Beautifying non-reef tanks

[flanque]

Hello,

I don't have anything in my aquarium that makes it a "reef tank" except for some corilamorphs. I'd like to make it look nicer than just some live rock, fish and some corilamorphs. Any suggestions?

I was thinking of some of the colourful fake hard corals, but am not too sure on how tacky this may look.

Thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[austinsdad]

Stay away from fake corals. They'll get covered in algae and not look pretty. What kinda lighting you got anyaway? How long you had the mushrooms in there doing well?

 

[flanque]

Lights are as per my profile - 2 x 30w (1 daylight, 1 actinic). Slowly but surely the fluffy corilamorphs disapear.

Had them in there for months really. The "normal" ones seem to love it. None disapear but they don't spread though, just live.

 

[melosu58]

There are some low light corals out there but the problem is that you`ll have to target feed most of them. Sun polyps come to mine. I agree with Ray on the fake corals. They`ll look bad after awhile. Just do a search for low light corals. Make sure you check out the difficulty on them. Here are a few

http://www.fantasyreef.com/database...ords=low&ordercolumn=2text&orderdirection=asc

 

[flanque]

Yeah.. I'm always cautious about corals flagged as "low light". I wonder just how low can one's light be for adequate survival. It'd be good if these sites could include, even though it's crude, a WPG rating.

 

[austinsdad]

Any hope to put some 4x65 watts on the tank? You'll get a lot more coral and color for sure.

That's moderate. There are even brighter lights, but they cost, get hot, evaporate water, etc, etc.

Just some brighter power compacts (the 4x65s) would make big difference. Your rock will even have colors.

 

[flanque]

Unfortunately, just the fixture alone is around $300 in AU, plus lights. I've also heard some bad accounts of manufacturing too. There aren't many options for lights in AU other than regular fluros and MH. There ARE CF and T5's but they're insanely expensive.

 

[MT79]

I'm always cautious about corals flagged as "low light". I wonder just how low can one's light be for adequate survival. It'd be good if these sites could include, even though it's crude, a WPG rating.

I would consider from experience about 3 WPG low light. Stay away from coralimorphs like ricordia's. Sorry to hear lighting is so expensive. Is that even for retro kits like this- http://www.hellolights.com/2lamvhoretki1.html
PS- some corals marked low light are actually nonphotosynthetic, and are more demanding and more difficult to keep. ie sun corals, many gorgonias, etc.

 

[flanque]

I have about 1.3WPG... so that's very low. It's only 2 x 30w fluros over a 55G tank, less 45KG of rock.