Just started up a 46 gallon bow front tank. So far we have 50 pounds of sand on the bottom (its like 3 inches deep or so), and about 24 pounds of live rock in the tank. Next week we will add more live rock, gotta buy stuff as budget allows. We are going to bring it up to about 50 pounds of live rock, maybe a little more. We will be adding a protein skimmer and a few power heads.
We have an emperor filter and a fluval 404 canister running on the tank for our filtration. The emperor just has the cartridge in it and the fluval right now has biomax and carbon/resin mix in it. I think for the fluval I am going to change it to prefilter in the bottom and then just biomax in the rest, and then just have the carbon running on the emperor. Does this sound good for filtration or should we do something different? Should I leave the biowheel on the emperor or take it off? I've heard having a biowheel on it can cause the nitrates to stay high.
For lighting we were thinking of getting a 36 inch compact flouresent and then having one flouresent fixture. Would it be better to have the compact be atinic or white light? It comes with white lights but the store said they can switch them to the blue. If the compact is blue then I will put a reef sun bulb (50/50) or or ultra sun bulb into the reg. flouresent fixture. If the compact is white then a coral sun (blue) will go ino the reg. fixture. Which way would be best?
We are going to let the tank cycle with the live rock first and then start adding inverts. In about 6 months or so we plan on then slowly adding some fish.
Some inverts I was thinking of include: Brittle sea star, Sand Sifting Star, a couple emerald crabs, a couple zebra legged hermits and some blue legged hermits, about 3 cleaner shrimp, 6 or so pepperment shrimp, maybe a coral banded shrimp and a couple camel shrimp. A few turbo snails astrea and margarita snails too. Any do's or don'ts here?
For fish, a pair of true percula clowns, a mandarin goby (probably not until the tanks been up a year though), an algae blenny, a purple fire goby or two, and then a few green chromis and a pair of bangaii cardinals. Any do's or don'ts here?
