Setting Up Our First Marine Tank!

[Terri_84]

Hoping I'm posting this in the right place!

OK so we have managed to sell everything from our tropical set-up and have decided to take the much anticipated dive in to marine...!

We headed over to Maidenhead Aquatics earlier today and came back with the basics to get our new tank going. Currently we have it set up with coral sand, RO water and with (what seems like) a ton of Kent Marine salt (which we were told was the good stuff?!)on stand by.

We are looking at our next steps, being:

Pick up a Protein Skimmer (we have been advised the v2 300 for our 190L tank?)

Pick up a refractometer (some going as cheap as £5 on ebay - are these going to be any good?)

Lighting: we have a Jewel Trigon 190 tank and will be upgrading our lighting. The lights available for our system are 2x 28 watt T5 bulbs (590mm) - One is ''marine-white'' and the other ''blue''. Will these be suitable for our set-up? We would like corals in there, things like: toadstool leather coral, red mushroom coral, colony polyps, yellow polyps and some sort of anemone (but haven't looked into types / needs yet).
Will this lighting be good enough for invertebrates?

Then fish wise, all we really know is that we want clown fish. We like the look of things like: dwarf angels, yellow tangs, green bird wrasse, sea betta but haven't done any real research in to what may / may not work.

If any one has any experience to share it would be very much appreciated!! I will continue to plough through my books in the mean time!!

Terri

 

[Morri]

Hi and to the salty side

Not sure on Kent Mairne salt would be intrested to see what stats are like later on once the tank is settled in I think most Use D&D H2Ocean but most salts will do the job

I would advise against the TMC skimmers they really do not perform as well as some of the other skimmers available I would try and find a second hand Deltec MCE 300 or even new it will do a better job for you

A refractometer is good a fiver seems low I thought they are more like £15 for a D&D one

The lighting would be fine for most Soft Corals and even some of the LPS Torches etc.

Anemones tend to need a bit more light and are somewhat more difficult to keep they are for a more mature tank around 12 months old

Your lighting will be fine for most inverts hermits, Shrimps etc.

I woud advise against Tangs in a tank of your size they tend to need a lot of swimming room and can be quiet heavy on your bio load

Fish wise there is plenty that will be fine in a 190L Dwarf Angels, Gobies, Blennies, Wrasse etc.

One of the main things with Marines is to go slow and reaserch everything you want to add ask lots of questions read through the journals here there is a wealth of knowledge in them.