"Maintenance free" ideas

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
See posts with no answers
I'll keep you updated and if it's working at 8 months you could probably give it a try. I am doing a 320g with 110g and it's SW reef.
 
That is what I wanted to do, I guess I would have a better display to sump ratio, but I think that probably won't matter as much since you have such an enormous set up. I definitely want a reef tank because they are just so much better looking. I would imagine that even with doing the refugium build myself it would be quite costly though. What would you expect to spend to set up a 120g tank?
 
All new or some used? Counting the tanks/pumps, and stuff or do you have anything? Making your own rock or buying all live or a mix dry/live.... lots of factors, can you narrow them down a bit?
 
Well, let's say for the sake of going budget without sacrificing quality I will go with a mixture of live and dry. Making my own sounds really cool, just need to find out how. I have a 75g tank (I want to use as the refugium), and planned on buying a 120g which is $359 at Petsmart. I will continue to look in case I can find one cheaper. What is ok to buy used for something like this and what do you want to buy new? Money IS definitely an object. I think when I figured out how much I wanted to spend on fish at Liveaquaria.com it came out to be around a couple hundred dollars.
 
DIY live rock
http://www.aquariumadvice.com/forums/f20/diy-live-rock-115686.html
this I think may not work for my setup as I plan on having few/no water "changes" just top-ups. An the rock needs to be rinsed/washed so it doesn't make you PH too high... I'm not sure if over extended periods it would increase the PH or not... and what else is working properly to balance the system...
back to price lights and pump/pumps/power-heads are going to be the expensive parts... also if you are going to have it in a room that may get hotter then the fish tank you may need a "chiller", for the lights you can get second hand but they lose power over time so new ballasts and bulbs would be better... if your not going to have corals or anemones right away, you could skimp on the lights and upgrade later.Your tank may even come with cheep lights... that you couldn't grow anything with. But you are going to have a lighted refugium with strong lighting right?... (needed for my style of setup.) How much of a DIY person do you consider yourself to be? on a scale of 1-20? Because again the more you can piece together yourself the cheaper it would be.
 
I would consider myself a 15 maybe? I learned how to work on cars because I refuse to pay shop prices, and I now know how to change cylinder heads, transmissions and I am confident in just about anything involving a car. So when it comes to fish tanks if I heard or read about a way to do something I would really want to. The limitation is that I am stuck to hand held power tools. I can't afford, and don't have room for, table saws and things like that. I plan on building the "housing" myself. I would have more fun building a stand and top myself than buying one from the store!

The more I read about SW tanks the more I think that I should probably stick to FW for now. I get out of the Army in a little over two years and I will be moving from Georgia back to somewhere in the south west. I can't imagine that that would go well with a full set up SW tank. Anyone else done a move like that with a SW tank?

I read somewhere else that you can use silica sand (sand box sand) as a substrate with clay underneath. I am VERY tired of aquarium gravel but all of the sand that I have seen at the LFSs were for SW and had all kinds of bacteria that made it really expensive. Is there a way to buy clay? The lady that was writing the article that I read said that she just dug it up and washed it in a pillow case. I am not so comfortable with doing this myself because my luck I would dig it up from an Agent Orange dump spot or something. Thanks!
 
I would say on a move like that you would send your live stuff to the store and keep your equipment... I stopped SW 6 years ago after only doing it for about a year because I had to move... then I had no space in the new place, over the winter it got some water in it and froze and cracked my tank... took me till now to get it together to get a new one.
 
Back to the maint free, I thought I saw a post on here by someone in FW with a "stream" or something. He doesn't use a filter and puts the tank by the window and like never does water changes, just lets the plants do all the work. I tried finding the thread but couldn't.

It is FW but that looked pretty darn maint free to me! :)
 
That looks really cool! I had a tank by a window with no live plants and that was a TERRIBLE idea. It had algae covering it in no time flat. I am looking to do something similar to that, but I might use lights instead of the window depending on where I live. I also want an enormous tank so the window would have to be really big. This does give me some other ideas for when I am no longer in the military and I build my own house though! My thoughts right now are to have a FW set up with a sump/fuge so that I can later turn it into a reef tank.
 
i know a guy who has a 125g reef tank, then a refugium, a sump, a frag tank, and a calcium reactor. i have yet to see a better looking reef tank than his.
all of that is 400 something gallons total water connected, and he only does 10% water changes every 4 months.
again, this was one of the tanks in the local reef club's little "tour of tanks", his was last, and it was for a good reason, because it made all the others look pretty sad... lol
 
I am not sure what I will do exactly because I am trying to get moved to Washington for my last two years in the Army and then I want to move to Hawaii if I can get a job so I may just wait until I get to Hawaii to do anything bigger than my 75g tank.
 
I found out that the laws in Hawaii are crazy ridiculous on what all you can have in your tank because they don't want people to release them into the wild. There are still a decent amount of beautiful fish that you can have in your tank.
 
... and you can have most of the unprotected fish you can find around Hawaii. Snorkeling at night with a red lamp :)
 
Well, I plan on getting SCUBA certified before I move so I will definitely look into catching my own. At the moment I am trying to plan my 75g rebuild when I get back from Iraq. I am thinking of getting a 30g tank and making a sump with a freshwater tank...we shall see what progresses as my deployment moves along and I continue to frequent these forums lol
 
I clicked a link somewhere for a person that had a 75g planted tank with a few red plants that was awesome. The person's name was Loren and they had a website detailing the build up and I am all fired up and had some questions for them lol. If anyone can lead me to the correct person or a link that they have posted on I would appreciate it!
 
Craigs list

I just got a 55 gallon with stand and all the trimmings for 75.00 on craigs list. I was patient, most folks want 200.00 for a 55 gal. patients is the key.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

S
self sustaining fish?
Replies
7
Views
476
Andy Sager
Andy Sager
KreativJustin
AIO Return
Replies
5
Views
1K
Andy Sager
Andy Sager
bskerrichard27
Have not been on in years how is everyone
Replies
1
Views
330
Andy Sager
Andy Sager
J
Greetings from Sedona
Replies
2
Views
411
Andy Sager
Andy Sager
F
Sump for 36 gallon fresh?
Replies
3
Views
285
Andy Sager
Andy Sager

Latest posts

Back
Top Bottom