Traciedjessop
Aquarium Advice Activist
We just setup our first saltwater that we bought from a guy off Craigslist on Saturday and its in pretty bad shape.
This is my first saltwater but have good experience with freshwater tanks so I understand water quality and testing etc. Right now I also have a 55 gal tank with red eared slider turtles.
I've had a 20 gal long tank in cycle for 4 weeks and was ready to start stocking when we had a hard time finding a good freshwater lfs in our new city so here we are.
New set-up consists of (with many plans for upgrading and updating)
-55 gal tank
-basic canister filter (soon to be aquaclear 110 + a power head )
-Some kind of decent hob protein skimmer
-duel mode T5 light hood (to replace with led's soon too)
-Came with 5 fish who are not exactly a good mix so we are going to move at least 2 of them out. We have:
-yellow tang
-kole tang
-angelfish ( going to be rehomed)
- regular clownfish
-tomato clown (will be rehomed, he picks on the regular).
we will add a few clean up crew guys once we have the tank good and stable.
we've cleaned everything really good and we replaced the original substrate of crushed coral with fine white sand and live black sand.
My next steps is to update the pump and am thinking...with an AquaClear 110 and a Hydor Koralia Evolution 1400-1500.
And to get that Tomato Clown and Angel out of the tank, our lfs does store credit so we can rehome them. We love both, but like the regular clown and would like to add a Black and White clown.
My questions are:
1) Will this pump system be sufficient for a beginner reef tank? We plan to use LPS and Soft Corals in this tank. Glad to look at other options, but please keep in mind this is under a reasonable budget for our first tank.
2) Clowns. We really like the regular clown, but really love the Black and Whites. Are they ok in a tank together? (unlike the tomato) If they are fine together, do we need to do 2 of each? (We won’t be adding any more fish to this tank, We are removing the Angel also.)
3) When the sand settled it settled on our live rock as well. What’s the best way to get that off the rock without disturbing the water too much?
I took progress pics of my tank last night and have attached J
I have a whole album here that shows what we started with on saturday: https://www.flickr.com/photos/traciedpannell/sets/72157634060816326/
Sorry for the long message, just wanted to include as much info as possible. Thanks and I look forward to learning from all of you!