Eclipse is to freshwater as (blank) is to saltwater....

clams are a no go unless you have MHs or like 10 T5's w/ individual reflectors. id suggest staying away from those for a while if you're a noob.

i cant get them cause i just dont have the lights. ah well.

i cant reccommend crabs. they're lil snail assasins. specifically the blue legs. the most mild mannered crabs ive had were scarlet hermits and emerald crabs. but, keep in mind they are all oppertunistic.
 
Yeah, I would skip the crabs if you don't need them. Snails are much better. Must likely the crabs will slowly kill off the snails after a while. It starts to get expensive to replace all those snails.
 
ok i have been trying to do the same thing as you.. you can check out www.nano-reef.com for tons of information there. alot of people there don't really think the cubes are that bad, and they look way better than a standard 10 gallon. there is a site called nanotuners.com where you can buy pop-in upgrades if you need to..

there are basically three types of corals.. Soft, LPS, and SPS.. which need increasing amounts of light.

most of the cubes only have sufficient lighting for soft corals. If you get the 12 gallon AquaPod with the 70W HQI lighting from Drs Foster & Smith for $175, you will be able to do almost all corals. That is what I ordered.

Then you pretty much just need to buy live sand, ~ 15 lbs. of live rock, fish, maybe a heater, and a hydrometer/refractometer to measure SG.

The rock is super expensive though so be sure account for that in your budget.
 
dont worry about live sand, it will become live on its own. If you can find rock from someones tank who no longer wants it is much cheaper. My tank has 110 lbs of it that i got for a total of about 250 bucks... where as local fish stores sell it at around 8-9 bucks a pound around here.

I would recommend a refractometer because the hydrometers are very inaccurate unless they are kept spectacularly clean which is not easy to do.
 
I stopped by my LFS tonight and bored the poor salesperson with tons of questions. They were able to show me which corals/fish/misc stuff that would be good for a beginner. I almost met an untimely death, though, when he told me how much live rock costs. $10/pound!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't know anyone who'd part with any, and at that price I'll be on the streets! Aside from that mild heart attack, I got so excited looking at all the little cuties and imagining how my tank would look.

On another note, he said the cubes are hard because they're acrylic and being you have to scrape off red algae from time to time it scratches. I can attest to this from my Eclipse having a number of scratches even though I'm very careful.

Trancefusion...thank you for the info and links, very helpful!
 
dude, do not buy LR from LFS

go to club forums, cragslist, or at most like liveaquaria.

i made that mistake when i started. be patient, look around, and i can garuntee that youll find better LR than the LFS crap for 2-5 bucks a pound.
 
BeelzeBob said:
dude, do not buy LR from LFS

go to club forums, cragslist, or at most like liveaquaria.

i made that mistake when i started. be patient, look around, and i can garuntee that youll find better LR than the LFS crap for 2-5 bucks a pound.
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BB that's such a relief. After yesterday I was starting to think this wasn't going to work.

And that's "dude-ette" to you. :-)

Grins, He showed me basically the same species you all have mentioned, but I got to see them in person.
 
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