new to saltwater 55 gallon set up questions

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coffeetwitch said:
so im wondering if two 24 inch lights be ok? are there any rules saying that the light has to be the entire span of the tank? huma-huma mentioned smaller ones... and those odyssea fixtures are appear to be a little bit more in my price range.

2x
Odyssea Metal Halide System
or even
Odyssea Metal Halide System

both are less exspencive than the 20" currents.

i know halide lights get hot, think my tv will still be safe?

The 72" is only $429 with free shipping.I run mine MH's for 8 hours a day and my tank only goes up to 82 degrees.
 
82*...thats not too bad is it? i keep my freshwater tanks at that... how hot does the fixture itself get? like can you put your hand on it at the end of that 8 hours? then do you just run the built in moon lights so you can still enjoy your reef and fish?
 
coffeetwitch said:
82*...thats not too bad is it? i keep my freshwater tanks at that... how hot does the fixture itself get? like can you put your hand on it at the end of that 8 hours? then do you just run the built in moon lights so you can still enjoy your reef and fish?

I can put my hand on the top and hold it there,it will be real warm,like all MH.
The 72" fixture I referenced comes with actinic's and led moonlights.you could run the actinic's a couple hours before and after the MH's.
 
the only lighting option that youre not gonna get excessive heat from is the led's..but thats a whole other ballpark. im not a huge fan of MH because of the relative bulkiness but to each his own
 
huma-huma said:
the only lighting option that youre not gonna get excessive heat from is the led's..but thats a whole other ballpark. im not a huge fan of MH because of the relative bulkiness but to each his own

T-5's fixtures are bigger than MH's,at least the ones with 6 bulbs.
 
i cant afford leds saw one for almost $3000. 10-12 bulb t5 are pricy too. bulk is ok with me. i guess like anything i will learn along the way... im just trying to not to do it the hard way too much out of the gate.
 
i was referring more to the 400+ watters. i prefer the slimline profile of either CF or t5's...atleast height wise..
 
how important is a calcium reactor if i use sand other than aragonite like pool filter sand or super naturals tahitian moon and i want to down the road have reef components?
 
i dont believe a calcium reactor is a necessity... and the glass tops are hit and miss...some people notice huge differences with them on/off...some dont. I personally keep mine on 24/7 and have a sable ph
 
I have a dsb of PFS and have tons of pods and other little guys living in it. I found the PFS to have a better consistency than play sand which seemed way too fine.
 
Thank you carey. Im now on page 165 ish of your 125 build. I saw that you used pfs in your tank so i suppose i was asking a retorical question if i would have just thought about it for a second. I hate to bring up bad memories but page 165 is around the time you had a bunch of problems in the tank and then your cichlid lights broke.
And even though i havent finished reading yet im sorry for your lose and heart ache. And hope everything has worked out for you

Sweety pie was looking at maybe black sand that is fairly close to grain size of pfs but of course more costly. So we are teatering on that.

If anyone is curious we have changed directions yet again. We heard of a deal for a saltwater set up. It was a 140 gallon reef ready complete set up but the guy was on a roller coaster of if he wanted to make a deal and trade or even act like he wanted to sell it. In that little time span sweety pie and i where planing on rearanging our aquariums. And desided that if we get this guys 140 then we could move our african cichlis to our exsisting 125 and make our 75 a ram tank.

The poop factor here is he never made up his mind and kind of soured the whole deal. Sooooooo now we kind of liked the idea of our cichlids being in our 125 for the extra leg room and are thinking of starting our saltwater adventure with the 75 gallon tank. So i suppose the long and short is when we actually start some thing ill make an actual build thread. In the mean time ill try to get most of my common monotinous questions here if thats ok.
 
feel free to post away! lol

Glad youre getting some good info from the 125g build thread, I asked a TON of questions and got alot of great responses. :)

I have let my tank sit with out adding any fish since that incident with the tangs. I am planning on putting my first fish in tomorrow since the holocaust that took out 6 of my fish. ( well I'm buying it tomorrow and qt'ing).

I have my cichlids in a 125g as well and they LOVE it. They race back and forth all day long. Glad I got them the extra room.

What kind of cichlids do you keep? I have african haps and peacocks. ( and 2 mbuna from the original stocking).
 
is a quarantine tank hard to keep up? what about keeping it cycled? how exactly does a person care for the quarantine tank? whats the filtration used? water changes? lights? temp? live sand and rocks?

my cichlids are also haps and peacocks. and at least one mbuna... when we first started out i made it a point to keep a log of what fish we added. but more times than not the guys at the lfs wrote down the wrong name and item number to sell them too us cheaper... i bought an electric blue jack dempsey for $10 once. normally a $30 fish here after the pet club discount.
now he is only 1.5 inchs long and in the ram tank. point is i usually forgot the actual name so my list went from electric blue haplochromis to oh thats a pretty fish lets get him no make it 3... we do have a few red empress that we are waiting to find out if they are male or not... we ,like you, got alot of them small hoping to watch them grow into their color... bought a lot of them in 2s or 3s in an attempt to get at least one male that will be stunning as an adult. ha before i donated my new world cichlids to my friend from work i had a firemouth that was getting harassed so to save him we put him in with the africans and is now thriving. also we must be doing something right because our bicolor blue/red shoulder? just married an orange blotch and we have our "med tank" full of fry.

really though its not much of a med tank considering we both hate seeing an empty tank so we keep finding something to put in it and then moving them around to our other tanks.
 
i will also say this.... i really like the cichlids because they dont waist the tank.. they swim at all levels front and back... our rams stick fairly close to the bottom of theirs. we also changed 3 things all at once in the ram tank and almost had a holocaust.... we put in a piece of drift wood from another one of our tanks, i changed the plumbing of the fluvals to pvc and painted it black, and the third is we added 2 bettas... almost in a week we lost our albino bristle nose pleco and 4 rams... i was pissed she was heart broken... in a panic we did a pwc and changed everything back the way it was... battas stayed. i think we saved the remaining fish... its a real shame too because it looked like of the rams we lost, 2 may have been a pair and one was the second half of another pair.... we really wanted a full tank of rams. beautiful little fish... water test was 0. 0. 5 driftwood came from a healthy tank. and paint was supposed to be safe.

so i do and did feel your pain went you lost your fish. we do work hard to make everything right for them. and its absolutely frustrating when it all goes wrong.

that said...

why is it that some use a reactor? im assuming it basically contains material that buffers as what ever your reacting is removed from the water.
but why is it not every one uses them... even to the point that not everyone uses a protein skimmer. i may have mentioned in another post that im a mechanic and because of that i see alot of things as being a set of rules and processes in order to work. things are very much standard... main difference is who makes what part and who makes that part better than the other guy... so when there are so many different ways to do the same thing i get lost sometimes let alone not knowing what all is going on in the first place. ive have definitely enjoyed learning from everyone here as i slowly grasp the concepts of it all.
 
Protein skimmers arent a necessity on small tanks in my opinion if youre doing proper and weekly water changes. As far as reactors, some people use them for various reasons, I'm planning on getting a carbon/gfo rector at some point but again, not a neccesary item in my book.

We started our cichlid tank as all mbuna and a few months ago traded most of them in for haps and peacocks. I've got 4 empress'es, 3 males and ne female as well as 2 giraffes which was the main reason we upgraded from the 55g to the 125g as they get huge! lol
 
what constitutes a small tank? if a reactor is not necessary, what benefits does your tank gain by having one?

we just got done moving our africans over to the 125. talk about coloring up... one of our red empress looks like it turned red compared to the other two, currently they are about 3 inches long. we also have two giraffes. no one told us they get that big... i kind of said it jokingly but now that they are in the 125 i may get a baby frontosa. one of the lfs sold us a deep sea hap? payday is friday so while im looking at their sand i may see if they have any more... they are kind of a plain cream to white base with a black stripe on either side of them just behind the head and a smug of black on their chin, but i like em... beauty in simplicity especially in a sea of colors.

also with them being moved over to our 125 i guess, unless she finds a deal online, we are going to make the 75 gallon the salt tank...
 
so a bit of an update... i spent the morning riding around town looking for crystal sand pool filter sand. i couldnt find any. i found qiucrete but it was too brown for my taste. when i asked the store employees if they had any crystal sand brand pool filter sand they looked at me like i was making it up. "crystal sand? whats that?"
its pool filter sand
"pool filter sand? i dont think we carry anything for pools"
yeah its sand for pool filters, i saw you guys carried quicrete pool filter sand but wondered if you had anything other than that.
"oh sure if you go to the outside area and look in the corner by the rock i think its there... its called paver sand."
yeah i just came from there....

this went on and on... store after store. ha home depot was the best, i asked a guy there for it, he asked if it had to be that brand and i said yes im using it for my aquarium hahaha he asked another guy there and then said i might want to try petsmart across the street they dont carry aquarium supplies.... i wasnt asking for aquarium supplies... frustrating to say the least.

anyway once sweety pie got home from work we went to the only non chain fish store in town and bought a few more cichlids AND 2 40lb bags of aragonite. the first purchase for our saltwater tank... tomarrow i think im going to tear down the tank we are going to use for a cleaning and a paint job... so now to start my actual build thread.
 
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