It's very quiet in this section so let's see if we can blow those cobwebs away and get a marine going
Hopefully it will encourage a few more to dip their toes in the salty sea and "Go Marine" (it's not as hard as you think
)As some of you may have seen on another thread a few weeks ago RallyMatt and I took a trip to our local marine specialist (Real Reefs, fantastic little lfs you should visit if in this neck of the woods) in search of some white sand for Bora Beach. It's been a couple of years since I shut down my 200L marine tank (it went from 15L to 60L to 160L to 200L) but upon opening the door the lovely seaside salty smell brought all the memories back and within 3 minutes I'd gone from saying "we're not doing another marine" to "Oh why not it'll be fun"
(No comments please about supervision needed, I'm looking at you Gingerlove )So here we are a couple of weeks later at the start of a Nano marine blog
We are using the 24L that used to be Bora Beach before it grew into 60L. So far all that's been bought is a new light. It's a shallow tank so only needed to be a cheap one from Amazon. Plus some coral sand substrate.
Here it is before getting it wet.
I rinsed out the sand a fair bit but there's always going to be some cloudiness. I was able to jug in 18L of RO.
There is an Interpet Nano heater in there that's always set to 25 and a little 250lph powerhead (I may add to this once the rock is in if it's looking a bit weedy, good high flow is important in a marine)
It always takes a little bit of experimentation getting the salinity right when you first setup as the instructions on the salt don't always give you the required salinity. As I will be having corals I am aiming for 35ppt. the packet said 37-40g per litre to get 35ppt so I started with 37p/l. Even cloudier once that had gone in.
Tested this morning with my refractometer and it was at about 32-33ppt so I added another 3g/l before work. Testing this evening showed it at 36ppt "D'OH" so I've squeezed in another litre of plain RO and voila we are at 35ppt
some maffs later I know how much salt for each litre when doing changes (will go through all that at the time) It's all looking nice and clear now too Tomorrow will be Live Rock Day. I'll get around 2kg sticking to the roughly 1kg per ten litre rule. Then it'll be testing for a few days then livestock woohoo!
I'll only be having a few inverts (shrimp, snails and crabs) as it's not big enough for fishies but marine inverts are awesome
and there will be all the weird and wonderful and scary things that creep out of the live rock to get you in your sleep mwahahahaha!!!There will probably be stock going in here before I've even finished the cycle on The Barbarium
More tomorrow...…….
