Easy low maintenance tanks

more than likely not other then extreme circumstances where water evaporates very quickly like in a room that is very hot and humid with a lot of airflow and the tank would have to be extremly small lol

 

Soft corals are pretty forgiving. I think you will be OK.

 

Ok. Thanks a lot for answering everything.

How about the other question, do invertebrates pose any threat to coral? While looking stuff up, one guy mentioned his peppermint shrimp ate 2 of his coral. Is this rare?

 

Actually, Bruno, if I recall correctly, a humid room would have less evap. When using air conditioning, for example, the room temp. will generally remain more stable, but the air will be dryer, meaning a higher level of evaporation in the tank (than if the humidity was say, 65%). Keeping your AC temp nearer tpo the desired tank temp. will help this issue, to a point.

 

See my previous post. I edited it to answer this concern.

 

peppermint shrimp have been known to eat corals at times but usually wont if well fed but there are plenty of other shrimp you can go with that are reef safe

 

you may be right, i was basing it off of when my a/c went down my room was getting real hot and i was adding atleast 1+ gallons a day to my tank (its a 55 with a 29 gallon sump....lots of surface agitation) but that may have just been because i was running 3 fans on high in the room to keep circulation to keep me and my tank from overheating lol

 

Ok. Thanks. I have a hard time believing LED lights provide the proper light spectrum to coral, I was always under the assumption, like freshwater, flourescent lights were the only way. I'll have to look into that more.

I do notice a lot of used stuff cheap. I guess there's always someone getting out of it.

 

if you are using a single color you wont get very good spectrum but if you blend them properly it works awesomely...you can get a pretty good spectrum with cool white, warm white, blues, and royal blues....you could throw in some uv, green, cyan etc as well if youd like

 

Im kind of late chiming in here but figured Id give my 2 cents.

When you say your FW planted take is no maintenance I believe you mean low maintenance. You still have to top off from evap, replace lightbulbs, clean or trim back plants, and do waterchanges or add ferts usually to help give the plants the potassium, iron, etc they need. That being said a SW tank can be as high or low as you would like.

If you want an SPS low nutrient system it going to require lots of money and equipment with a lot of time testing parameters and dosing accordingly. If you want NPS corals you spend a lot of time feeding and doing waterchanges to help keep the system clean. If you want softies than they require almost no dosing, the least amount of lighting and flow, and are the most tolerant of less than optimal conditions with some even preferring water that is slightly dirty over pristine water. LPS are somewhat in between softies and sps with there care depending on which species you purchase but msot of pretty hardy and normal regular water changes will provide the majority of the nutrients needed depending on your saltmix. Inverts are easy to care for just make sure you never dose any medications to the tank as it will kill inverts and corals. Most species of snails, hermtis, shrimp are reef safe but there are always exceptions such as gorilla crabs and snails that eat clams. If you have ANY questions regarding inverts or algae ask john from reefcleaners he has a forum on here and specializes in all that stuff. He also sells many inverts and macro algaes. Filtration wise make sure you purchase a quality porous rock for your liverock not that dense fiji from you lfs. Sand is your best bet and unlike FW you do NOT stir your SW sand, instead you buy some inverts to keep it clean.

I have a 46gallon and run a HOB filter really for filtration but without a sump or fuge it is what I use to allow me to run carbon or any other chemical filtration you choose. I have it filled with mostly liverock rubble and a bag of seagel (carbon+phosgaurd). I do not run a protein skimmer because my softies seems to go downhill when I ran one for a few weeks, since taking it off I have noticed increased growth and they look healthier. I also have mushrooms lps and jsut bought my first sps. My liverock and livesand handle the fishload I have and my nitrates remain at 0 or very close to it. I watch everything I put into the tank and feed lightly and carefully as to not cause a nutrient issue. I do a 5gal WC once a week. Preparing the water the night before takes about 15min and doing the WC itself takes another 15 min but I usually clean the glass, move things around, straighten up my supplies, etc and turn it into an hour or so. I also test the water for calcium, magnesium, alk, ph, and nitrate as well as check the SG and that takes me close to an hour to perform and clean all the supplies afterwards.

So long winded answer to the original question, I consider my tank a moderate care level due to corals and minor dosing and need to spend about 2-4hours a week for care. Sometimes I spend more but that is my minimum. If you have a tank with just rock sand and fish than you could get away with an hour or less a week probably. THe majority of the time will be spent researching everything you put into your tank, find in your tank, or purchasing stuff/ setting up the tank.