of meat eating fish) and pretty constant algae cleaning form setting the tank up across from a window. The 300 had two over flow boxes that were full of bio-balls to silence the water falling, a sump with bio balls (for bio filtration), a protein skimmer, uv filter and a mechanical paper filter. It was connected to the ro unit, so never had to top the tank off. Monthly I would pull out 30 bio balls from the sump and rotate them into the overflow boxes. The ones from the boxes would then go into the sump (was told this was not necessary but I did it any way. Would then stir up the bio balls in the sump, just to mix the "new" ones in. Monthly maintenance also included removing the filter cartridge and cleaning it, as well as taking the head of the skimmer outside and hosing it off. At the three month mark I would exchange 120 gallons of water (always had 3 40 gallon trash cans on wheels ready to go with the sg set at 1.018-1.020 just in case), the month after a water change I would also swap out the uv filters light. That was the extent of it. The water change did take a couple hours, the rest of it was closer to fifteen minutes. Would test the water weekly in the beginning, but after the first few months was more bi-weekly. I also was dealing with a great shop in regards to the fish. Kingsley was from Sri-Lanka and imprted almost all of his own fish. He had an import business, so he would just call his friends back home and they would go diving looking for what he needed. More on the specific gravity later, but one of the reasons I went with lace rock instead of live rock was the ability to run a lower specific gravity, with less salt in the water it allowed for more oxygen Kingsley also had a Marine Biologist degree, so he understood this stuff pretty well.
 
Thing to remember with a salt water set up is you are more or less playing God. You are creating a universe for creatures to live in. Fresh water is far more forgiving, the trade off is the fish are not the same. I would never do a tank under 125 gallons, nor would I ever do one with out a sump again. Having the sump dictates what kind of tank you can use, as it needs overflow boxes. The larger the tank the easier it will be. When you have 300 gallons of water things are a lot more forgiving. In my 125 I had an eel that lived in the sand. I wanted to put some burrowers in but could not because there just was not enough room. In the 300 gallon I had an eel and a couple of burrowers (don't remember the name) because there was enough room for them all to get along. The burrowers were 2 of the 3 deaths that we had, they did not die from my care they died because as well as burrowing they were known jumpers and that is how they died, they jumped out before I had made the lids for the tank. Part of playing God is you have to have an understanding of how the universe works. And at times you may have to sacrifice doing something because of a disaster in the universe. Again, this is where more water is better, as things do not happen as quickly in 300 gallons as they do in 30......
 
I was not even close to $30 a gallon to set up my swim tanks.......
 
inkjunkie said:
I was not even close to $30 a gallon to set up my swim tanks.......
Click to expand...

Here's the basic setup costs for a simple 75 gallon live rock tank capable of keeping low to moderate light corals:

Tank and stand (used): $75
48 inch CF light: $200
Sump: $100
Protein Skimmer: $150
Pump for sump: $75
100 lb. live sand $100
80 lb live rock $500
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Total $1200 ($16/gal)

This is just the tank setup. It does not include chemicals, salt, an RO unit to make water, fish or coral. Also, to ensure long-term health of your animals/corals, you should use multiple pumps to stir the tank and provide currents in the tank. For a reef tank, a turnover of 10:1 is considered the minimum, if you want to set up to keep SPS (Small Polyp Stony) coral, the turnover should be better than 20:1, and you'll have to go with Metal Halide lights, which run $600 - $800 for the 75 gal. tank above. You'll notice that the live rock is a major part of the setup cost. In a reef tank, or any marine tank for that matter, the live rock does most of the filtration; its purpose is to provide a home for the denitrifying bacteria. Without live rock, the nitrates slowly build to the point that livestock will perish one by one, unless you are religious with water changes.
 
never tried salt to expensive. have a 100 gal fresh water. minimal cost and only have to spend most 2 hours a month maintence.
 
google Blue World Aquariums and check out the 2 he did for Microsoft , the second one is actually an old XBox converted with live corals and tiny little shrimp etc , when he talks about working with contractors that would be me , I made it all come together as a project but know next to nothing about the maintenance other than he is in there every other week cleaning and rearranging the big tank .
 
I've had salt water tanks for years. Things have really changed. My system is all automated with a system called reef keeper. It's super great as it does it all. The only thing I still do is check water levels. Makes me check out the tank daily.

I'll post pictures as soon as I can...

Riddler
 
I don't really know what my stuff cost us....it was all purchased on a bi-polar credit card shopping spree. I walked in, I want this, that and the other thing, handed Kingsley a credit card and walked out. I do know that we got everything for damn near dealer cost. All we have left of it is the 300 gallon set up and the turtle tank. The 300 gallon one is out in the shed, waiting for us to build our house some year.
 
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