Saying howdy with my 150G reef

I've been a lurker here for a bit.. thought I'd finally join.



I have an Oceanic 150G reef tank.



I've had it since..hmmm...2002 I think. So 12 or 13 years now.



Here is a pic I took just now of it. (It's due for a cleaning this weekend.)







I'm kind of getting my "second wind" for the tank. I'll explain...



For the first several years, I had lot's of pretty fishies, some easy to maintain corals. And..hmm.. maybe 50 lbs of live rock. Don't really remember how much. I didn't buy it all at once, added to it over the first few years.





I had looked into RODI units for water changes, but back in the early 2000's, those things were expense, and I could buy "ready to use" salt water for 40 cents a gallon.





Yes.. 40 cents a gallon. Why spend (at the time) almost a grand making a RODI system, when it cost less than $20 for 40 gallons of salt water??





For that same reason, I never had a skimmer. Again, why? Skimmers were expensive and didn't work as well as they do now.. and water was super cheap.



Life was good.. the tank was good.





Then 2008 happened.





I'm on the gulf cost, and in Sept 2008 when Hurricane Ike hit, I lost power for 13 days.. and lost 99% of the tank life.



The only thing that survived was one (of 4) pajama cardinals, one Sea anemones, and some crabs. Everything else died...





In 2009 I started to build it back up.. but I had lost the desire. I put a few fishies in there, nothing complicated or "heavy".



To be honest, I had really been thinking about selling it.



Water was no longer 40 cents a gallon. Now it's like $1.50 a gallon. Jeez. That 40G of salt water that USE to cost less than 20 bucks, was now costing 60bucks.



And I was tired of doing water changes... manually emptying and refilling the water. After a decade+ of that, was old.



Water changes use to be every 2 weeks. Now.. was going a month.. then a month and a half.. then would realize, wow, I haven't changed the water in 2 months.. *sigh*, better do it this weekend.



blah.. I should just sell the thing...





Then.... I was at a friends house who very recently got into reef tanks. And he had a RO/DI unit!!!



He pointed out that many things have changed in the past decade. And I should do some "fresh" research..



Which is how I found this place.





Soooo... I recently (with the help of my friend) built an RO/DI unit in the corner of my "man cave".











So now, water changes are a fraction of the cost and a breeze to do.



So now, I'm looking a skimmers. And the 50000000 page thread FutureDoc has on them...