You can't beat a nano tank.
For starters, they are exceedingly easy to maintain. The 7 gallon nano that I had on my desk at work took me all of 10 minutes a week to maintain, and it was fine over 3 day weekends (which was every weekend for me) without any problems. Once every few days I would slide the cleaning magnet across the glass, and every other week I would do a 1 gallon water change. I had two containers under my desk, one empty, one full of fresh seawater. I would simply siphon off a gallon into the empty one, and pour the one full of fresh seawater into the tank...done!
Being this easy to maintain, no excuse for algae covered glass, your tank always looks nice.
Live rock and sand, along with a sensible bio-load make for an easy, trouble free tank. Back in the day the common line was that smaller tanks were more difficult to maintain, but that was back when under-gravel filters were the order of the day. Indeed, 23 years ago when I started doing this, we'd never heard of live rock or live sand.
They are relatively inexpensive (the operative word his relatively) to set up. You need less rock and sand, and you can only fit so many critters in there. You all saw my old 12 gallon nano in the week 1 thread. I simply moved inverts and fish from a larger tank to stock it, nevertheless can you imagine how much it would have cost me to purchase enough inverts to make a 200 gallon tank look this full and abundant? Forget it! My 150 gallon looked nice, but it never got that FULL looking, doing so would have drained my bank account.
You don't need high wattage lights, so aside from the initial cost being less, they use less power, and they cost less to replace.
You don't need a skimmer. On a tank this small, a skimmer is silly really. The point of a skimmer is to export nutrients, but when water changes are so easily done, there's no point in a skimmer.
They are easy to move.
Catching a fish in one is a breeze.
They won't spike your power bill like a large tank will.
They fill up fast, so money-waste potential is nippid in the bud. This is a good thing for people like me. :wink:
I still love large tanks for fish only marine tanks and freshwater, but where reefs are concerned I'll stick with the nanos.
I plan on doing a 500 gallon Amazon biotope tank, but that's another topic for another time.
:wink:
Jim
