Plan on a bit more substrate than this. Flourite is very good.
Filter is fine. I much prefer sumps but this will work. I would also plan on a CO2 reactor PVC tube on each circuit(roughly a 3" x 24 " with a gas inlet).
UV, don't bother using except for about 1 day after a water change or if in the rare case you get green water.
I will say 12 x 96 w is enough, I set up a 440 gal tank with 8 x96 and it was plenty. Remember that the reflectors are awesome, plus the amount of light froma T-5 with an electronic ballast also increases the amount of light vs an old watt per gal rule.
900-1100 watts is enough.
You can opt for the MH's, I'd use 250's, 5-6 of them.
Have a good lighting person professionally install them built in if you chose this route.
Plan to aquascape so that you are able to hide all components.
Use wood, rock, plants etc to do this.
Also, don't bother with the heating cables thing, it's help is insignificant and it's cost is high. It won't hurt but ifI had all the $, I still would not use them in any of my personal tanks, and yes, I've used them over long periods and I have used 3 brands, dupla, sandpoint and zoom med plus have built several of my own from raw parts. Spend the $ on the substrae instead.
Also, get a couple of bags of ground peat and add this to the bottom of the substrate along with some old filthy mulm from severval vacuumed established tanks from the LFS, decant off the clear supernatant, save the detritus on the bottom, add this to the bottom layer with the peat and mix with about 1" worth of flourite. Top with 2-5 inches of flourite, also feed some of this into the filter also.
You now have cycled your tank.
Reef tanks need more light than any planted tank does, at least SPS tanks do, soft corals etc can get by with less etc, but more light is not better, you can learn the hard way if you so choose.
You will also want to get KNO3, K2SO4, KH2PO4 and some traces, like plantex CMS etc.
You can buy the fert's from agriculure grass lawn turf wholesalers for about 20-30$ per 50lbs.
The plantex will be about 35-45$ for 5lbs of dry and this should last a few years.
20 to 50lb CO2 bottles will be needed.
Driftwood, I have wood that is similar to Amano's big 12ft x 6ft x 6ft monster tank here and we have tons of it. See the Book of ADA.
Very beautiful. Redwood stumps are also a prime idea locally.
If you can see this tank, note how the Anubias are used in the lower reaches along with crytps etc.
C c. variety balansae is great since it gets about 24-30 inches long and is a nice grassy bright green metallic sheen.
Much of the wood is planted with narrow leaf java fern or Bolbitus(easy to get at).
The general layout is based with a central mound of rocks supporting the wood with some open space along the front/sides of the glass.
It is much better to be in the lower end of the light with good CO2
and nutrients as this is the best overall combo for work load and over all look and presentation for an aquascape of this size that you plan on keeping looking good for any length of time. Less glass algae also.
More light will => more work.
Your "customer" and plants will also be pleased with this amount.
I am in the bay area often(permanently next year) and there is an excellent friend of mine from the Monterey Aquarium who does excellent contract/consulting work if you are interested as I do on ocassion.
He's _the_ best person in the world for jellyfish tank. He has a very nice Discus 250 gallon tank running at the present time which he maintains and is one of the nicest Discus tanks I've seen to date, certain within the USA.
Pleco's are tough to catch in a large tank later.
I'd opt for another algae eater, also, don't depend/rely on algae eaters to solve your algae issues, they are only icing on the cake.
Amano shrimps in mass are good, but costly and may prove tough in this large tank(Get loss in the over flow, Discus eating them etc after they get good sized etc).
You'd need 500+ of them or so which would be about 300-400$.
I can recommend some great local Discus breeders for the stock.
Regards,
Tom Barr
