Welcome to the 3reef,
From what I gather you have decided to enter the wonderful relm of reefkeeping and now are on the way to seek out the best ways to forfill your goals , which I think is a great first step. lotts of questions and reserch is the key here. oh and patients
I would recoment that you reserch further into this and return to your lfs and make your decision as to weather you want to keep corals and fish or fish and some corals.There is acctualy a big difference here and like mentioned above it can be an expensive transfer from one to the other ie. upgrading pumps ,lights ,filters and what not.
Personaly I was also in to minds as to weather I wantd a reef tank (coral dominated) or a
Fish onlywith some basic corals.
I decided that I would like to have more of a reef tank more coral, less fish
so I did the reserch on needs of the future tank inhabitants
lighting their is alot to cover here different corals different intensities.
flow as above mentioned different corals need different current structure
chemical composition/ dosing Many corals absorb nutrients and trace elements from you water colum these need to be replaced
and so on .also some of the guys here dont like to do maintanance on their tanks
so they have incorperated many automated features to their tank.
( wish I had some of these gadgets too)
Sorry this post is so long but I think it should be helpful to you and perhaps you might not recive this kind of info from your lfs.
Good luck to you and please keep the posts comming in as to let us know whats going on with your little piece of the ocean
