Ahoy!
Wanted a place to keep track of everything as we go and this seems perfect.
So it all started when I impulsively decided we should get a reef tank while visiting an aquarium and for the first time ever, my fiance didn't immediately shoot down my idea of adding another life to our household.
A week later I had a 55 gallon Aqueon and a tank stand. Behold my ugly impulse buy:
I also purchased a hang on back SeaChem Tidal 75 filter and an aquatop heater as well as salt and live sand. Excellent start (sarcasm) because I researched absolutely nothing. No idea what I was thinking. Also utterly shocked my fiance allowed this purely impulsive decision. He's a champ and also I think he was trying to support me because I had a mentally rough couple of months (injury plus work stress and personal life stress etc). Anyway we decided to stain the stand. This also turned out ugly. But taking pics encouraged me to clean my table for the first time in months so bonus!
At this point I had still done very little research but I was starting to read up a bit. Excitement was still beating out common sense obviously. We had each spent a solid day trying to sand and stain that stand into submission but I finally gave up and decided the tank will just have to be pretty enough to make up for the uglies of the stand and tank and supply selections I had made.
Fiance suggested we fill the tank with pre-purchased salt water instead of making our own. So back to the LFS I went and bought some live rock and water!
In my head, we would let it all cycle super slowly for a couple months as we have a vacation coming up, but we soon got caught up in (finally) researching tanks and found a YouTube series we decided we wanted to emulate.
Long story short (ok not really this is super long but whatever), now we have more live rock, some dry rock, a power head, two AI Primes, and the ICP.
I'm not sure what the fudge we were thinking but we def dove in headfirst. I want to say we've made up for it a bit in our admittedly belated research (sooo many hours of YouTube videos and reading!). Literally have now spent several days off just reading for 14 hours while analyzing our tank and rewatching the tank build series we wanted to follow.
We're both super excited. Today I found a glass lid for the tank as it has pretty serious evaporation, also found a couple of tank sitter options for while we are on vacation. Testing daily to twice daily. Dosed the tank with Stability. Keeping an eye on the live rock hitchhikers (pretty sure we have an aiptasia or three as well as a starfish) and wondering what the heck we were thinking but then I turn the lights on for a minute and it's somehow worth all the dollars, all the mistakes I've already made, and the work we've put in.
Names so far have been rather inappropriate but all we have decided for sure is that as a collective, they shall be referred to as the ICP.
Wanted a place to keep track of everything as we go and this seems perfect.
So it all started when I impulsively decided we should get a reef tank while visiting an aquarium and for the first time ever, my fiance didn't immediately shoot down my idea of adding another life to our household.
A week later I had a 55 gallon Aqueon and a tank stand. Behold my ugly impulse buy:
I also purchased a hang on back SeaChem Tidal 75 filter and an aquatop heater as well as salt and live sand. Excellent start (sarcasm) because I researched absolutely nothing. No idea what I was thinking. Also utterly shocked my fiance allowed this purely impulsive decision. He's a champ and also I think he was trying to support me because I had a mentally rough couple of months (injury plus work stress and personal life stress etc). Anyway we decided to stain the stand. This also turned out ugly. But taking pics encouraged me to clean my table for the first time in months so bonus!
At this point I had still done very little research but I was starting to read up a bit. Excitement was still beating out common sense obviously. We had each spent a solid day trying to sand and stain that stand into submission but I finally gave up and decided the tank will just have to be pretty enough to make up for the uglies of the stand and tank and supply selections I had made.
Fiance suggested we fill the tank with pre-purchased salt water instead of making our own. So back to the LFS I went and bought some live rock and water!
In my head, we would let it all cycle super slowly for a couple months as we have a vacation coming up, but we soon got caught up in (finally) researching tanks and found a YouTube series we decided we wanted to emulate.
Long story short (ok not really this is super long but whatever), now we have more live rock, some dry rock, a power head, two AI Primes, and the ICP.
I'm not sure what the fudge we were thinking but we def dove in headfirst. I want to say we've made up for it a bit in our admittedly belated research (sooo many hours of YouTube videos and reading!). Literally have now spent several days off just reading for 14 hours while analyzing our tank and rewatching the tank build series we wanted to follow.
We're both super excited. Today I found a glass lid for the tank as it has pretty serious evaporation, also found a couple of tank sitter options for while we are on vacation. Testing daily to twice daily. Dosed the tank with Stability. Keeping an eye on the live rock hitchhikers (pretty sure we have an aiptasia or three as well as a starfish) and wondering what the heck we were thinking but then I turn the lights on for a minute and it's somehow worth all the dollars, all the mistakes I've already made, and the work we've put in.
Names so far have been rather inappropriate but all we have decided for sure is that as a collective, they shall be referred to as the ICP.