The reefer who has the 10yo tank more than likely had to deal with the same, or similar issues the 2 month tank owner is experiencing.
Absolutely.
But, as a human being, I question the ability of said reefer to *accurately* recall exactly how they dealt with such issue, and what the lessons from such issue are - and to have internalized those lessons when they are often directly at odds with how the reef tank they've been keeping for the last 9 years behaves.
Again - I'm not saying newbies should be giving advice - I'm saying that *recent* experience is drastically more valuable than old experience - especially given the differences with live/dry rock between now and then, and the availability of bottled bacteria.
Someone who has a beautiful tank, but hasn't set up a new tank in a decade isn't a great source of advice for someone setting up a new tank.
And they found a way to resolve those issues that then lead to a successful reef 10 years down the road. They then can share what happened to work for them to lead to such a successful tank so many years later.
Not necessarily.
Having a nice tank doesn't mean that you got to that state on an optimal, or even good path. Plenty of people on here with gorgeous tanks got there making every mistake possible - and if they started over - would make most of the same mistakes. Experience just means having done something - not having done it well or understood it.
Older tanks are fundamentally more stable than newer tanks - and if you do everything wrong - you'll still end up at 5 years with a tank that's fundamentally stable and can keep most things - but with no fundamental understanding of *why* it took your tank 5 years to get to that point - and what you could have done differently. That's how we get people saying things like "Oh, having lots of stuff die in the first year is normal."
Almost everyone who stays in the hobby long enough, and keeps a single tank up long enough gets there. The difference is that if you do it right - in 2 years you're having to do massive renovations because you've got corals growing out of the water, and if you do it wrong, you're sitting there 5 years later with a pretty tank and telling people that SPS grow really slow.
I would argue that the best person to give advice to the guy with the hair algae outbreak is someone who has done the research into understanding why what he recommends was successful. I think it also works if someone has done research on a product that may treat hair algae and, while they may not understand how the product works, they understand how it should be used.
To me, either of those is more valuable than someone who had a hair algae problem and got it cleaned up by following advice without knowing why that advice worked.
Nobody is arguing otherwise.
I'm arguing that
having a pretty tank is not a good indicator for
actually understands nutrient flows and reef chemistry.
