New to the forum

[Ryan]

Sounds good. If my new 65 watt light is 24 inches long will it still be OK even though I have another 32 watt next to it? Sorry for all the questions.

[messiah023]

Hi Ryan, welcome.

I have a 30g too and have had much success with it.
I use a Coralife Aqualight with (2) 36w Power Compacts. Once is True Actinic 03, the other is a 10K daylight.

I keep a handful of small fish and inverts (shrimps, crabs, snails).
I also keep 3 frogspawn corals, a torch coral, lettuce coral and bubble coral. Most LPS can be housed in your 30g.

I had the biocube skimmer......for about 1 1/2 days...
I found it to be very horrible (in my opinion).

I replaced it with a HOB skimmer from Octopus, I would recommend this to anyone. Once I put it in, my water quality changed 100%. Everything looked better in the tank, I was getting tons of skimmate from it and purple Coraline algae started to grow.It works with an airstone and didn't collect much. It also took up valuable tanks space and the stone would have to be replaced often. I use the HB-100F.
I also use a Koralia 1 for water movement in the tank.
I run an Eheim Ecco canister filter as well. I don't use the Eheim substrate in the filter, I replaced it with a nitrate absorbing media called Denitrate.
I didn't think it would do anything, but to my surprise, my consistant 20ppm nitrate level was reduced to 5-10ppm within 1 month.
The Eheim also creates another direction of flow from the return line.

Good luck.....keep us all updated.

[RyanG]

From one Ryan to another WELCOME!

[Ryan]

Thank you very much for the replies as I'm just a rookie.

So I take it your lights aren't the width of the tank because I too have a 30 inch tank with a 24 inch light along with the other 15 inch that is the 32 watt.

I forgot to tell everyone that I do have a start of a cleaning crew and that's 5 snails, 1 hermit crab (red legs), and 1 peppermint shrimp. The cleaning crew has been in there before my clowns. Any suggestions to this please let me know or if you think I should add more.

So my store also recommended to me that I get a bubble anenome (sp) as soon as possible? What do you guys think? Also, man do I have a lot of questions... My sand has a thin layer of tan going across it and was told my snails would help on cleaning this up? Just making sure I'm hearing it right coming from my store....

[RyanG]

DONT GET AN ANEMONE! Let your tank mature for a year before attempting one that is uber-aweful advice to give a new guy. They need very very high light needs.

[Ryan]

Wow! That idiot obviously doesn't know what he's talking about then. Thank god I didn't buy it tonight. I was skeptical of doing it too and thank god I didn't!

[RyanG]

Yeah they need 8-10wpg of Halide or 8wpg of T5

[yote]

RyanGs right on the anemone.Hold off on those untill your tanks matured and stabilized.They just cant handle the parameter swings that a new system goes through.
As for your clean up crew,let the algae guide you.Just enough to keep up with the job,but not so many that they end up starving to death.

[Ryan]

So I guess my question is with everything I have, am I off in the right direction with seasoning my tank, lighting, cleaning crew etc.? It sounds like I'm talking to the right people now. Thanks.

[daugherty]

just dont jump into anything to fast take your time with the tank and you will have a great system if you rush it you will end up wasting a lot of money from things dieing