Lighting / Filter Question

[Parker420]

I have a 75G non-drilled SWT, and I am the greenest person on this forum. Yep, I'm just starting. Soooooo, i'm doing fish and coral, and want to go with LED's, and i'm leaning toward the AI VEGA's....thoughts? Also, A local friend who has been doing SW for YEARS, suggested to keep things simple for now and go with a Reef Octopus BH2000 HOB Protein Skimmer, and a HOB Aquaclear 110 filter. Thoughts?

Thanks!

Steve in KY

[Parker420]

Oh....Also..... RO/DI units....my water company says the don't use Chloramine. So what do I need? I was suggested a 5 stage unit from Pure Water Club? Any good?

Thanks!

Steve in KY

[Epicreefer]

Simple is a good way to start as sw tanks have a way of becoming very complex. My first suggestion is read, read and read. Most importantly you need to decide how dedicated you are to a reef tank and how much you can spend. It's unclear exactly what you have, sounds like a new 75g glass box, so any more info like any live rock, fish etc. As well as where you want to go, fish only, simple reef or lps and sps reef, would be helpful to offer advice. The nano reef and large reef tank sections of the forums have a lot of build threads to give you a better idea of how reef aquarium filtration works. In reef aquariums the basic biological filtration, processing the toxic waste of the inhabitants into less toxic forms happens largely on your tank decorations, the live rock and sand inside the tank. From there everything you add helps to remove those less toxic forms of pollution and some ways are better than others. The most basic tank can have only rock sand a heater light and a pump for water movement and function great. But you would only be able to have a few fish and need to do large water changes. Your probably looking for something a bit more complex and colorful than that.


I can't offer advice on those LEDs, but with my experience with other LEDs I would suggest you get one that is adjustable, LEDs have a way of being too strong for some corals, killing them, so it's nice to be able to dial them down to suite the distance and corals you select. In general most reef keepers don't use hob filtration on tanks over 20g or so. If you don't have a sump then it's nice to have but mainly serves as a place to place activated carbon and a particulate filter to help remove suspended solids from the water column cleaning the water. For a fish only or a few beginner corals it will be just fine but if you advance more it will likely end up unused. A better form of filtration is utilizing a CPR or Eshopps overflow box and leading that to sump below the tank of 20-30 gal in size. That also opens up your options for skimmers as you could then also pick from in sump and external skimmers rather than just hob skimmers. That octopuss skimmer is a bit undersized for a 75g reef tank, it would be ok for a fish only with a few corals probably but again for a full reef a bit small. This path ends up a bit more pricy than you may want to start off with because buying one piece of equipment leads to another and so on... But you can keep more fish and coral! For now do some reading, and try to decide on exactly what you want to keep now and 6 months from now. Zoanthids and leathers are the easiest, LPS are not bad and sps can seem almost impossible corals to keep. For fish I would recommend against any that get over 4" long or are incompatible with corals or reef inhabitants, that means no tangs, triggers, angels, butterflies and half the wrass family is out. Your friends recommendations are fine for a simple reef tank but in this hobby it's nice to think ahead and spend the money the first time, nothing worse than 6 months from now realizing you want to spend $500 on new equipment and the $300 you already spent ends up sitting in the closet till you toss it.

For ro systems from one of my earlier posts,

Ideally every time you run the unit the first 1 gallon of clean water from the membrane, before di, you dispose of down the drain. This is due to creep across the membrane when it is sitting idle. Basically when stagnant the salts on the in put/waste side move across the membrane to the clean side contaminating that water in the cartridge. By flushing this water from the output you can greatly improve the quality of water you collect and reduce the amount of di resin you consume. For instance if you dont flush, an ro works best when producing a higher quantity of water at a time ,say 20g at once every three weeks instead of 1g a day. If producing 1g/ day then every gallon produced contains that contaminated water( let's say 1 cup of 16cups/gal produced while if you make 20g then it's only 1 cup of the 320 cups produced). Best of all you just dump that water down the drain, but the meat of it is short cycling your ro is not anywhere as efficient as long cycling it. As long as you flush that first output almost any setup is adequate, if you have high tds readings then just buy a high quality membrane from spectra pure for about $50, the rest of the system is almost identical, chloramine removal excluded. Just add a T between the membrane out and the di in and a valve on both outputs of the T(about $10 at home depot, one valve runs to drain and other is to isolate your di cartridges). Open the one to the drain and run ten min, close, then open the one to di, and run till you have your water supply and store with both valves closed. The salts will find their way through the tubing seeking out the pure water and bypass the di, I've seen 0.30 phosphate AFTER new di cartridges from a system short cycling, so flush your membrane