What's REALLY needed for a marine aquarium?
Richard Sexton
>OK, so I've read the books by Moe and Thiel on marine and reef
>aquaria. I don't have any fresh water experience. I'm a landlocked
>land lubber who lives in a high desert. How can I get into marine
>aquaria for less than $25,000, which is what I wildly guess Thiel's
>150 gal. set up costs?
I'm certainly no expert on marine fishkeeping, but I'm pretty good
at finding cheap shortcuts :-)
>All I want to keep, at least to start with, is just some live rock,
>a few anemones + clown fish, maybe a couple of invert ickies and the
>odd fish or two. Could I get away with just a powerhead driven
>undergravel filter in a 55 gal. tank with maybe a charcoal filter hanging
>on the back? Keep in mind that I'm really not that tight budgeted,
>I could spend a grand or two on my setup, but I'm trying to seperate
>out the essential equipment needed to maintain a healthy tank verses the
>state-of-the-art stuff to maintain a superb tank with hard corals,
>sponges, etc.
I'll give you some information to get you started for relatively
cheap. The real marine fishheads will have to fill in the details
I've missed or overlooked.
1) Tank. Get a slightly bigger tank than you can afford. Buy it
used. Check the _Recycler_ or the local classified ads. You
should'nt need to spendmore than $1 a gallon. Acrylic tanks
may be more $$$, but I'd stick with glass unless you are thinking
of a hex tank or really want an acrylic tank. At any rate some
of the more common sizes are sometimes very cheap. Around here
you can get a new glass 60 gal. tank for $50.
Cost - Low: $20 High: $60
2) Under gravel filter. Easy. Make one. Since you mentioned you
didn't get alt.aquaria, you will have missed the article I
wrote on building them out of fluorescent egg crate grille
material. I, uh, don't seem t have a copy of it. Perhaps
some kind soul will mail it to you.
Cost - Low: $10 High: $25
You aren't going to be able to scrimp on thw powerheads for
this. The cheapest way is to buy them mail order.
3) Lights. (Assuming you end up using a 60 gal tank) Buy
a 4 tube shop light from a hardware store. Buy 4 GE
Chroma 75 tubes from a lighting supplier.
Cost - Low: $10 High: $25
Cost - 4 tubes @ $5 ea = $20
4) The last thing on your shopping lst will be a wet dry filter.
I have zero experience with these things, but fromthe ones I've
seen, you should be able to make one for under $100, and save yourself
$200+
It's still not cheap, as you can see, but this is a cheaper way of doing it.
For reference, a local fish store is having a blow out fire sale
and is selling a 40 gal complete reef system for $449.
--
USENET: where the name goes on, before the quality goes in.
ric...@gryphon.COM {routing site}!gryphon!richard
Oleg Kiselev
readers, this flurry of "hobby" questions should have made the distribution
problems of ALT quite obvious.
In article <16...@esunix.UUCP> kro...@esunix.UUCP (Keith Rogers) writes:
>OK, so I've read the books by Moe and Thiel on marine and reef
>aquaria.
Have you read Moe's new book? It's 500+ pages of very objective and readable
information (no pretty photos, no flashy illustrations, just MacPaint
diagrams and text) for $20 mail order, $24-$25 at the local aquarium shop.
The book is "The Marine Aquarium Reference: Systems and Invertibrates" (Green
Turtle Publucations, P.O. Box 17925, Plantation, Florida 33318). I just got
it and it's great.
>How can I get into marine
>aquaria for less than $25,000, which is what I wildly guess Thiel's
>150 gal. set up costs?
Don't set up 150 gal tanks and don't let Thiel and Tunze advertisement
convince you that theirs is the only way to run a marine/rief tank. Theirs
are definitely workable methods of running tanks, but not necessarily the
best for your budget. You can always put in less bio load per gallon.
>All I want to keep, at least to start with, is just some live rock,
>a few anemones + clown fish, maybe a couple of invert ickies and the
>odd fish or two. Could I get away with just a powerhead driven
>undergravel filter in a 55 gal. tank with maybe a charcoal filter hanging
>on the back?
Yes, but that may not be enough filtration for the invertebrates and live
rock. See, in "real life" reefs are just tiny islands of life in an enormous
islands of lifeless water, with a few inches of plankton at the surface and a
few dosen feet of very sparse fish life in an ocean of millions of square
miles of water several miles thick. The reef aquaria require extremeley
potent filtration because there isn't this huge support system of lots of
water with very low bio load (wave turbulence at the surface efficiently
aerates water, deep water layers with very little oxygen supply seem ideal
for denitrification, etc.). On the other hand, Sprung mentions in Dec. issue
of FAMA that he has a 15 gal "reef" tank running for some 10 months with
almost no filtration (he took out all of the filter media from the trickle
filter attached to that tank and left only a 4"x4" sponge prefilter, protein
skimmer and a ChemiPure bag in the sump -- he thinks live rock does all of
the necessary bio filtrartion; 3 months ago he removed all "trickling"
effects, letting water dump right in to the sump. The tank WORKS!) Sprung
also mentions other tanks he has with little or no filtration (one with just
open ended aur supply for turbulence and a 5' long wave tank driven by an
Eihem pump -- no filtration of any kind, about 2 gal of water in the systems
and he has some 19 species of algae, some seeded live rock and one "happy"
[his words!] Percula clownfish... See pp. 56-71. Now THAT's a tank I'd love
to set up! Anyone have any technical suggestions?)
>I could spend a grand or two on my setup, but I'm trying to seperate
>out the essential equipment needed to maintain a healthy tank verses the
>state-of-the-art stuff to maintain a superb tank with hard corals,
>sponges, etc.
As you can see, you can have an excellent looking and working tank with very
little investement in filtration (but excellent lighting -- Sprung keeps his
tanks by the window, to allow sunlight in). Now, *I* have not tried any of
this (although I intend to!), so go to the library and read through the Reef
Notes column Julian Sprung runs in FAMA, read reef articles in TFH and get
Moe's new book for "do-it-yourself" ideas.
--
"No regrets, no apologies" Ronald Reagan
Oleg Kiselev ARPA: lcc....@seas.ucla.edu, ol...@gryphon.COM
(213)337-5230 UUCP: [world]!{ucla-se|gryphon}!lcc!oleg
Tom Rosenbaum
>
> 1) Tank. Get a slightly bigger tank than you can afford. Buy it
> used. Check the _Recycler_ or the local classified ads. You
> should'nt need to spendmore than $1 a gallon. Acrylic tanks
> may be more $$$, but I'd stick with glass unless you are thinking
> of a hex tank or really want an acrylic tank. At any rate some
> of the more common sizes are sometimes very cheap. Around here
> you can get a new glass 60 gal. tank for $50.
>
> Cost - Low: $20 High: $60
>
Just out of curiosity what would be a good price range for a used
40 gallon long, with cast iron stand, wisper2 power filter, heater?
It has no cover or lights.
I would like to set up a marine tank possibly a mini reef.
Are there any problems with putting the reef in later after stablizing
the fish first?
thanks for any and all replies.
Tom Rosenbaum