About Me

I am new to saltwater systems and new to large systems. I have over 20 years of experience with small fresh water tanks however. A few years ago I aquired a 135 gallon tank with many accessories in exchange for some work. My intentions were to set it up as a saltwater system but was lacking a lot of equipment necessary and did not have the money or space to set this large of a system up. Recently, a friend of mine was forced to tear-down his established saltwater system. He offered me a lot of his equipment (including good lighting), water, live sand, live rock, and fish. His system was in a 120 gallon tank. We were on a limited time-frame to make the transfer and it was a last-minute type of things. So, we had to move quickly. I did not have a stand, so I needed to build one quickly. Because the tank was going in my living room, I needed things to match the rest of my furniture. I purchased two 24" bathroom cabinets, some pre-drilled shelving material, and assembled a great stand that I painted black. Although his tank was supposed to be 120 gallons, the water from it only filled my tank half full. We used nearly 150 pounds of live sand and over 100 pounds of live rock. We filled the tank full and salinized the water. Unfortunately, his system was pretty dirty and had not been maintained for several months so there was a lot of work my filters and the system needed to do. Because the fish were in temporary storage for almost 25 hours, we had to acclimate them to the new tank and get them in as soon as possible. We took a coupld of hours to drip acclimate them. There was a lionfish, a tomato clown, and spotted gobie, a turbo snail, and a lawnmower blemmy (however, we lost that one somehow). The fish did not appear to be stressed at all and adapted to thier new habitat very quickly and well. The water cleared up after about three days and I changed all of the filters at that point. The tests all were good on the water after a week so I added a yellow tang, coral beauty, and two margarita snails. I currently have a bi-colored angel, 10 pacific nassarius snails, 10 carribean nassarius snails, and 10 more margarita snails for the system. I don't have any corals , anenomies, sponges, urchants, or plant-life yet...but I do plan on slowly introducing them in the future. I want to make sure my system is stable and I need to learn a lot more before I am ready for more difficult species. I do realize the bicolor angel may not be able to stay in my tank if I add corals, but I also understand that trading or selling him shouldn't be difficult. I am extremely excited about this tank and have wanted to do this for several years. I do have a good education and don't jump into things without doing my research to some point. I have a degree in biology and chemistry and feel this should help out a lot in my future with this tank. My current system is as follows: - 135 gallon tank (72x18x24) - 72" of 4-tube lighting (one bank of marine, one bank of aqua, and LED night lighting; one bank is white while one bank is blue) - Emporium 400 filter - Cascade 1200 canister filter - Seaclone 100 protein skimmer - Two powerheads - 300w heater - UV filter (not yet attached to system) - Air pump with one large airstone Future plans: I have just finished designing a 55 gallon sump system that I plan to add to the basement. I have designed it so it won't lose suction and so it can't overflow if the return pump fails. It will use a surface skimmer box with a siphon system and the calculations tell me that it should run at about 900 gallons per hour (I am expecting slightly less due to friction and other mechanical losses I didn't take into account when doing the calculations). The sump system will also have the ability to simplify 5-10% water changes with minimal work. I will use a 20 gallon tank to prepare and salinize my replacement water. The sump will have a 5 gallon pre-filter section for incoming water that will contain poly-flos and have a sediment pit in it. I will then have a >20 gallon chamber where I will have plant-life growing to denitrify and remove phosphates. I will then have a >20 gallon chamber from the overflow of the previous chamber that will be a live sand/rock chamber with a cleanup crew in it and possibly some plant-life too (this section will be used as a respite chamber for fish that need isolation for some reason...not a quarantine chamber though). The final chamber will be a post filter and pump-out chamber that will house some more poly fiber and charcoal and will be about 5 gallons in size. I won't add corals to my system until after my sump is up and running well. This will increase my total system size to 185 gallons (gross). That is my story in a long nutshell.