Let me offer up this to consider when feeling a little boxed in by our setups...I have 440W of VHO over a 75G tank. I recently added some SPS to the tank, though many would scoff at the idea given Im not using MH. MH, after all, is the 'holy grail' of reef lighting...or so some believe. Once I added the new SPS specimens to my tank, they grew like a freggin' weed. Wow, I thought, I did something right. What I did not count on as time went by were the *other* expenses I was now going to incur due to my desire to branch out to new corals. Sure, softies are "easy" (ya, right, if your growing a xenia patch) but the allure of more complex SPS corals draws us into this 'money pit' that only seasoned SPS reef keepers can identify with. I almost feel that the ideal of 'elitism through halides' is merely misery begging for company. Any way, as time progressed my SPS collection seem to cease growing. What is this?, I thought, everyhing took off so nicely and now, after all this, a dead end? After checking, I began to realize why all those wonderful tanks we see in mags and on the internet displaying colors of purple, electric green, yellow, and orange, a virtual SPS coral rainbow, also had these equipment albatrosses around their collective stands. It turns out that its not always just a display of money, and reefing power! No, indeed there was a real need behind a lot of this technology. A need driven by the mistake(?) of leaping blindly into the money pit of SPS corals. As my SPS frags grew and prospered among the lowly LPS and softies they also began to soak up a lot of other chemicals, previously transparent to me, the LPS/softie 'newbie' (of 3 years). Indeed, new problems with alkalinity, calcium, magnesium and other chemicals I still can't say or even spell, began to arise. Sure, for a while I struggled, dosing this evey week, then every couple days, then every day until I was practically tied at the hip to my tank and its evil test kits. Until I realized that maybe this isn't why *I* got into reefing. Maybe this was more time and effort than I could afford. Maybe what I had wasn't so bad and suited my 'style' of reefing more comfortably. Indeed, take this, if only this, away from my long drawn out rambling of a post...Make sure you are ready for the hidden expenses of expanding your hobby. Every new fish, every new coral, ever new desire for something living requires your time, effort and wallet. ENJOY!
