crushed shell sand

[phOOey]

there has been alot of saltwater nano threads around recently but i'm afraid i have to add another one

my ph out of the tap is 7.4, i understand saltwater fishes like it more into the 8's right? well i have some 'sea shells' lying around and was wondering if i could crush them up and mix them in with play sand. would that help raise the ph? also if i were to do it how fine should i crush the shells up? so that there the same size as the sand, bigger smaller pieces?

also i have a hob filter which i was going the use for water movement, do i just remove the filter media or leave it in?

thanks

 

[newman187]

I'm a recent victem to the salt water tank, I had a 50 gallon show tank with plenty of live rock and crushed coral as the substrate and my advice for you is as follows from my experiance.

First off Salt Water fish are very sensitive to Ph change as well as nitrate/rite and ammonia as you probably know, and having a Nano tank is difficult to keep even more so that an larger tank because there is not as much water as a large tank. My suggestion to you is dont use tap water, It contains chemicals, and minerals that are not good for your salt fish and not good for your tank like phosphorus which causes algea blooms.

If you are having problems keeping your PH stable you should add some kind of PH buffer to raise your ph level, I had a digital PH meter and I used that along with the buffer to keep my ph in the 8.1-8.3 range which is idea for salt water fish.

Also how is your tank setup? FOWLR, no live rock, do you plan on keeping corals?

In my experiance flow is everything in a salt tank, from the research I have done you should have approximatly 10 times the tank in flow, ie if you have a 50 gallon tank you should have beetween 500-750 gph in water movement in your tank, and most of the flow or current should be towards the bottom of the tank, or moving across your LR to prevent any bacteria outbreaks such as cyano bacteria which is a B**ch to get rid of.

I guess I would like to also know how big is the tank, can your run a skimmer on it? Do you have room for a refugium? Do you have any problems with nitrates/rites or ammonia? How often do you do water changes? How often do you check the salinity of the tank? How many fish/corals do you have or plan on having? The more info you can give the better.

Hope it helps a little, I tore down my fishtank because my tank got Cyano Bacteria from a coral or a fish or something and I could never get it to go away, and I was spending lots of money treating the tank and it was a loosing battle.

Also more advice of you is to quaranteen your fish and corals for a few weeks before adding them to your tank then accimilate them for at least an hour adding 1/4 cup of water to the bag every 5 minutes for the hour. This is all for a large tank, so you may want to tweak it a bit, but thats how i did it and I have never lost a fish.

Hope that helps just my 2 Cents

 

[1979camaro]

your salt mix should buffer the pH...for top offs you can add pH buffer as well (Kent, Seachem, etc all make products)...so crushing up seashells, though probably effective, is not the best way to go about this

 

[phOOey]

thanks camaro, i'll give the shells a miss then.

wow newman so many questions .

first of all i havn't actually set up the tank yet, but it will 5g ( i know should start off bigger but i'm afraid thats all i have room for). RO kits a quite expensive, but i heard somewhere that brita filters, are just like mini RO systems, so i could use water from that seeing as though i would only be changing like a gallon or 2 a week. has anyone else heard of using brita filters for this?

initially it will be FOWLR, but down the road i may try and add corals. the standard lighting is a 6500k fluorescent light. are there any corals that can grow with that lighting, or will i have to uprgrade?

as i said i will be using a HOB for water movement, it is more than sufficent to do that i believe.

i wasn't planning on using a skimmer as i heard they are not really necessary on such a small tank. i was also not planning on a refugium.

as far as stocking goes i was just going to get a hi fin red banded goby, a scarlet cleaner shrimp or maybe a pistol shrimp, some bumblebee snails and a few blue legged hermits.

 

[Cichlid-Man]

I use crushed coral as my substrate in my 15gal nano. Havn't noticed a large change in anything yet.

I also only use an AC300 HOB for water movement, does just fine and gets to pretty much every part of the tank. I just have the sponge in the box now. Of course for a 5gal you would want something smaller.

 

[newman187]

My god, do not do CC its is the biggest pain in the butt, the sand is a much better route to go imho, I regretted every minute of the cc.

I wasn't aware of your tank size, I guess my comments were in general, but a 5 gallon tank should be a nice little starter, but as i stated before is you notice anything out of the ordinary try and figure out what it is and take care of it asap or the whole tank will crash, and your fish will die.

The water movement by the HOB filter should be sufficent for the size of your tank, you deffinatly want to have some kind of surface agitation to introduce oxygen into the water.

I imagine that the britta filter you will be using is using carbon to remove contaminants and odors from the water, but what I would do is get a 5 gallon water jug, go to the lfs and have them fill it up with ro salt water, and you have water for a month or longer.

As for the corals, i'm not sure if you'll be able to grow any type of fancy corals, deffinatly mushrooms, but its hard to tell with such a small tank. I have noticed that mushrooms are very hearty and are hard to kill so if you have a spike in ammonia or nitrate/rite you should be ok, not to mention they are pretty cheap, and they dont require insane ammounts of lighting to do well.

Refuge, hehe thats deff out of the question on such a small tank.

One more comment about ro water is that you will need to add some kind of ph buffer to to bring the water up to about 8.0-8.2 ph, i'm not sure if the salt does or doesn't buffer the water, in my experiance it does not.

Hope this helps

 

[phOOey]

thanks c-man + newman, you've pretty much answered all my questions .

one more thing though , the HOB has a bio wheel, will leaving this in cause any problems?

i think i will try just one type of mushroom coral for my tank then. i was looking at the blue striped mushroom

http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_Display.cfm?pCatId=1860

also are there any polyps that could work in this tank?

 

[wayne]

Crushed shells or coral likely won't do anything for pH unless they're composed of aragonite (some are) - ordinary calcite won't dissolve at those pH's.

Your pH should be taken care of by your salt mix, however if you use RO beware, they will likely mix up a bit low on alkalinity, and thus pH. You can buffer this OK. Do you live near one of the better UK shops to buy premixed water from.

I don't know what comes as stock on your 5, but mushrooms grow under most lights, especially if you can get some daylight on it. I suspect thats an 11 W fluorescent?

I personally don't like beginners to start on such small tanks as they are pretty high maintenance, but if it's what you'vedecided on so be it. If I was to do such a thing, and I'm considering it but with a bit bigger, I'm looking to change most of the water once a week. If you think you can consistently make decent water, or buy it, it's a trick that can get you out of a lot of hassles with filtration.

 

[phOOey]

Yes i can get premixed water weekly, or monthly if i get larger quantities of it. I to would rather start out bigger, but i'm afraid its all i can afford. The stock lights on my five is an 8w fluorescent tube, 6500k. Where the tank is now it get about 4-6 hours of sunlight hitting it a day (aslong as its not overcast) so i guess i should beable to get some type of mushroom for it then.

 

[newman187]

Daylight is fine, but you'll be scraping alot more algae than normal.

The mushrooms as I said would be best, not sure on the polyps however.

I agree with starting out on such a small tank, but I also understand your financial constraint.

No matter the substrate you choose, make sure you wash it very well to get all the dust and silica out as it can cause problems in the future, I would suggest you use ro water (hehe you can see i'm a big RO guy) and make sure all the dust is out of the substrate.

 

[lordroad]

I don't know about the U.K., but here in the states there are actually vending machines that sell R/O water in grocery stores and places like that. This is what I use for my ten gallon nano, which I started Easter Sunday. 25 cents a gallon at the wal-mart vending machine... you buy the plastic jug, then just fill up and refill as needed.

 

[phOOey]

that sounds really good, unfortunately i dont think with have them here , but i will look around to see just incase.

 

[dbacksrat]

My god, do not do CC its is the biggest pain in the butt, the sand is a much better route to go imho, I regretted every minute of the cc.

Amen to that--i find that detritus and other junk gets trapped, thus fueling my hair algae growth as well as isolated areas of cyanobacteria
i've been wanting to replace my crushed coral with sand (both the dry stuff and live sand) for months, but pods and worms are beginning to reproduce and now i might have a problem
i believe my grocery store vending machine has a trace amount of phosphates or silicates in the water--my advice is to find a water/ice store

 

[wayne]

Is the tube a part of integral hood. If it is, live with it, the amount of evaporation an integral hood slows down is very , very useful. If it isn't , well basically get something better as an 8 W fluorescent is very, very weak. The sunlight will be the only tihng worth a toot in that situation.

What brand is the tank?

I have a 5 setup right now , but I have it pretty easy. It's setup for a small damsel my 6 line wrasse had a good go at (and I mean a good go) and to keep things ideal I'm swapping out/in 10 litres of water (50%) from my main display. I am convinced regular large conrtrolled water changes can keep you well out of trouble.

 

[phOOey]

It is integral but i think you can change it, it appears to be be a screw in type thing. The system is from the 'Moby Dick' line, not sure if get them where yoor from, it comes with everything you need, filter, heater, light, well this was my very first tank .

 

[wayne]

Yes I've seen those though I thought they came with a short normal output t5 tube (as opposed to the HO T5 usually seen on tanks). Well if it is a screw in E27 like on a normal light socket I'd get the biggest one I possibly could, like a 25 Watt or something. However that will come up very yellow so I would probably spend some time trying to find a light bulb that was more blue.

The fact that hood is so well fitting will be a real bonus as you get next to no evaporative loss, though you'll have to beware heat buildup, maybe a problem if you really bump up the lighting.

 

[1979camaro]

if you mean a standard screw in socket like we have over in the states (i haven't been to the land across the ocean) coralife makes a nice screw in CF 50/50 bulb...

 

[wayne]

Well I'm now pretty certain the thing comes with a NO T5, which is not very great. This is not an easy tank to build around.
Yes, I wondered if it was a screw in CF, but I wonder if one set for 110V in the US would work here. Methinks not. It's different I tihnk for fluor and MH as the ballast sorts out the voltage change. I'll find out soon enough, I'll try putting a PC bulb I picked up in the US in a Euro fixture

 

[1979camaro]

i wonder if you put a power converter on the socket so that US appliances would work if the screw in CF bulbs would work (though it sounds as if that isn't what she has)

 

[phOOey]

wow i'm really getting into this whole SW thing, i'm actually toying with the idea of converting my 29g to SW rather than the 5g. This would be probably be easier as this tank is not an all in one thing so i would beable to buy everything seperatley. from what i've read protein skimmers aren't eassential but i think i'll get one anyway. any suggestions for lighting? at the moment i quite like the look of the tomatato clowns, any comments?