My first marine tank
Dave Bee
follows,
I am about three weeks from purchasing my first marine tank (waiting
until I move), and I have more or less decided upon the hardware, but
I'm looking for a couple of pieces of advice. I'm going for a DSB
with lots of LR (40lbs? 50lbs?), and no fish life at all for the first
few months (although I will add some interesting inverts and some
macroalgae after cycling), then probably add a couple of Jawfish for
personality when I think I can keep the tank stable enough. Does this
sound like a reasonable plan so far?
I have in my possession 50lbs of Home Despot's finest coral play sand
(definitely the variety recommended here and in other places on
several occasions as far as I can tell). I was going to combine this
with some larger crushed coral, and then seed it with 10lbs or so of
live sand as my DSB. Sense? Lunacy?
The tank I have in mind is a rather fetching 45 gallon tall (36 x 12 x
24 or thereabouts). I chose the tall tank since I plan on running a
sandbed of a minimum of 6 inches and it made sense to be to reserve at
least some of the tank space for actual water - is this height of the
tank going to cause any issues (particularly with lighting)? Should I
just be going with a deeper (ie less tall) tank with more acreage for
the Jawfish later on? I really don't want to go much larger than
this, since I may have to move in a year or two and this is about the
largest tank I can see myself moving successfully.
Is this tank setup likely to run OK with a Remora pro skimmer and
reasonable circulation?
I'm still unsure on lighting at this point. I don't intend to keep
coral in the tank (I intend to do this in a bigger tank in a couple of
years when my housing situation is a little more solid). With this in
mind, what kind / how much light should I have to keep the
photosynthetics happy in a tank of this depth?
Dave