Hello everyone!
This is my first reef tank and my first post on Reef2Reef! Super excited to be getting into the hobby.
I have limited space at the moment, but I'm moving into a larger, permanent home in a year or two. My plan for my first reef tank is to start small and learn all I can while planning for a bigger tank down the road.
In terms of stocking, I'm thinking about a pair of captive-bread Ocellaris clownfish, a watchman goby + a shrimp, and some snails. Corals will be mainly LPS (hoping to grow a handful of frags into small colonies over 1-2 years rather than add a whole bunch of frags) -- hammer or torch coral, acans, ricordea, and zoas. Hopefully, this will all be moved into a 50+ gallon tank in a year or two.
To keep the setup as simple as possible, I'm planning to start with limited mechanical filtration, no skimmer, and no sump/refugium, but frequent water changes and siphoning of detritus and algae. I'm going to start with live rock and live sand, and fully cycle the tank before adding any livestock.
Here's what I'm thinking in terms of equipment. If you have any experience with any of this equipment, I would love to hear whether you'd buy it again or recommendations for something else:
This is my first reef tank and my first post on Reef2Reef! Super excited to be getting into the hobby.
I have limited space at the moment, but I'm moving into a larger, permanent home in a year or two. My plan for my first reef tank is to start small and learn all I can while planning for a bigger tank down the road.
In terms of stocking, I'm thinking about a pair of captive-bread Ocellaris clownfish, a watchman goby + a shrimp, and some snails. Corals will be mainly LPS (hoping to grow a handful of frags into small colonies over 1-2 years rather than add a whole bunch of frags) -- hammer or torch coral, acans, ricordea, and zoas. Hopefully, this will all be moved into a 50+ gallon tank in a year or two.
To keep the setup as simple as possible, I'm planning to start with limited mechanical filtration, no skimmer, and no sump/refugium, but frequent water changes and siphoning of detritus and algae. I'm going to start with live rock and live sand, and fully cycle the tank before adding any livestock.
Here's what I'm thinking in terms of equipment. If you have any experience with any of this equipment, I would love to hear whether you'd buy it again or recommendations for something else:
- Aqueon 20 gallon long tank (30x13x13)
- DIY aquarium net cover
- Nero 3 or MP10 (help me decide? or something else?)
- 1 30" AI Blade Coral Grow
- Eheim Jager TruTemp 75W heater + temperature controller (recommendations?)
- Auto top-off (recommendations?)
- Possibly a HOB filter if needed (AquaClear 70? something else?)
- Regular Instant Ocean salt
- CaribSea Arag-Alive Fiji Pink sand (20 pounds)
- Live rock either from LFS or online (20 pounds?)