Monthly Archives: April 2008

New article “How to set up a marine reef aquarium”

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       Finding a easy start up guide for marine reef aquriums is hard to come by. When I first started I did not have a clue about reef aquariums.  Thankfully there were sites like reefcentral that I could ask a ton of questions, but one thing was still missing, a beginner guide. So I decided to take a few hours tonight and write up a step by step guide for setting up a marine reef aquarium.

        Keep in mind this is very basic and should be used as an outline when setting up a tank.  The reasearch involed in many diffrent aspects of the marine aquaria such as lighting, flow and water chemisistry are generally based on one’s setup and tank, as there are no two tanks a like.  So the beginner guide is just to show the beginner where to start and how to go about doing it.  You can find this article on the right hand side of this page under the tab “pages”.

Hermit crab hitching a ride

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       Theres nothing like sitting back and watching your reef tank develop.  I took a few minutes today just to sit and watch my tank, instead of tinker with it like I usually do.  Its funny how you appreciate the little things such as this  pic.

       Here are one of my many astrea snails on the glass with a hitchhiking blue legged hermit crab.  This little hermit crab held on for about fifteen minutes until the snail decided to go onto some live rock.  I often see this happen but the hermits usually end up falling off the snails.  This fella stayed on for the whole ride :)

Marine reef aquarium additives

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We have all done it, mainly when we were young and naive reefers.  We stood at the LFS stores staring “dead eyed” at all the additives.   Its a tough choice and every thing looks like it will help a great deal.  You have your iodine, your calcium , magnesium, essential elements, strontium,  iron and a bunch of others, I could go on for days.  With all these additives its easy to get confused, if you look at this webpage in detail you will see pictures of my aquarium.  I only dose a couple of elements, the rest replenish with water changes.

      My 46gallon bow-front is mainly “softy dominated” which means most of my corals are soft corals.  I do have  a few large polyp stony corals and clams and I also take into account my coraline algae when I dose.  As of right now I own Iodine, Calcium, essential elements and magnesium additives.  But I only dose calcium and magnesium the other additives I ave bought when I first started my aquarium and have learned that there is very little need for them if you are performing weekly water changes. 

Before I dose any additives I test the my reef water to see if I even need to dose.  This may sound like common sense, but you would be surprised how many people on the various forums will add additives to there tank water just because the label says to! I dose calcium just about every other day,  while my soft corals only use a small amounts of this, my clams, LPS and Coraline algae us a lot of it. I keep my calcium levels at around 430ppm.   I suspect that my salt mix has a low magnesium concentration because every time I do a water change my magnesium concentration drops.  I like to keep the magnesium level at 13500ppm.  

 Dosing an additive can be very tricky as most additives will not tell you the concentration of the element you are adding.  Their directions are very general, most of the time telling you to add a cupful per 50 gallons.  For most reefkeepers this is unacceptable. Luckily there is an online calculator that will tell you how much you need to dose to get a certain concentration of a specific element. This calculator has many name brand additives to choose from and is located here.  It may surprise you at how much you actually need to dose.