How easy is it to do a 5 gallon marine setup (w/o fish)?

[grimlock3000]

One of the local fish stores has a salt water setup running in a 5g tank. The tank has a Aquaclear Mini filter, normal hood with a VERY bluish light, and nothing else out of the ordinary. The light has a very dim glow and might even be incandescent. Inside the tank is one piece of live rock on some live sand/crushed coral. The rock has a bunch of stuff living on it for being in such a small tank. There are a few small critters in the sand, and something with legs that always hides rock (I think it is a small crab or shimp). They tank has been up and going for a few months now without any changes so it should be pretty stable. How hard is it to do a mini environment like this? I do not want salt water fish in something this small but some small critters and shrimp would be great to have. Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Well, being the proud owner of a nano tank, 5 gallon modified Eclipse system, I will tell you that it is pretty easy. However, I have done this for a while and it is easy for me... I change a gallon or so a week, and I replace about a gallon of fresh water due to evap per week... I have about 8lbs of LR and some Xenia and a Gorgonian frag in it. This tank has been up for about the last 10 months and it has done nothign but get better looking everyday.. Get this, it is on my desk at work... It gets a lot of attention... I add 2ml of 2 part additive daily and a miute amount of iodide weekly.. I have a Marineland Primo 95gph power filter on it. The lighting is 2x13 watt PC 50/50's...

Here is a picture of it in a thread I started a few weeks ago, right before the 50/50 pc's got here..

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/viewtopic.php?t=7245

 

[possum]

I would think it would be fairly easy to do a tank that small with now fish. I have been thinking about doing one myself and just putting in a couple of small peices of LR

 

[ReefLady]

I've always wanted to do a nano tank - my biggest issues (as yet unresolved) are - temp stability - especially in the summer, and topoff (we are often gone for long weekends or longer). Other than that, I think nano's are fascinating!

 

[tkos]

I have seen where people setup an IV bag with a slow drip filled with freshwater to take care of daily top off on the nano tanks. Seems to work well and it easy to setup. You just have to hide the bag to make it look better I guess.

 

[pm64971]

What does it cost to setup a nano tank?

 

[Salt4Us]

Ours in running great it's been up since March of this year, we only have 5 pounds of live rock in it, because of how tall the lid is we've never had any problems with heat, we also use a clamp on PC light by JBJ that seems to work great although we are going to upgrade since we've added the GSP recently. We do weekly water changes and have a small power head that we got at Doctor Foster Smith works great and a power filter an Aqua Clear that only runs with a sponge in it. We have one fish which our kids named Jet who stays in one place all the time a hole in the rock he is a barnacle blenny and is quite small. It's not hard to maintain at all and basically takes care of itself with an occasional top off which seems to be once a week. We seem to add more water to our 29 and 40 than we do the 5 can't explain that one.

We enjoy ours so much life in such a small area, we also had a small starfish that had hitchhiked on one of the rocks and has since multiplied, they are small enough for this tank and don't hurt anything, we have 5 or 6 of them now not to mention endless snails and brittle worms and featherdusters.


We figure a rough figure of a little over a hundred bucks that's not including fish, crab and corals.

 

[pm64971]

Cool!

The reason you add more water to the bigger tanks is because they have a larger surface area for the water to evaparate out of. Small tanks shouldn't loose much water.

If the ratio of surface area to volume was about the same, then the the actuall gallon measurement should be proportional, but still MUCH smaller.

Cheers,