Took the plunge,(slowly)

[BCOrchidGuy]

Okay so this may label me as a dabbler rather than a jump right in both barrels blazing kind of guy but, I set up my 45 gallon today and have it running with water and coral gravel, I will wait 24 hours for everything to settle then add the salt, and another 48 hours after that I will add some live rock and get the tank cycling. Right now I have just freshwater with fine coral sand in it, I am running an Aquaclear 500 HOB with just a sponge and charcoal, I will remove them both before I add the live rock, and I have two Powerhead 301s moving the water around. I decided to go with the Bio Star salt, I may regret it but I figure I will try it out, I may change over to ME but for now Bio Star got the nod.

 

Once I have my stuf organized I have decided to set up a 20 gallon tank with a 5 gallon refugium on top, and I will set up my 72 with a 20 gallon refugium with a deep sand bed and mangroves/macroalgae. I am curiuos, how much water flow through the refugiums do people use? I was thinking it will have to be slow but how slow?

 

Thanks everyone for all the ideas, I will of course keep you all posted.

[printerdown01]

My fuge is pretty slow! I have a rio 90 pumping into a 2.5 gallon. That may seem like a lot, but by the time the water makes it up out of the tank, through the looped tubing, and into the fuge it is enough to move the surface (tube points directly at the surface and is only about 3" away). By 1/2 way down the tank there appears to be almost no water movement. My pods love it, and it also give ditritus enough time to sebtle on the substrate (which my pods and 1 nass snail seem to take care of).

[reiple]

printerdown01 - why does it have to be slow? can i setup a refugium with a higher flow rate and somehow stop it from becoming turbulent?

I think I can get some algae (they call it seagrass and thats how it looks like- grass) and what refugium setup would work ok?

 

btw lots of tanks there BC. would be great to have lots.

[BCOrchidGuy]

because you want your shrimp and other goodies to have a bit of movement but not fast moving water. Basically you want your shrimp to have babies, and snails to have them too... the babies or larvae will slowly wash out in the water column a few at a time, good chance that some will manage to survive and grow so you can get a few $$ at the LFS. The other thing is, you want all sorts of stuff at different sizes to grow in there, ciliates, rotifers etc, if you can maintain a good refugium you can supply different sizes of food to your whole tank all day, which is how these babies feed on the reef. Imagine having a pair of Tomato clowns spawn and actually having a source of food for them, you could use the refugium water for top off water in the larvae tank for them to feed on and with a bit of luck in a week and a half you can start feeding them on BBS, and try to count how many you have.

 

Printerdown funny you should mention the Rio 90, thats what I was looking at to run mine, I had a Rio2500 for a sump pump before and it was second to none.