# switching over



## leveldrummer (May 27, 2005)

i have a 46 gallon bowfront. ive kept a mixed cichlid tank for about 4 years and im thinking about converting to salt water. i have lots of rock. about 4 inches of tahitian moon sand. emperor 200 filter, basic heater. basic light. i was wondering if id be able to use any of this with salt water, id really like to keep the sand most of all. the rocks dont matter. ill probably get live rock anyway. what steps do i have to take to clean the old tank. i plan on a fish only tank. maybe some anemones and such. do i need different lights for either of these? can someone give me some good guidelines to follow. ive been reading books but they dont help much because they all contradict each other. and i really dont know about the stuff they are talking about anyway.


----------



## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

If you only want fish, then all that stuff will work fine. All you need now is some salt & a hydrometer.
Anemones, though...forget it. Not gonna happen unless you spend a few hundred bucks first on the stuff you'll need to keep them alive.
Live rock...again, it won't stay very lively without some major upgrades like a skimmer and the correct lighting.

The moon sand is not the best for the job, but if you just want fish it'll be fine.

Step one- take everything out of the tank
step two- thoroughly scrub & rinse all of the equipment & the sand
step 3- set it all back up minus the water
step4- mix up the water and let it fully dissolve to a specific gravity of 1.023 according to the hydrometer. You CAN do this in the tank itself, but it'll be trickier. You'll be much better off by using unchlorinated water that you can buy by the gallon from WalMart or wherever, or from Reverse Osmosis water you make at home with a tricky & expensive RO filter. One thing to remember is that normal aquarium dechlorinator and seasalt mix do NOT go well together. The dechlorinator reacts with a lot of the elements in the salt mix and ruins them. You might be able to just let a bunch of tapwater sit around with heavy aeration for a week to dechlorinate it, assuming your city doesn't use chloramine instead of chlorine.
step 5- make sure the stuff is FULLY mixed by letting it swirl around in the tank for a few days. Check daily with hydrometer. The temperature you want is 76F. If the temp is 76 & the sg is 1.023 or thereabouts, you're good to go.
Step 6-- get some bottled nitrifying bacteria. "BioSpira" is the very best, and "Stability" is second best. All others are complete junk and a huge waste of time & money. Follow the directions on the package to make your tank safe for fish instantly.

Otherwise, you'll have to "cycle" your tank the hard way, which takes several weeks and is very hard on the fish, which sometimes even die from it.

Your 46 gallon bowfront will only be able to hold about 8 inches of fish. One inch of fish length per five gallons. That's a safeguard to keep them alive during power outages. With lots of filtration you can double that no problem, but know the risk ahead of time. Your Emperor 200 filter can't quite measure up to the job alone, so add another one or something else like a skimmer instead. A cheap SeaClone skimmer would work okay on that tank. A Skilter would too, and much cheaper still, but Skilters make a little bit of noise.

I don't know which books you have been reading, but here are two that you can absolutely trust:
1- The Conscientious Marine Aquarist- by Robert Fenner
and
2- The New Marine Aquarium- by Mike Paletta

Either of those will help you understand everything you need to know.


----------



## flamingo (Nov 5, 2005)

What type of rock is it? You will most likely not be able to use it. Just replace it with live rock. And ditto with the anemone. If you want one of them your going to have to seriously upgrade your lighting. Not exactly metal halide but somewhere near VHO or something like that.

Don't buy the seaclone, buy someother one like the needle wheel one by coralife. It's only about 10 dollars more and a whole lot better. Seaclones inject air at the wrong place in the skimmer or something like that and they need a lot of tinkereing and DIY work to make it better. Skilters are a waste, They're just a sheap filter with a little dinky skimmerin it. It's like buying those little plastic air stone driven ones that are like 20 dollars.


----------



## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

seaclones will work fairly well on a fish only tank with only 46 gallons... I would imagine being a cichlid tank its holey rock, which is okay to use in a saltwater tank. Most liverock critters will just die under NO's. Anemones need MH lighting in most cases, and few have chances to do well in captivity. So on with the questions for you  
What fish/inverts you gonna put in this thing? Are you thinking about quarentine? Check out the sticky posts for explinations.


----------



## leveldrummer (May 27, 2005)

wow that helps alot. the rock i have is a mix of store bought, granite, and other crap i found in the yard and prepared with all the methods commonly discussed on these forums. the only reason i mentioned the anemone is that i like the clowns, and bond they make with anemones. are their other types of plants/animals that would be easier for someone like me to start with that adds intrest to the wave motion of a marine tank? are plastic plants and such ok. i also planned on getting a skimmer anyway. not a cheap one but something decent. money isnt that big of an issue but i know these things can get very costly. im thinking about the average tank. looking into (not definatly getting) fish like... clowns, damsels, angels, gobys, and such. still doing research on all this and it will be a long while before i even attempt this. but basically i want a pretty tank with all the cool fish you see in most stores. any suggestions of what work well together? like i said money isnt a huge issue but it is somewhat an issue. i am willing to save for a better setup but not willing to throw 2000 dollars down the toilet if it fails.


----------



## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

the clowns do just as well (or better) without anemones in the tank as they would with. If you want a symbiotic relationship that isn't going to take so much work, try a tiger pistol shrimp and yellow watchmen goby pair. Plastic plants are fine, but not extremely natural. Possbily fake corals would be better? 
The granite and such would not be a good choice of rock. Rock from www.hirocks.com would be better. 
I would invest in the following
RO unit
Skimmer
Fishless cycling

Check out my sticky "What fish/invert/coral to choose" for an idea of what you could and couldn't put in your tank. I would go also to www.liveaquaria.com and pick out some fish that are must haves, some fish that would do, and others that are last resorts. from that list we can choose what will work best for your tank. 
Just to get you started, rethink damsels (they are the devil  ).


----------



## leveldrummer (May 27, 2005)

yea ive read alot about the damsels.... they are just so damn pretty. anything you can recomend that would be around the same colors? i think it realationship with the clown anemone is cool but def not a must have. the fake coral is a good idea but im lookin more for the wave motion of the plants. very relaxing. the ro unit you talk about is "reverse osmosis" right? what is that and what does it do?


----------



## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

Well, if you like damsels, then go with damsels. 
Damsels would be a very good choice for a tank like yours, especially if it's your first saltwater tank. The main reason people don't like damsels is because they pose so many problems later on when other kinds of fish are desired for the same tank. However, a stunning display indeed can be made using only damsels.

1--Damsels come in a wide variety of colors and sizes and temperaments.
2--They are practically indestructible.
3--They are pretty much the cichlids of the sea in most ways, so if you like cichlids, you'll love damsels.

You can learn a lot from keeping damsels.
You can learn about saltwater diseases & their treatments with only a low risk of losing fish in the process. You can learn about territoriality & pecking orders. Damsels change color when things aren't just right, so they are good for letting you know at a glance that something needs correcting.
They zip around all over the place, providing dashing bolts of color & action.

Yep, there's much to be said for damsels, and a damsel tank is a worthy endeavor in itself. You can always move on to other fish once the damsels have taught you what you'll need to know to be successful. Just do it in a new tank.

RO ( Reverse osmosis ) is a water purification method involving forcing water under pressure through a membrane with holes so tiny that only water molecules can slip through them. Well, pretty much, anyway. The resulting water is pretty darned pure and makes for excellent aquarium use.
On the other hand, it's expensive and so horrendously wasteful that it should probably be illegal; for every drop of pure water gained a few pints go down the drain. Someone really needs to invent some sort of gizmo that recirculates a tankful of water through an RO unit over & over again to put a stop to all the waste. Right now they hook up directly to the plumbing in your house.
They are very slow, too, taking all day long to make enough water to do a water change. You're better off using bottled distilled water from the grocery store or Walmart. However, people like RO anyway.

Oh, in case you were wondering, we use pure water in saltwater tanks because traces of the crap normally found in most tapwater simply wreak havoc in a saltwater tank, ranging from uncontrollable algae to dead invertebrates to weird compounds being formed when mixing in the salt. A simple damselfish tank wouldn't have much to worry about, but a tank with live rock or anemones or shrimps in it most certainly would have problems.
Oh, that reminds me--> never mix two different brands of saltmix in the same tank! Each formula is different, based on different ways to acheive similar ends. When two brands are mixed, you can wind up with a lopsided mess or much worse.


----------



## leveldrummer (May 27, 2005)

thats very very useful about the salt mix, i havent ran into any info that has said that yet. i would really like other fish besides damsels, because of that is it safe to say that damsels arent a good idea at all then? if they are the "cichlid of the sea" i definatly dont want to mix them up with some of the others that i would like. because cichlids are terrible fish. very fun to keep and pretty, but very mean and destructive. ive been looking at some clowns, gobys, anglefish (like flames) and maybe a few others, im still looking and reading. do any of you think that this combo would be ok together.


----------



## Fishfirst (Jan 24, 2005)

The clowns you can get as a pair of them (they do best this way) and the gobies (it depends on which gobies you want) usually need a fair amount of territory away from eachother, and angelfish such as flame angels do well in aquariums and are fairly peaceful to other fish except for other angels. Look into my favorites, royal grammas, firefish, and cardinalfish.


----------



## leveldrummer (May 27, 2005)

ive read that gobies tend to stay on the bottom of an aquarium. im looking at a lot of different fish but im just gonna have to see whats available in the dif lfs in the area when i start to do this. i want to thank all of you again for the info and all the help.


----------

