Ground Zero

Everything clean... time to get started again. I thought this might be a good time to capture the most important "lessons learned" from the last year and a half of reefkeeping. No doubt, I've learned some important lessons above and beyond what I knew from 5+ years of keeping marine fish. Starting out with a smallish (28 gallon nominal) system may have been a little more challenging than a larger water volume, but nothing could be cooler than having a 24" square reef in your living room...

Lessons learned:

1- Metal Halide lamps really do need to be changed every 6-9 months; toward the low end of the range for magnetic, HQI ballasts.

2- There may be such as thing as too much live rock- I think that the more surface area you have in the tank, the more flow you need to ensure that detritus cannot build up to the point where there are anoxic zones, etc. I started with about 50 pounds; restarted with about 30 pounds. Instead of piling it up from the bottom, it is now placed on 3/4" PVC sections daisy-chained together with zip-ties to ensure that the sand bed is continuous below the rock.

3- You need a good protein skimmer. I'm now using a CPR Remora hang-on-back model driven by a Maxijet 1200 pump. Previously, we had the stock, air-driven JBJ skimmer. Unless you have a lot of time to devote to tweaking/optimizing the skimmer, a product like the Remora that can be pretty much set and forgotten once it is up and running is the way to go, IMHO. Worth every penney.

4- Quarantining corals is a good idea... Having a simple T5HO setup that gives you time to ensure that monitpora eating nudi's, AEFW, etc. aren't present on that new frag cannot be a bad idea... We took care of this with a 10gallon and Coralife light fixture- but not before losing a couple of really nice Montipora spp. frags that had grown out really nicely. (Thanks Payton!)