Greetings everybody! I've been lurking a few days and am very pleased with what I read in this forum. I'm not much of a forum person since the usenet days. But I will try to be active in this one.
My name is Carlos, and I currently hail from Lowell, Mass.
I started a mini reef once apon a time in 1991. I was going through a divorce, and wanted to have some diversion as well as provide something interesting and some opportunistic learning for my 2 year old daughter.
The original plan was for a temperate tank with lot's of LOCAL invertibrates and maybe some fish. New England has some of the most interesting ocean in the world. Cape Anne is particularly fascinating as a study subject. I thought a cubic aquarium would be best to minimize surface area to mass ratio. (it has to be kept COLD in order to house these local monsters) The $500 price tag for such an aquarium (back then) compared to $50 for a 55 gal tank - add another $100 and you have a nice stand as well. This proved too tempting to pass up. I bought the 55 gal tank and stand.
I dived folley cove, back beach, wingarsheek and a few other places to get some mental notes on what to use for a base population. I had hoped my daughter could collect some tidal pool samples, maybe a little snorkeling sampling, and put them in the tank temporarily. It's interesting how microeconomics, space and time constraints can effect ones plans.
The first calculations were to determine what kind of thermal pump was needed to keep this tank at 55F or so in a 75F room - with all that serious surface area to the tank. Holy Moly!!! I won't go into the details (unless one of you really wants me to) but I initially came out with a figure of around 7500 BTU's per hour (with a safety factor for when the room gets to over 100F for a long weekend). Can you imagine what that kind of chiller cost in 91/92? -- Back to the pet store -- while pricing coolers, and realizing with horror, these coolers are not throttleable. It's either all on, or all off. Pulsing them for a PID effect would destroy their motors. Incredibly foul language seemed to be all I could think for a while..
I noticed the few lovely miniature reef aquaria they had. Blankly stared at them for a little while. Ideas began to coalesce into plans. after about three hours of observing these tanks, I bought a few books, went to some book stores, bought other books, and began a holy grail quality quest to get a tank up and running. The adventure begins!
I started with reef crystal mixed water, 10 lbs of live rock, and 6 blue damsels. A hang on the back wet/dry filter, and a 20 gal hospital tank filled with local sea water, rock, and it's own wet/dry filter. Dolomite about three inches deep in the main, local sand in the hospital tank. Hospital tank "cycled" almost instantly. The main tank took more than a month. I had to find out why - The filters used had different bacteria colonies! Also, the hospital tank had an incredibly rich invertebrate population. The main tank - almost none. Remember, the hospital tank which was not being chilled, was about 30F warmer than local conditions. Didn't seem to matter to the creature, diatom, or algea populations.
Over the next ten years, lot's of experimentation, and a bit of a learning curve, I had kept a very nice, maybe over densely populated artificial reef going with growing corals, and happily reproducing fish and invertibrates. The tank required pruning twice or so a year. I had to move twice during that time, and the tank was moved maybe 5 times without serious mishap. Note: sea apples do NOT like being moved!! keep them separate, and do NOT reuse the water they were in - they poison it under stress!
At the end, I was using Metal Halide lighting, a protein skimmer I designed and built, the hang on filters became refusiums, and after about three years, the denitrifying plenum under the dolomite was FINALLY self feeding. (detritus from the tank, and the creatures that move about under the floor were effectively feeding the denitrifying bacteria without introducing too much O2.) The tank operated this way for almost 6 years. Testing and dosing occurred monthly. My tank would not have survived without testing, and a good microscope to monitor the various microscopic creatures.
The total costs were not bad -- the tank and hardware cost maybe under a thousand. Creatures/rock, Testing, and reagents over that whole period cost much more.
The tank system was given to someone when I moved in 2000.
A friend recently gifted me a 90 gal (18X48 base) reef ready tank. I'm not sure if it was a punishment, or a reward - I'm on this forum now, so you (pl) probably figured out that Reefer madness might be taking hold.
I haven't built a stand yet, nor have I decided whether or not to plug up the two bulkhead holes yet. It's not "analyses paralyses" - I'm carefully weighing out the advantages. I'm leaning towards pluggin them up, and using a wide overflow for the thinnest stream possible. Hopefully this forum will help me arrive at the best solution.
While I build a stand, filter, and skimmer, my first purchase will be a RO/DI. It would be awesome if I had a multi purpose one - for drinking water as well as tank water.
Cheers!
--Carlos
