newbies help please...

[ickypimp]

Hello all

i am about to set up my first reef tank, it is gonna be a 5 gallon pico reef...

I appreciate that small aquatic systems are difficult to keep stable, however i think that my experience of many years of fresh water keeping and my job ( i am a biologist) gives me a thorough understanding of whats required in terms of the environmental parameters that need to be maintained

what i would appreciate some help with is a little hardware guidance, i think i have most things covered

Tank, (5 gallons) - got one :p
Heater 25 watt Ebo Jaeger - got one
powerhead aquaclear 10 (~80-100 gallons per hour) - got one

lighting - ok for lighting i have decided to go with 2x 10 watt T4 triphosphor compact fluorescents (they are smallet than T5 and kick out some serious light , the light is ~7500k, one of them will be covered with a filter sleeve that will leave light of 400-480 nm with a peak of around 440 nm (basically actinic light)

I Plan to put a HOT filter on the tank to offer a little more filtration i have been looking at the Hagen aquaclear mini/20 and the ehaim liberty 100

any suggestions woild be fantastic

skimmer... hmm i would skim if i could find anything small enough

ok i am planning to put a 1 inch bed of live sand in the tank and~4lb of live rock..

Take plenty of time over cycling.. then take it from there

I would expect after the cycle peaks to see a diatom bloom.. maybe some hair algae at which point a pico cleaning crew would be added... not chosen yet...

water... my tap water sucks for marine, (my cichlids love it though) but i have RO on tap at work, it would be easy for me to change 1 litre per day to keep the tank ticking over ( i also found a salinity refractometer in a drawer the other day )

i have a test kit bought, just looking to source some nice quality live rock locally that isnt in massive chunks... i will keep you informed as to how this project develops

any comments or suggetions would be appreciated

 

[brandon4291]

We're really glad to have you on board. I'd like to think we have something special to offer with our experience and biology-first/technology last approach here on RDO nanos forum... I find interesting discussion at several places across the net concerning small reefs, but the place that filters out all the conjecture and sets the science first is still this home-sweet-home website.

We'd also like to hear about your FW work in the FW/Terrariums section, I was glad the day we added that part of our site to encompass the entire hobby aquatic.

I think your setup is just fine, and will work as is. You may be interested to see from other posters here, and through trial-and-error, that some of the mechanical items you mentioned may be an option and not a requirement. Such as the mechanical filter...once again, doesn't hurt to have extra surface area for sure, but it won't be required unless you are planning an above-average stocking level with fish or extra-taxing invertebrates. You may find that bi-weekly water changes will suffice and free up some of your time, but this too will require a more forgiving bioload and stocking approach. For the most part, the guys and gals here tend to do about 70% coral loading and 30% fish loading, in a general sense, to avoid water change hassles and heavy mechanical filtration. Matter of fact, using a canister filter on a nano reef is a separate and much more involved maintenance task sometimes than the reef itself! When you consider the natural detritus production found in our high-nutrient/high-current nano setups, the mechanical filter is a highly porous and recessed trap for this stuff whereas if it's accumulated in the reef it can be easily removed during weekly service without having to take apart and unhook things (plumbing work, restarting siphons, etc). It's things like that you will refine in time to suit your own preferences, but your current approach will certainly work if it is built, cycled and stocked patiently.

Tell me about that add-on filter sleeve for light...haven't seen that before in the hobby although it sounds neat. Does that have to do with hospital bilirubin lighting for neonatal care?> I've seen stuff like that before, wondering if that's where the filter sleeve over standard lighting comes into play. Then again, I've been out of the new-products loop for awhile and it wouldn't suprise me if that is reef-specific new stuff.

Welcommain!

brandon429

 

[ickypimp]

Hi Brandon

Thans ever so for the warm welcome, i have posted on some other reef forums and they all seemed real quick to want to snipe and criticise, guess i found the right place here

I appreciate what you are saying about the HOT filte being Superfluous to requirementsbut as you rightly said it wont harm and will increase the overall filtering area, what i am hoping is that the mechanical filter (and a small spponge on the powerhead intake will deal with the "chunks" whilst the rck and sand will do the ammonia/nitrite/nitrate bit (assuming 1 inch of sand is deep enough to get true anerobic conditions to facilitate denitrification)

The light filter... the filter came about due to me being on a tight budget and looking for cheap alternatives to conventional lighting..

I have used the compact T4 triphosphors for some years in my freshwater aquariums, with great results, whilst checking out a website for the colour of the white light ( degrees k) emmited from the triphosphors i happened upon a website of a company that makes filters for the film industry for lighting and cameras... there were page upon page of emmision bandwidth plots, well in my work i use fluorescence a hell of a lot, so light and wavelength i know well, i looked up the lambda max of moonlight , a mean value for this is between 400 and 480 nm with a peak at 440 nm ( at a depth of 5 metres (on a reef) so i looked through the profiles and found what i concidered to be the best one, it reduced the net transmission of the tube by up to 40% but all in all i reckon with 10 watts of 7500k white and 6 watts of 440 nm actinic in a tank as small as mine then you could even get some nice SPS growth.. The light option will if it works be dirt cheap, the triphosphor T4 tubes cost next to nothing to buy and the actinic filter will last forever...

I will keep you posted on developments with that aspect of the tank

All i need to do now i find a source of nano suitable rock close by......

thanks

 

[Anonymous]

Hey ickypimp,
As you can see, I hang here also. But RDO is my fav stompin' grounds.
You will always find the best info, ppl and ideas here.

On the 7500k lights, are you sure you wouldn't like to go 10000k? Much more natural looking color of light. I didn't like the 75's I had, too yellow for my likeing.

I have a little 2.5g going, I'm using a skilter 250 on it. At this time tho, I'm not running the skimmer part. In such a small tank it creates way too many bubbles. I removed all filter media and replaced with rock rubble. It runs with 4x9w pcs and at one point I had a small rbta in there, which while it was doing well, it wasn't spectacular.

If you go snooping around the site check this area out= http://www.reefs.org/phpBB2/viewforum.p ... 9c491f33df

A lot of great little tanks happenin in there, with tons of great ideas at work. You'll even see some small diy skimmers at work.

At any rate, the best advice you'll find with RDO is to take your time. Nothing good happens fast in this little hobby of ours. You'r tank can take up to a year to really stablize, so don't go rushing like your trying to do a long run of flick flacks!

Keep us posted on how things progress.

 

[Anonymous]

Icky,
Your plan sounds good so far. We're all glad to hear when someone is saying "I'm going to set up this tank, what do you think" rather than "HELP! why is my tank ______"

I think you'd be better off without the gel (filter) in front of the light. Although it would narrow the bandwidth of the spectrum, it's going to kill the light transmission. Most of the blues have transmission rates of <20% of the light getting through. The transmission rate is the ammount of light getting through. So on your 10w light it's 2 watts or less. I think your reef would do better leaving the t4's white and adding a small blue light. (there's lots of LED's that are around 400-460nm.) You'll get the florescence without losing the brightness then.


Just my 2cents!

B (who works in theater and uses gel filers all the time.)

 

[ickypimp]

Hi Bingo

Thanks for the comments, i have been thinking about this for a while, my latest plan is to use an 8 watt T4 for white and a 12 watt with the filter for actinic, the spectral data for the filter i am gonna use is ...

as you can see the transmission is 60% and the lambda max is spot on..., his will give me a whopping 15 watts at almost 50/50 in a tank that is 10 inches deep, hell i reckon i could even grow SPS's in there

thanks for the advice, i have looked at all the options and this is a very cost effective way for me to do my lightingthe tube cost around $5 each to replace and the filter shold last forvever

 

[Anonymous]

Icky,
That pic shows that it's letting 60% @440. But it's killing the rest of the spectrum.

If you look here: http://www.leefilters.com/LP1.asp?PageID=31
(scroll down to 195)

You'll see that the transmission (first column) of 195 is 2.7% That's the total transmission, not just the percentage of Blue.

So you're getting about .3w of blue light, while taking up the energy to make 10 watts. (think of long run costs) plus, 1/3 of a watt isn't going to shine very deep in the water.

You could build an LED setup with 2 or 3 lights for under $10. Or you could buy a strip of them made for a car or computer, and then just buy a power adaptor.

B