albert_dao

If it's going to be HOB, you'll find no better skimmer than the Remora. Super's are more effective, but VERY picky and will flood here and there.

From my experience, the break-in has nothing to do with foam climbing the neck. you can clean the neck squeaky clean and still have good foam production.

Uhhh, scum build-up on the side of the bottleneck does not allow foam to rise easily. That's why people make wet-necks.

Pro shots!

You're suppose to clean it. All the scum in the bottleneck reduces the skimmer output.

100 and 200. Give or take 100.

Nope, was at Pisces, they were calling them "grey cichlids"

l4ff.

I'll sell you mine for a $300,000 CAD. No taxes. Fish tank and my house included.

Edit; Actually, I got mine from rudy on this message board. He bred them, but has none left. Do you have any left Canucklehead?

Try running it without the venturi for a week.

Are they brand new?

MIght be springtails.

Oh yeah, I keep him in a fishbowl and I'm thinking of adding a yellow tang.

Lives with an ornate bichir, a queen arabesque and a... uhhh, turtle.

Monster in the making!

little guy with the integra? no, I mean Dennis' brother with the Porche...

Dry goods will probably not go up on the site for a while since we are not at a point where we want to be shipping these things out of town and across Canada.

It's there to protect the bottom from landslides and spread out the weight of the rock.

It's the same stuff that cutting boards are made out of. I've no clue where you can get large sheets of it in canada, but I imagine a boating supply company would.

They're garbage. They'll flood if you look at them wrong and clog ifyou don't.

Standard powerheads have a linear flow, that is, a jet streaming from their output.

Stream style powerheads produce a cone shape flow out of a much larger output. In essense, they create turbulence in the entire water column as opposed to a localized current.

Think of it in terms of blowing really hard through a straw vs. turning on a 19" fan.

Ther other difference is just numbers. Larger models of most standard powerheads hit the 300-450 gph range. The smallest SEIO sports a cool 600 gph.

Nope. The flow is very different from your standard powerheads.

Careful with artificial biomedia of any sort, they become long term problems. Same goes for mechanical filtration. I'd skip them altogether (including the actual filter that houses them) and go straight for high flow + protein skimmer.

Don't waste your time. Go straight to 20,000k HQI metal halides. Oh YEAH!

Actually, there's videos of them on the web crawling out of the tank eating children and pets, then robbing banks. Keep your tank covered!

That's a full scale reef set up. FOWLR has no coral.

Live rock has many properties that make it "live". For starters, it has a huge internal surface area (on good quality live rock anyway), which makes it a suitable subtrate for bacteria. Secondly, it is usually encrusted with things like micro/macro algae, bryozoans, tunicates and other sessle invertabrates. Lastly, you will usually find a whole community of motile inverts on live rock such as worms, amphipods, crabs, and snails. All these factors contribute to a substrate that has a huge capacity to process organic materials in many ways a bioball could not.

High flow and thin sand are not a match. You'll end up with sand all in one corner of the tank, or worse, suspended in the water column. Another alternative is to paint the bottom white. That's what I've done at the store and it looks good.

You should prioritize the purchase of a skimmer as it is one of the most crucial pieces of equipment to running barebottom effortlessly.

I'd actually purchase in this order: Tank, salt, hydrometer, powerheads, skimmer, rock, with lights coming last.

Thanks Josh!

If this is your first shot at SW, I'd nix the substrate. It will save you such much grief and hassle.

Don't make any misconceptions about live sand. REAL live sand is pretty much unavailable anywhere in Western Canada. I've checked.

http://albertaaquatica.com/index.php?showtopic=5084

That pretty much covers my rant on substrates and how to incorporate them into your tank later on.

But all things aside, if do plan on going with a substrate anyway, ditch the crush coral. It has no place in the marine hobby for many reasons including high organic phosphate counts and poor surface texture.

If you get power heads, go for either of the two SEIO arrangements. There's no way to accurately describe the significance of how much better these stream pumps are than the classic linear pump. You'd just have to see it for yourself.

Lighting is fine.