Welcome to My Tank Blog (#2)

I am going to use this blog to document my journey into the art and science of marine reef keeping. Since I was a kid, I have told my self that when I settled down and bought a house that I wanted a salt water aquarium with lot's of cool looking saltwater fish. Well, after a few decades, I finally have settled down and bought a house, so three months after taking ownership, I went out an bought a tank.

The buying decision was complicated as there are a lot of options. The general rule of thumb is that a 40 gallon tank is on the low end of a good beginner tank. Smaller tanks are harder to maintain because they can get out of whack pretty quickly and everything in it can die (the tank "crashes"). It turns out that aquariums are dynamic systems and the key to reef keeping is balancing the various chemical parameters of the tank (e.g., the salt content, calcium, ammonia, etc). This means it is similar to balancing a broom stick on your finger, It requires lots of small constant changes to keep the system balanced; and any lack of attention can quickly escalate into the a complete loss of balance.

I decided on a 34 gallon tank by Red Sea called the Red Sea MAX 130D. While 34g is a little smaller than the recommended minimum, it is a very aesthetically appealing tank and it is more or less complete with everything you need to get started. The reality is that many owners complain about some of the stock equipment, so I did make a few upgrades. Here are my upgrades:

• I upgraded the protein skimmer to a Tunze 9002 because of reports that the stock skimmer was noisy and a bit fickle (the protein skimmer removes Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) from the tank water which will cause problems because its decay produces toxins and the decay process removes oxygen that the animals need to use to respirate).
• I also purchased the inTank Media Basket to hold the mechanical and chemical filter media. This makes access to the filtration items much easier.
• I purchased Purigen as a synthetic chemical filter to remove nitrogenous waste
• And Chemi-Pure Elite as an activated carbon filter to remove ionic organics and other ionic impurities

I also added levelers to the bottom of the stand, but more on this in another post. Here is the tank waiting to be setup with sand, rock, and water.

NOTE: I moved my blog from it's old location to here because of spam issues.