 Hello from the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver, Washington to be exact.
Actually, I think the title pretty much covers it. LoL.
Hmm, this could take a bit. Maybe the short version? I've been around fish tanks all my life. Some fresh some salt. I used to own a petstore until about 2001, we had reptiles, freshwater fish and saltwater fish. When we closed up the shope we had a gorgeous 240 gallon reef that we moved to my father's house. It stayed there and improved for the next three years.
( Oh, a reccomedation: My dad kept trying to dodge the cost of things that I would reccomend to him. For instance, I would suggest over and over that he needed to add a chiller because the four 6' vho's and the 4 400 watt metal hallides, and the tons of pumps we had running, would heat the tank and cause all kinds of issues for us that were not great for the reef, like he would shut the lights down, and he bought this big noisy fan to blow across the water, and he even went to the lenghts of making me build this rediculous design of a cooling system that pumped water from the sump to under the house through a hose and then we drilled a small refrigerator and coiled the hose through the fridge and then the water went back up and into the sump. I think it might have even been cheaper in the long run to just buy the dang chiller. LOL
Sorry for straying there. Anyway, after three years he decided he didn't want to mess with the tank anymore and gave it back to me and we moved the whole thing to my house. I redesigned a few things which I was very excited to see how it would work, but didn't get the chance because the back of the tank decided to explode out and dumped almost the entire contents of the tank onto the floor. This happened at 1:00 in the morning of course, and I called my buddy who had a 100 gallon fish only tank set up and we bucketed everything we could to his house and turned his fish only tank into a semi-reef thing. He is resistant to adding metal hallides and is just running vho's and asks me all the time why his corals don't do very well.
I didn't do any fish tanks at all for a while, but recently my son wanted one and that started the whole thing off again for me. We started with a 20 long guppy tank that was given to us by his aunt. We now have 2- 20 long and 3- 10 gallon guppy breeding and fry tanks. AND................... I need to know about something. I am starting a breeding operation and I have 32- 20 gallon tanks and I want them all to be independant (not sharing water and filtration) but set up identically. I was going with a plenum. My description of a plenum: A dead air space under the sandbed made with plastic ceiling grid suspended on top of half inch pvc on its side with plastic mesh screen over the top of it doubled. Then the live sand goes over the top of this about one half to one inch thick. I let the live sand do its thing for a while then I top over it with 2-3 inches of aragonite. Then I put 1 nice piece of LR in the tank two corner filters. (these are the little box filters that operate with an airstone.) The reason for two is that when you change the filter media in one it doesn't throw the system out of whack because you only change one at a time. Then I was thinking of adding a snail or two and a herm or two. I would like advice on which you all think is the best snails and herms for this type of system also. And last but not least I would like to put an appropriate anenome in each of the clownfish breeding tanks. I know this post strays a bit from the topic, but my main question is: do you think the sandbed is a good idea for this setup and should it be vacuumed every once in a while??
Well... that's a pretty long intro.. hope I didn't bore you all too much, and I am looking always for good advice and good info on new techniques and ideas. Thanks and hope I have found a new home on these forums. | 
jb
