New tank

R

reiverix

Aye
Sep 4, 2004
1,470
0
0
57
Columbus, OH
Well my attempt to get my wife into the hobby by setting up a 10g nano for her seems to have worked alright. Last night I get home from work to find a 55g and 4*65 watt Orbit light sitting on the floor. So a few questions....

Can I move just everything from the 10g into the 55? I have enough spare substrate to fill the 55 and was planning to use what's in the 10g. Problem is the live rock. I can't just go out and buy 70 pounds in one go so I was planning to get maybe 15 pounds at a time. Cure it in another tank if need be, and add it when it's ready. The 10g has about 20 pounds in it.

Is 4*65 watts enough for most coral types?


Thanks.
 
Yes, you can just move everything over--though I would probably only move a few cups of the substrate, from the surface, and start fresh in the new tank. Adding rock a bit at a time, especially if you can get good stuff from a few places, is great--increases the diversity. I would encourage you to get a bunch of base rock, and use it to build the base up, so you're not piling stuff on top of the decorator quality rock--no use spending $$$ on it if it's going to be buried.

The light will put you around 4.5 WPG, so be a good start. You won't be able to keep high light corals, and medium light corals won't spread really quickly (this is NOT always a bad thing), but many corals will be happy. You'll want to use placement of the corals in the tank to control what they get.
 
There's more than one way to do this, of course. Here's my 0.02:
Put the new sand and 25 lbs of base rock into the tank.
Fill with saltwater.
Add some sand from the main tank.
Add shrimp or other seafood.
Let it cycle.

Then add the stuff from the 10.

That way, you will have 25 lbs of live rock in addition to what's in the 10, and can add cured live rock a little at a time and the tank will be able to handle it.

4X65 watts is fine for a lot of soft and stony corals. You might want to avoid the most demanding species, but you will have a lot to choose from.
 
I got a great deal on rock last night. So I picked up all the base rock they had, which was sadly only 13 pounds. Also got 40 pounds of fully cured live rock. Well they assured me it was cured. It smelled fresh and salty and I do trust this LFS. I set up the tank and will let it run and keep checking the parameters just to make sure.
 
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