How to maintain a Pico

[anhpeter]

I just started a pico and i'm new to it. I wanted to know how you guys maintain a perfect environment for the tank. After everything is set up, basically how do you maintain the tank. I understand that water changes are essential, but what else? Are there supplements you guys recommend? How often do you add it, etc.

I have a 4 gal tank, with a mini aqualight, AC 20, 50 watt heater, and a Rio 90 (set lower). I'm doing 5% water changes every 2-3 days, but after this week i'm going to keep it at a steady 10% every week. I dose plankton everyday 3 days, while leaving my light on for 8 hours a day. My ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate are at 0, my pH is 8.2, and my salinity is 1.024.

Basically how do you maintain your tank so it has a bright future?
:D :D

[maddmaxx]

well you covered the water change. i have a 5.5 pico.

i dose for alk, cal, and mag when needed. for corals i dose essential elements and coral vite...

also not many fish you can keep in there. but there are some. if you do happen to add a fish, do not over feed it, cause this can swing the levels out of whack...

make sure you keep your bulb fresh, cause when it starts to lose par levels, it can add unwanted algae quickly...

[sabazerehi]

i'm a little curious as to how you deal with evaporation. i'm hoping to start a pico soon too but i'm worried about having to constantly top off. would a lid be good? but i don't want the tank to be oxygen deprived. sorry if i'm hi-jacking.

[anhpeter]

Yea i'm also curious about the lid, because i don't have one either. Is that a problem? But i don't get much evaporation.

How often do you dose essential elements and coral vite, and do you also dose plankton?

[Sugar Magnolia]

If you are going to dose anything, make sure you have a test kit for it...alk, calcium, mag. It's very easy to get your levels out of whack if you don't test regularly, and very hard to get those levels back to where they should be. You can use a 2 part solution like B-Ionic or use Randy's 2 part recipe. For mag I use Brightwell Aquatics liquid magnesion. You really don't need to feed plankton unless you have alot of non-photosynthetic corals. The more you feed the tank, the higher the chance for nuisance algae.

I top off manually twice a day as needed, but then again, my tank is 30g with 250w of MH lighting, so I evap about 3/4 gallon a day. When I had my 2.5 set up, I only had about a cup of evap a day.