Kongar
Active Member
So often you hear “nano tanks are hard to keep stable - get a larger tank for your first one.” After starting with my nano, and keeping it going for a year, I’m going to go with “I disagree - starting with a nano teaches you to be a better reefer and is easier to fix”
1) YES it does swing rather quickly, sometimes surprisingly so. Like when my sps started doing good and they dropped the kh 2 points in just a few days. But this teaches you to stay on top of things and test often. If you do this:
2) you learn what specifically is going on. There’s no delays. You see cause and effect in near real time - there’s no buffer water volume to span multiple changes. Change your food? You can see the effect on phosphates. Corals start growing like crazy? You know right away how much to adjust your dosing. Over feeding? Yup that’ll show up in next weekends nitrate test. No guessing what happened over the past couple of months to make that parameter get out of whack.
3) It’s easy to fix. Are things not good? No biggie. Maybe it’s not stability, but you can do 100% water change if you wanted too with less water than most people use in their weekly 10% water changes. It would be better to not make these mistakes - but noobs do. Nanos can be “fixed” easy.
4) Maintenance is easy. One 5 gallon bucket, some bags of media, and a little square of floss. Boom, water changes are easy & quick - so you’re not likely to slack off.
5) it’s cheap(er). I mean big tanks are cool, and gear can be fun. But there’s something about the simplicity of a nano and that definitely helps those on a budget.
I dunno - I’m pretty glad I learned on a nano. It’s a bit more challenging to dial it in, but I feel like I’m learning faster & becoming a better reefer because of it. For someone starting with softies and lps, a nano is probably more forgiving and less expensive to learn on (especially since those tolerate swings better). Then when you get better at it, you can try your hand at sps.
1) YES it does swing rather quickly, sometimes surprisingly so. Like when my sps started doing good and they dropped the kh 2 points in just a few days. But this teaches you to stay on top of things and test often. If you do this:
2) you learn what specifically is going on. There’s no delays. You see cause and effect in near real time - there’s no buffer water volume to span multiple changes. Change your food? You can see the effect on phosphates. Corals start growing like crazy? You know right away how much to adjust your dosing. Over feeding? Yup that’ll show up in next weekends nitrate test. No guessing what happened over the past couple of months to make that parameter get out of whack.
3) It’s easy to fix. Are things not good? No biggie. Maybe it’s not stability, but you can do 100% water change if you wanted too with less water than most people use in their weekly 10% water changes. It would be better to not make these mistakes - but noobs do. Nanos can be “fixed” easy.
4) Maintenance is easy. One 5 gallon bucket, some bags of media, and a little square of floss. Boom, water changes are easy & quick - so you’re not likely to slack off.
5) it’s cheap(er). I mean big tanks are cool, and gear can be fun. But there’s something about the simplicity of a nano and that definitely helps those on a budget.
I dunno - I’m pretty glad I learned on a nano. It’s a bit more challenging to dial it in, but I feel like I’m learning faster & becoming a better reefer because of it. For someone starting with softies and lps, a nano is probably more forgiving and less expensive to learn on (especially since those tolerate swings better). Then when you get better at it, you can try your hand at sps.
