Addicted again . . .

[garrick]

Hello all,

 

In college, I had a few hundred gallons of saltwater tanks crammed into my tiny apartment. They all went away with graduation, but I've missed them for years.

I had everything from a large panther grouper (named Spot), to a 10 gallon (long - they don't make them anymore, I think) reef tank to a 5.5 with dwarf seahorses.

I ran across my last remaining tank in the garage and decided to find out if reefing is as expensive today as it was when I was a student.

This site is invaluable. Things have come a long way in the past nine years.

Anyway, I scrubbed out the old 20 gallon and started buying things to reef it up.

I picked up 110 watts of PC lights on Ebay.

The back of the tank is filled with a Penguin Bio-Wheel (mostly for water movement) and a Red Sea Prism (not the best, I know, but it fit really well and was on sale at a local shop).

The sides of the tank each sport an AC300 converted into refugiums, complete with the palm lights recommended on these forums. I picked up (forum recommended) macro on Ebay.

These filters also do an amazing job of propping up the lights.

I added some locally purchased live rock rubble to them and 'live' sand (20 pound bag), as well as about 10 pounds of pretty decent live rock which I bought solely for the neat little crabs, shrimp and weirdness that crawls out of them.

I think I've decided to purchase the rest of my rock (another 15 pounds) from Jeff's, also at the recommendation of this forum.

My next planned purchase is a clean up crew from GARF (and Grunge, because the crawly things are the best part).

Long term goals include only soft corals. Soft coral frags are pretty cheap around here, and the added stress of hard corals coupled with my lack of MH lights is too much when I really just weird crap crawling out of the rocks.

My daughter will be horrbly disappointed if the tank doesn't get a fish at some point, but I'm planning to stall with shrimp and crabs.

Once all is well with the rock, I'll post pictures. This post is just to thank all of you for your help and advice through all my (admittedly silent) questions.

 

Thanks again,

 

Garrick