Originally Posted by Badlatitude

What do you have for lighting? You're gonna need halides or HQIs for the reef if you want to grow nice sick purple coraline on your rock. For the lighting you WILL need a chiller! and you wount need that heater. Most people put them in their sump and use a reef safe titanium heater thoose glass one break and kill reef tanks. Also It looks like you need more power heads imho you should put an ocilating one on either back top corner and a comple lil baby ones in or behind the rock .

Dont forget your living matience crew .. alot of people over look the importance of their clean up crew and fail at reef keeping. No only do your blue legs and a large blenny clean up funk and poop but they also keep your agregate on the bottom in shape . Some turbo grazer or astria snails are needed also.

DONT cycle your tank with anything you dont want in the tank later. catching a fish out of a reef is a nightmare! Damsils get VERY nasty and pick at other fish as they age. avoid them! Use Blue Chromis to cycle your tank they can remain later and are nice fish they school well and are hearty and cheap too. Anthias are another great choice for a beginner imho because they eat well and school up with each other very well and have nice color. I would personally avoid tangs and angels for a while untill you get thru your struggling phase

How many gallons is your sump? In a reef you willnot need a "FIlter" per say once its a running system. You will however need a UV sterializer , protine skimmer and a micron (u can get the tube clusters that have micron , UV togather)

btw we found that Instant Ocean is a superior salt.

We used to have a filtration room here with a 400 gallon sump with quads , 3 chillers a 6ft skimmer and all awaki pumps. for our reef side of the system which consisted of a 150 mixed soft reef, 110 sps reef 58 sps reef and a 65hex seahorse tank along with a few frag/ grow out tanks. Then we had 3 isolation /med tanks. A seperate 150 with a octopus and a big eel in it. Our electric bill WITHOUT AC in the summer was 400 and change a month haha

My step brother and 2 friends still do reef tanks for a living and him and I have been talking about doing another reef here but im kinda over it. It was hours a work every night and a solid half day on a weekend every week =(