Reef Tank
 

I've been wanting to put one of these up for quite a while but they dont' move well and I knew we would be looking for a house in a couple of years.

Well now we are moving in the next 6 months or so, so the idea has come up again for the new house. Anyone have any experiance in this and how much matinance you need to do once its set up?

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about setting up a salt water tank but a reef tank which is bascially its own ecosystem.

A friend of mine is really into Aquariums, I don't know if he does Reef aquariums but he is very active in the following forum that is for aquarium enthusiasts and should have all the info you are looking for. http://ovas.ca/index.php

One thing that I have heard though is if you want to do a reef aquarium you should have a lot of aquarium experience in general, they are supposedly pretty difficult to get going and maintain.

Let me know if it works out.

They are a bear and very time consuming not to mention the small fortune in set up and maint.

Setting up the system will be the hard (and expensive depending on size) part, but once that's done it will be extreemly low maintenence.

So your only putting coral in the tank?

Man, unless I was really an expert I would want to pay the fee for someone to maintain my system. But I don't know a thing about a reef only tank. I think you'd eventually want fish as well.

One thing I do know, and that is you want a backup generator. A guy I know has a several thousand gallon tank and we had a power outage for 1.5 days. Needless to say, he lost everything.

Well only one way to become an expert in life and thats to do it :)

Power outages are a huge deal with them, while you don't filter you do need water circulation. One horror story I heard was a guy who turned his basement into a reef to rival an aquarium, friend of my office manager, anyways one bad winter storm they lost power and he lost heat. After a few days of trying to keep it warm enough he couldn't keep the heater going for lack of fuel, everything died, including sharks up to 4 feet long. Musta been one hell of a set up.

Those are horror stories.

What do you plan on putting in your tank Ustwo?

I don't consider SW reefs difficult to maintain. Setting it up right the first time is important and there is a method to the madness. For a 90gal one can pay ~$10K retail for everything. All I can really say is research, research, research and be patient, patient, patient. Doing this for a living, not many do :(.

I would strongly recommend joining a marine fish club and online forums in order to get to know what other "reefers" are doing and get some ideas/feedback for your set-up as well as getting to know the lingo.

In terms of supporting equipment, there are sooo many products, methodologies and experiences out there. What I do will differ from what someone else does yet achieve the same result. Again, knowing more of different methodologies, who's doing what and products will help tailor a design for your particular system.

It's not a cheap hobby to get into but very rewarding as well as addictive.

HTH

We had a saltwater take about 500 gallons in our house for a couple years, I know you said reef however we had several componet of reef tanks in ours, so I can offer some tidbits of information. What size tank are you looking to get? We had about 85 pounds of liverock from Fiji in ours. Those of you familiar with liverock know how many unknown things live within them. At night with the light off take a flashlight and poor some frozen food and as lands on the bottom note all the little creepster worms coming out from their little private abyss. We used white sand instead of crushed rocks for the base, it was easier for the filter system plus made nice for the deep sand bed around the liverock. I miss the aquirium as my parents took it down when my sister left to college.
Any sort of aquiriums are expensive either way you look at it, if you're lucky the tank could be found maybe at a yardsale or elsewhere however you might risk possible side effects from previous users which could destroy your ecosystem. Check ebay, we sold ours on there. We sound the liverock for around $300 and the fish were sold back to a good rep fish store.
We did end up flushing about $200 worth of fish down the toilet during a power outage in the winter, so be certain to have a generator or hospital area for your tank just in case. My dad bought me a Red-General Starfish when I passed my driver's test although it promptly disinigrated a week later, starfish are very sensative to climate change so be care and do alot of RESEARCH before buying or setting anything up at all.
A good website I would recommend is saltwaterfish.com or any other good fish-forum similar to his nature.
Goodluck!