Very Small Reef Set-Up - Need Advice

[knashash]

Hello....I am completley new to saltwater. I have a 4 gallon tank set-up that comes with a compact florecent light and a filter. I will get a small heater for it as well.

I would like to start a very small reef set-up with some shrimp and other crustations and possibly one small fish.

First off, would this be possible with this small a tank? If so, can someone offer suggestions on how to get started or point me to a good article. Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks in advance......

 

[david emmett]

Hey my names dave and I,m also new to this stuff. I have found that through the kindness of others at this site that most any ? I have is anwsered nearly as soon as I post it but I also found that many of my ?s I can find the anwser to in a book my wife bought me "saltwater aquariums for dummies" I think its great it dosnt confuse me with a whole lot of technical stuff I cant understand and talks in plain simple terms right up my ally anyway as I said I get most my ? anwsered right here and they dont even care about my terible spelling. Good luck

 

[OrionGirl]

To be honest, I will never encourage anyone to setup a tank below 30 gallons as their first SW setup. Smaller tanks are harder to stabilize, and harder to keep stable--they require much more attention than a larger tank ever will. Salinity and temp stability are the biggest challenges--not impossible, but definitely more work.

That said--small tanks have the same needs as larger tanks--cycling, filtration, etc. There are a number of threads in the newbie section that cover these in depth, so read up some, and then you can ask specific questions for your setup if you still want to go the hard road.

 

[mysis]

basically, the smaller it is, the harder it is to keep, they can also be considerably cheaper, and if you do your homework it is not impossible to keep a tank that small, even for a newbie to saltwater. basically, read whatever you can, spend a couple of months browsing on forums like this, if i could add one i would definately recommend reefcentral.com and nanotank.com spend a couple of months on these site and this one, then start to ask questions, like what equiptment you need etc, most of your questions about parameters and other will have already been answered by the reading.

 

[itstheantitang]

you also need to be very alert to the evaporation in a tank that small, top off often so salinity doesn't rise

 

[Crown Royal]

At only 4 gallons you're approaching "pico-tank" territory. There's very little room for error or inadvertence at this volume (especially a reef setup). Tank crashes can happen with alarming speed. I agree with the others and would recommend that you start with a bigger tank first (without corals initially as well) before you tackle something this small (as counter-intuitive as that seems).