Hello!
I am from the frozen north. I have so far zero experience with saltwater aquariums, but I am planning to make on in anywhere from 6 months to a year. So i'm learning and designing. For obvious reasons, it would be better for me to finish building the toddler's room before I put an aquarium in it. She loves fish. I can't keep my aquariums clean cause she kisses the fishes (through the glass, thankfully! gotta keep little fingers out of there).
I'm very much a maker. My biggest crafting project is my house. I couldn't buy one, so I built it... with my partner and some friends.
I have a fair amount of experience with freshwater, had a tank as a kid too, but I don't really do conventional aquariums. My current 30 gallons is covered in leaves, mulm and decomposing wood bits, lively microfauna and aquaponic filtration. Its a DIY (with some design issues, really). I used to work in wastewater treatment and did some research in pisciculture effluent treatment, so building my own filters in freshwater wasn't nearly as... alien as the sea stuff. I started reading. A lot.
Other then engineering, I farm. Permaculture style. If you want a description of permaculture, well, its a design method where you plan the ecosystem for you veggies and nuts and whatever. Soil ecology, predator habitat, etc. A good description might be this: "you don't have a slug issue, you have a duck deficiency". We built our arduino controlled heating germination bench, and the greenhouse should end up on a raspberry pi, maybe with home assistant.
