ihayat

Oooo.. thanks for the recommendation. That's an excellent website! I've been browsing it all morning. Thanks again!

Thanks to all the replies! I went and got myself a RO/DI unit online off of a company in Vancouver. Am enjoying the clean water now just for plain drinking too! Attached a long length of 1/8" tubing to bring in filtered water from the unit under the kitchen sink to my aquarium. Took a few days for my 110 gallon setup to be filled but it's finally all going now. Will have to figure out how to do the water changes but.. oh well. It's all good for now while the nitration cycle's in progress. Thanks again!

Hello everyone! I've finally gotten my 90g aquarium (with 20g sump) cycling now. The plumbing of the sump took a while! But at least now I know a lot more about PVC and creating fittings than I ever wanted to know. Alright, now I have about 40lbs of live rock in there at the bottom and about 2 inches of aragonite sand (Mainly fine grained). It's been about 4 or 5 days now of running like this with the LR. A couple of days ago the Ammonia levels were just getting going. (Will try to check tonight) Ok... some questions: Q. Apparently I need about 60 more pounds of live rock. Any sources of cheap LR in the Edmonton area? Q. Anyone familiar with cultured LR? It's supposed to be cheaper. Should I put in about 40lbs of this? Q. Should I now add all the rest of the LR together, or should I do it in small increments? Should I wait until the aquarium has fully cycled? Q. Aquascaping! How can I get LR going up vertically on one of the walls of the aquarium? Q. Lighting! My aquarium comes with a (very nice!) wooden canopy with a wooden flip-up kind of a top. (So the lighting would need to fit inside the canopy and can not be suspended from the ceiling) Once the tank's getting close to fully-cycled I am hoping to buy the lighting. Any suggestions? From what I've read it sounds smarter to only have power-compacts or VHO flourescents, for energy efficiency but I don't know if there would be enough light this way. Any suggestions? Here are some photographs: http://www.canreef.com/photopost/showgalle...500&ppuser=1497 Thanks in advance!

Yes, I do believe that we're using NaCl for the softener. Hmmm.. this is interesting. I really didn't believe that just adding the salt mix will take care of pH and hardness too. Wow.. that's great! I just thought that marine fish and inverts, etc. were picky about hardness/softness. I've been recommended RO water here too. I just don't own a RO setup. Is it expensive to get one? And is it worth it? And if I did get a RO setup going, would it simply take in my softened water or will I need to connect it to regular hard water? If I don't get an RO machine.. can I just buy about 110 gallons of RO water somehow? Hmmm.... Thanks for all the help!

Hi again! Now that I have my 90 gallon aquarium all plumbed, I am thinking of adding water to it and let the pump and sump do their thing for a week or so. I don't know if I can even get access to my hard well-water here.. we have a water softener that sends the softened water everywhere in the house. I don't know if there even is a way to access unsoftened water. (Any ideas?) Would it be okay to put in softened well-water into the aquarium for starting a marine aquarium? Also, when I'm adding fish, etc. and I need to raise the hardness.. how can I do this? It just seems like a shame to add softened well water to the aquarium and then to add chemicals to harden it again. The person at the aquarium shop told me that when I'm adding the Instant Ocean to the water it will automatically adjust the hardness and pH level and make them alright. This can't be right! Is it? Any ideas? Thanks in advance!!

Hello! First time poster here. I'm trying to set up a reef aquarium (90 gallons) here in Ardrossan, AB. (Just east of Edmonton) We have well water here which is about pH 8.0 and relatively hard. Does someone here have any experience with setting up a marine aquarium with well water? I have the sump and protein skimmer and all that. Have to put it all together though, but before I can put water in there and get the Nitration cycle going I wanted some information. Thanks in advance!